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C. Wade Bentley

 

Wade Bentley lives, teaches, and writes in Salt Lake City.  For a good time, he enjoys wandering the Wasatch Mountains and playing with his grandchildren.  His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Green Mountains Review, Cimarron Review, Best New Poets, New Ohio Review, Western Humanities Review, Rattle, Chicago Quarterly Review, Raleigh Review, Reunion: The Dallas Review, Pembroke Magazine, and New Orleans Review, among others.  A full-length collection of his poems, What Is Mine, was published by Aldrich Press in early 2015.

On your nightstand: 

Aimless Love by Billy Collins; Selected Letters and Speeches of Edmund Burke; Wildflowers of the Wasatch.

Which do you prefer, print books or ebooks?

I’ve never read an entire ebook, so it’s probably not fair to judge, but I can’t imagine liking them as well as a print book. The feel, of course, the dog-eared pages, the dust jacket, the smell of new ink or old paper. I prefer to read something that silverfish are in the process of deconstructing.

What book made the biggest impression on you as a kid?

Well of course I can’t name just one book that made an impression on me as a kid, but if I narrow it down to two that I loved and still occasionally return to, I would say The Phantom Tollbooth, and The Wind in the Willows. But I could rattle off dozens more without pausing to think. Libraries and bookmobiles were my favorite hang-outs, my entrance into the larger world, and may have done more than anything else to shape the direction my life has taken.