In November 2007 Dryad Press published his memoir, Against The Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet, with an introduction by Garrison Keillor who took a class from him in his youth calling him a "movie-star handsome poet and teacher" who "owns the only sort of immortality that matters to a writer, which is to have written things that people remember years later . . . What makes R.W. permanently readable and relevant is his wit and humor, which is the underground spring that keeps the gardens of American literature green.
