10 things to know about Ted Kooser

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* A new book out this month pairs Arizona editor and publisher Steve Cox with Kooser for “Writing Brave and Free,” an accessible guide to writing wisdom for aspiring and practicing writers. 

* Pulitzer Prize winners will team up when New York composer Paul Moravec creates an opera based on Kooser’s “The Blizzard Voices” about the blizzard of 1888. “I think you could make some pretty good music out of a blizzard,” Kooser said. 

* A 100-yard small bore rifle target, with four bullet holes, signed in 1995 by Beat Movement writer William Burroughs, hangs framed in Kooser’s office at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It carries some significance because Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his wife in 1951 attempting to recreate a scene from the William Tell Overture. “Apparently, he didn’t give up firearms after that,” Kooser said. 

* After a 15-year-old was killed in 1998 by two shotgun blasts in a basement apartment at 2820 R St., Kooser wrote an essay about how violated he felt by the murder, even though it had been years since he had lived in the apartment. 

* The poet keeps a journal of coincidences that happen to him as he goes about his life. 

* For his next project, he’s considering reading travel literature and writing about faraway places from his armchair in Seward County. 

* Susan Orleans recently picked an essay he wrote for a compilation of Best American Essays. 

* He painted a Pennsylvania Dutch design above the porch years ago when he lived at 1447 Washington St. It’s still there.

* “Local Wonders” has lots of poems in it. “They don’t look like poems because I made them look like prose,” he said. 

* The poet doesn’t like to fly. Not because he’s scared he’ll fall out of the sky or is afraid of terrorists. He doesn’t like packing, meeting the airlines’ schedules or running the length of the Denver airport.