Sean Bentley

Sean Bentley, born in Seattle, majored in cinema at the University of Washington while continuing to write poetry, which was published by Jawbone Press, Seal Press, and several literary magazines. Since then, two books of his poetry have been published: Instances and Grace and Desolation. He is an editor of Fine Madness, and, in his spare time, a senior technical editor at Microsoft Corporation.
Herb Payton writes, "When I first met Sean Bentley in September 1979, he went by the alias of Lenny E. Beast. We were in Parrington 223b on the University of Washington campus and Beast, wearing his Captain America T-shirt, read "The Man with Meadows in Both Halves of Him, Living with It," written during a recent cross-country trip. Once, on a journey we took to the Canadian Rockies, Sean took a burning stick from our fire and traced Picassoesque images against the frigid dark which hung glowing green in the air longer than we thought possible. It is this spontaneous joy and beauty that make Sean’s writing so compelling."

The following is an excerpt from Night Train to Pisa,
It was the middle of the Gulf War. The already ugly Americans were especially despised abroad, and not only by Muslims. Yanks were staying home in droves, for fear of terrorism of one sort or the other, bombs, kidnapping, hijacking, random shootings. My wife, Robin, and I, who had been planning for a year to travel to Europe—the first time for me, at the advanced age of thirty-seven—were only spurred on by the highly reduced airfares. Americans are xenophobes, we thought, paranoiacs. It wasn’t like we were going to the Middle East. That sort of thing didn’t happen to us.
The night was chilly and wet, and we were at the Gare de Lyons, to ride the overnight train from Paris to Pisa. A young man in somewhat punky clothes approached me and asked, in Italian, whether I was Italian. Only several hours later would I remember him, and think: Perhaps he knew something. Perhaps he was screening his countrymen, keeping them off the doomed train. For now, I simply replied no (one of my few foolproof Italian phrases), and we boarded.

The essay Night Train to Pisa appears in the book
An Ear to the Ground
an anthology of the works of Václav Havel,
Arun Gandhi, Horton Foote, and 75 emerging writers.