About
My background
(Richard) Scott LaMascus is a writer, producer, and public-humanities advocate in Oklahoma City whose chapbook of poems, The Edited Tongue: A Family’s Year with ALS was released February 12, 2025, by Bottlecap Press in Los Angeles. His debut collection of poems, Let Other Hounds, is forthcoming in 2026 from Fernwood Press. Selected by judge Jackson Holbert for the 2024 Idaho Prize for Poetry long list, the poems break silence after fifty years to explore the aftermath of a serial pedophile in the small-town church of the poet’s boyhood. His poems about rural Oklahoma were recognized with the 2024 Bill Holm Witness Prize for their grounding in a place. His Ph.D. in literary studies is from the University of Oklahoma (1996) and his MFA in poetry is from Antioch University, Los Angeles (2024). He is professor of English, emeritus, at Oklahoma Christian University and director of the McBride Center for Public Humanities, which hosts free, public events with national writers as well as a biennial writers festival. He is on the advisory board of the Jeane Hoffman Smith Center for Film and Literature at Oklahoma City University. He serves on the board of the Federation of States Humanities Councils and before that, had served more than a decade on the board and then as chair of the board of the Oklahoma Humanities council. He is married to Alice Mankin, M.D., and the couple have two sons and two daughters in law, all currently residing in Philadelphia, Pa. Scott's poems may be found in Bracken, Red Ogre Review, Epiphany, The Calendula Review, The Pennine Platform, Red Door and others.
What They're Saying About The Edited Tongue
“This stunning poetry gives voice to the voiceless. For everyone who has lost someone to this cruel disease, Scott LaMascus’s words bring a healing truth and beautiful compassion.”
—Colette Freedman, author of Sister Cities, a full-length motion picture about ALS in a family, with a star-studded cast including Stana Kacic, Jesse Wexler, and Alfred Molina.
“Poetry makes nothing happen, or so the saying goes, but how about the opposite—what makes poetry happen? A new love, travel, politics, no doubt, but how about terminal illness? Chronicling his father’s struggle with ALS and its effects on their family, Scott LaMascus has written a book of moments lost and regained: a script for a “tender tragedy of quotidian love.” Even though an ALS diagnosis is a death sentence—first goes the throat, then the voice and the lungs, “the very heart of being”—what’s left when “silence opens” is nothing short of a miracle. Like Seamus Heaney, LaMascus refuses to cut corners while wrestling with fate and what some call the human condition, making the best use of his “godforsaken pens.” These beautiful and moving poems are testament to how words can help us make sense of the direst of circumstances.”
—Piotr Florczyk, poet, translator, and author of Dialogue and Influence: Essays on Polish and American Poets
“LaMascus constructs a moving poetic collage that speaks to the complexities of accompanying a loved one through the end stages of ALS, while recognizing the caverns of resonance that echo through the silence—the things a caregiver sees and remembers and draws from that disease cannot fully usurp when affiliation is fueled by love and memory so steel strong and lasting. These beautifully written vignettes explore the liminality of the terminal.”
—Liz Baxmeyer, author of Root & Bone and founding Editor-in-Chief of The Calendula Review: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
"These poems ache with grief, yes, but also with a deep, enduring tenderness—between family and land, hammer and nail, father and son. LaMascus, through his own exploration of language, finds meaning and beauty in the silences: of illness, of death, of a father's quiet temperament. There is so much to feel here, it's overwhelming, in the very best of ways."
—Grant Chemidlin, What We Lost in the Swamp
“Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is a devastating disease. It is the one that we doctors hope we are wrong about. Scott LaMascus's poems provide insights to the power of naming the diagnosis and to the courage as well as the fear of facing the incurable. This book reminds us that medicine does not always come in the form of a pill and that the arts can provide comfort to the soul.”
—Nicole C. Bowden, DO, board certified in neurology, Meinders NeuroScience Center, Mercy Hospital, Oklahoma City.
Purchase the book at www.bottlecap.press/products/edited
My Story as a Writer
A blizzard and howling winds built snow drifts over and around the tin-can trailer where we lived in the winter of 1967. My father's work in the oil fields of Oklahoma was impossible, so we were stuck indoors, four of us in 600 square feet of space. Marooned in a sea of snow drifting higher than our heads, we'd might as well have been 1,000 miles from town instead of one.
Each night that week, Dad began reading chapters aloud from Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which just happened to be in the house. I was hooked. The rich language, imagined world, characters, and conflicts of were a transporting adventure. I was in the South Seas. Worrying for Robinson, the marooned sailor who needed to get back to his family. I remember listening as if Robinson's life somehow depended on us all in that little trailer covered in snow banks.
This formative experience with narrative is my first remembered tale, though I know I'd been absorbing stories since infancy from the King James Bible at church. I lived in a home where reading, songs, and richness of story were all around me. I also enjoyed a large family nearby, back four more generations in Oklahoma, so one Grandparent might be telling a story from the Dust Bowl and another from the early Caine's Ballroom days in boomtown hills of Creek County, when Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys performed a few miles from my grandparents' farm. Stories, characters, and language were all around me, some in the patois of Scots-Irish Okies and some in the poetic richness of 16th century English, some real and living, some imagined.
Fast forward to college and I tried several majors. None quite fit until I found a variety of English major which incorporated a minor in journalism. A boy of little economic means could become a journalist and make his reading and writing skills pay -- first in scholarships and later in jobs. So I edited the college newspaper and worked several years as a journalist trying to find the right graduate program for me.
One Ph.D., two sons, and two states later, I was back at my alma mater as a faculty member looking for a way to grow a department and honor my mentor, Dr. Bailey B. McBride. It wasn't long before we'd increased enrollment to 120 majors and were asking the National Endowment for the Humanities to provide a Challenge Grant to permanently endow our McBride Center. What fun I had in academe, helping students and hosting national writers who could inspire them -- including novelist Marilynne Robinson, playwright David Henry Hwang, activist Bryan Stevenson, nonfiction author David Grann, and poets Robert Pinsky, Dana Gioia, and Kathleen Norris.
Once our sons had graduated and gone off to the East Coast, I started using my summer and fall breaks for a low-residency MFA at Antioch University, Los Angeles. Before I could graduate, my father became ill. Turned out, he had ALS and my mother and sister and I were caring for him at home, so I retired the same term. He passed away five days after my Antioch graduation. The Edited Tongue: A Family's Year with ALS was my first chapbook.
The chance to write "full time" has come to me and I'm living it up.