On His Own Terms | The Writing Life of Tom Driscoll

WINONA — Tom Driscoll claims his life has been ruled by one “misfit gene” that has urged him — no, forced him — to create art through writing, playing piano and guitar, and building with his hands. He has two published books, written for many publications, and even has his own publishing company. 

“I got the defective gene. I don’t know where it comes from,” he said. “I’m a full-time creative person.”

Another misfit gene, however, nearly killed him. 

He has a family history of heart disease that showed itself in 2016 when he had a massive heart attack, leading him to rely on a lifesaving pump and eventually a heart transplant. He spent a total of 16 months at Mayo Clinic, Rochester and has many of the wristband IDs to prove it.

Those two misfit genes have now aligned into a book he is writing — Dying Man Suite — about his near death, all those months in hospital, and recovery.

Lest you think the book will be another just-the-facts medical book about how different medicines and a heart transplant saved his life, forget it. This is Tom Driscoll after all, and he has never been one for following the standard way of doing things, even near death.

“You know I’m not going to write a straightforward cookbook of what it’s like to get old and die,” he said in an interview from his office in downtown Winona. “It’s going to be Tom Driscoll. I mess with reality because reality has messed with me . . . It’s got to come out on my own terms.”

You can track the 16 months Tom Driscoll spent in St. Marys hospital in Rochester with his hospital ID bracelets. (Photo by John Weiss)

The writing life

Driscoll, now 75, was born in northern Illinois and grew up in Davenport, Iowa. In high school, he came under the spell of Rod Vahl, a legend in Iowa for producing journalists. That suited Driscoll because even in grade school, he wrote plays and produced a class history.

Driscoll then attended a local junior college where he began the school newspaper. But this was also the time of the Vietnam War and the big push for civil rights. “I was very interested in all of this,” he said.

Driscoll grew a beard and long hair, smoked marijuana and wrote his own thoughts in the newspaper. This got him in big trouble and eventually kicked out. “They crushed me like a bug, threw me out in the street,” he said.

He was soon drafted into the Army but instead of going to Vietnam, ended up in Alaska and wrote for the base newspaper. In 1972, fresh out of the service, he attended the University of Iowa Playwrights Workshop.

“In Iowa, I felt like I was home,” he said. “I was in heaven. I wrote all the time.”

Tom Driscoll pictured in his youthful ‘hippie days’. (Photo courtesy of Tom Driscoll)

While continuing to write, Tom made a living working construction in and around Iowa City.  He called it “swinging a hammer”, skills he picked up from his father. He worked a variety of construction jobs, eventually picking up skills as a draftsman and estimator.

After several years, Tom felt he needed a change.  “I got out of the rut, packed up all my tools” and joined the Peace Corps, becoming a volunteer in Gabon in Central Africa. He and his girlfriend, later wife, Beth Stanford (they were married in Gabon), worked many years in Africa.

Driscoll later joined the US Agency for International Development in Africa, working as an engineer, a skill he learned on his own. And eventually decided to come back to America, spent a year in New Orleans, then Virginia.

Beth, meanwhile, continued flying all over the world for the Disaster Assistance Reconnaissance Team — a group of disaster assessment experts that go into an emergency and make recommendations on necessary aid. Eventually, they had enough.

“We just had seen enough of the world,” according to Driscoll, “so we said, let’s settle down and buy a house.” And that’s just what they did.

They landed in southeast Minnesota, bought a beautiful but rundown Victorian in Rushford and remodeled it. Tom served as president of the town’s Economic Development Agency. 

A sampling of Lost Lake Folk Opera literary magazine covers published by Shipwreckt Books. (Photo by John Torgrimson)

In 2011, Driscoll started a new venture: book publishing. He named it Shipwreckt Books (the name is misspelled because Driscoll thought it was neat) with four separate imprints — ‘Rocket Science Press’ for fiction, ‘Up On Big Rock Poetry Series’, ‘Lost Lake Folk Art’ for non-writers and ‘Lost Lake Folk Opera’, an annual literary magazine. To date, Shipwreckt has published 95 books and magazines, and plans on reaching 100 in 2025.

The will to live

Life was going well when that second misfit gene raised its ugly head in 2016: “My heart attack was catastrophic. My heart stopped for 20 minutes before they shocked me back to life.” He had open-heart surgery and eventually needed a left ventricle pump to survive.

Over the years, he spent nearly 16 months on the fifth and sixth floors of the Mary Brigh building on the St. Marys Hospital campus. And all the time, Driscoll was writing, mostly poetry. Sometimes he would write on a Mayo notepad and tape that into one of his diaries. 

He came to know and admire the doctors and nurses. “I have Stockholm Syndrome bad, you love your captors,” he joked. He also loved their touch, their hands were so fantastic when they worked on him, touched him. In fact, one of the chapters in the new book will be “On Hands.”

The doctors told him his pump could have three things go wrong with it and he had all three. At age 72, Driscoll technically had aged out of a transplant.

There was, however, something else he had — the will to live.

Doctors told him he “fought through everything. You are a great candidate for a (new) heart, whether you are 72 or 22.  You just demonstrated the will to live.” He received the heart of a much younger person.

He said he was doing well when “I had a major heart rejection last May. It was a comet striking the earth, it was more significant in my mind than the heart attack or the heart transplant . . . My brain went on fire, I couldn’t breathe, I had 25 pounds of fluids. My brain just went boom.”

Still, he said, he’s feeling good, although he has tremors from a new medication. “It has terrible side effects, but it keeps me alive.” But he’s writing, he’s publishing, he’s being Tom Driscoll.

Two pages from Tom Driscoll’s hospital diary. His story is being told in a new book entitled Dead Man Suite. (Photo by John Weiss)

Tom and Beth moved to Winona in 2021. There, he’s made friends with many of the poets and writers. They and the doctors kept telling him: write a book. 

“This writing community here, especially the cardiac doctors, have said for years, ‘Tom, when are you going to write about this?’” Driscoll said. “It’s a unique view of living and dying, which is really what Dying Man Suite is about. I’m alive.”

Driscoll said he’s never feared death. “I don’t know why it doesn’t scare me, it seems natural, a part of life. I think I fear living more than dying.”