For years Cheryl-Anne Millsap has been broadcasting from the Inland Northwest. It’s good to see a hefty bunch of her recent pieces for Spokane Public Radio have been uploaded onto PRX—and good to hear her clear voice again.

In this drop-in, her personal essay about her grandfather has the sentimental warmth of a fireside chat. Her piece is titled “The Poetry of Carl Sandburg,” but it’s more a tribute to her bookish grandpa than to the author of “Chicago Poems.” Millsap begins, “My grandfather was a good man,” and she returns to this line as a refrain and her central theme.

It turns out that one of the main reasons Millsap’s granddad was a good man is that he “gave [Millsap] a good start,” i.e., he gave her Sandburg’s “poetry and steel mills and train cars and ordinary people.” It would have been excellent if Millsap had quoted a few lines from one or two of Sandburg’s poems. Failing this, she leaves us to make the connection between poems like “Fog” or “Gone” and her own plainspoken writing style, as well as her own down-home vision of ordinary life.

Who knows what kind of writer Millsap might have become if her grandpa had read poems to her by T. S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens? Let’s leave that question unanswered for now—and enjoy her words from a place that could hardly be called a “hog butcher for the world,” eastern Washington state’s Lilac City!