How Chaucer's Canterbury Tales Inspired This Denver Renaissance Man's New Book

Denver writer Josiah Hatch III has a lot in common with Geoffrey Chaucer, of Canterbury Tales fame. And it's not just that Hatch's new book, A Journey to St. Thomas: Tales for Our Time, models itself very purposefully and masterfully on that seminal work of storytelling. 

Chaucer was perhaps the perfect model of the Renaissance man, even if he pre-dated that era and in some ways helped to bring it about. He's come down through the ages as a poet, even called the Father of English Poetry by some scholars, but in his own time, he was a man of politics and civil service, dabbling in philosophy and astronomy, too.

Such is the man whose work Hatch studied both at Princeton and later at Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, where he delved into Anglo-Saxon and Middle English with the relish of a Chaucerian disciple. "I loved my time in academics," Hatch says, "but in the end I went to Washington, D.C., which I considered sort of a halfway house for liberal arts majors. I loved the humanities, and if I had my druthers, I'd have sat in it like a warm bathtub. It's a wonderful thing. But I also had a father who was set on me repairing the family fortunes. He was a Depression-era kid and wanted me to become a lawyer." Hatch says he fought against that paternal directive for some time: He got married and worked at some economic development agencies — including the International Trade Commission, which was housed in (and was very much outgrowing) what had been the old U.S. Patent Office and opened in 1840 after having been commissioned by the Jackson administration four years earlier. Hatch heard that Walt Whitman had been a nurse there at one point during the Civil War, when the building became a makeshift hospital and barracks; considering its history, he contacted the Smithsonian Institution to see if it would be interested in trading its D.C. location for the former Patent Office. The Smithsonian was definitely interested — not only in swapping spaces, but in Hatch himself, whom it hired away from the ITC as well. He became the assistant director of the American History Museum in charge of public and academic programs for more than seven years.

"I discovered that the Smithsonian was sort of the climax," Hatch recalls. "If you wanted to progress, you had to wait for one of the old deciduous trees to topple so you could shoot for the light."

So Hatch finally went to get his law degree, studying nights at Georgetown University. "Everyone else in Washington had one," he jokes, "so in order to get along and even understand what was going on, I felt I had to do that. But a law degree is sort of like a soufflé: It sinks if you don't keep an eye on it. So I had to employ it. Went to work for a national law firm and stayed there for an appalling amount of time: 37 years."

But despite spending all his working life there, Hatch says that D.C. is a "place of entropy," with "everything grinding away everything else." He says he got tired of the city, where people are often valued not for who they are, but for what they could do for someone else. Luckily, he found himself with the opportunity to handle a complex legal matter in Colorado. "I just loved Denver," says Hatch. "It reminded me of my hometown in Savannah, to an extent." This was 1992, and he remembers the Mile High City as being a "sweeter place then, smaller, and people still smiled at you at the elevator. Things like that." He relocated, and started the collegiate teaching career he's still enjoying today, mostly in international business and economics at the University of Denver's Korbel School.

"But I never gave up on the humanities," Hatch grins. "I tell my students to remember they might deal with huge numbers and data, but eventually you have to talk to people."

And then came the idea to write A Journey to St. Thomas. The book is very much a product of the global pandemic — COVID and its influence on the world plays a major role — but it wasn't the inception point for Hatch. "I got irritated at how isolated people were who had a background in literature, etc.," Hatch says. "No one really understood it or wanted to hear it. According to my wife, I started talking in my sleep in Anglo Saxon. And then when Trump was elected and the chaos ensued, it reminded me of the fourteenth century. There's a consonance between the two eras."

Hatch says the idea for A Journey to St. Thomas is a response to all of the above, and also calls it a "garden folly of a project," albeit affectionately. The book took him four years to write, he says, and "life kind of cooperated" with that process, what with the pandemic and its forced isolation and the opportunity to write, and write, and write.

Which Hatch did — and in heroic couplets, no less. He says he hopes that the poetry appeals to readers, and suggests that readers try reading the book with someone, aloud to each other. "Poetry is just really fun," he says with a laugh. Although he appreciates modern poetry, he says he's at a point where he wants people "not to neglect things that have been in the record for so, so, so long. And why? Because they're fundamental and important. I think poetry conveys more than philosophy does. It's the tonality of it, the music of it, that makes people want to go further."

That's not to say that A Journey to St. Thomas puts on airs; on the contrary, its poetry is filled with casual and contemporary speech, a familiarity that connects the modern reader to a rather ancient form. It's another nod to Chaucer, who at least in Canturbury Tales does much the same thing: tells common stories with uncommon flair.

The one concern Hatch as about the whole experience with A Journey to St. Thomas is that he doesn't want people to think he's setting himself up in comparison to Chaucer. "Not a bit," he says. "I wish Chaucer were here, right now, to describe all of this far better than I."

Josiah Hatch III's A Journey to St. Thomas is in stores now. For more information, or to order directly from the publisher, see the Fulcrum Books website.