Heavy Matters:Interview with John Guzlowski

In Issue 10, we interview Polish-American author John Guzlowski. He previously submitted a

reflection on postmodernism to Issue 7 of The Unconventional Courier, which you can check out

here.

John Guzlowski’s writings appear in Rattle, Ontario Review, North American Review, and other

journals here and abroad.

His poems and personal essays about his parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi

Germany appear in his award-winning memoir Echoes of Tattered Tongues.

He is also the

author of the Hank and Marvin mystery novels (reviewed in the New York Times and elsewhere)

and a columnist for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.

His most recent books of poems are Small Talk, Mad Monk Ikkyu and True Confessions.

He has also recently published a novel about two German lovers separated by war entitled Retreat: A Love Story.

In reviewing Guzlowski’s book first book of poems, Language of Mules, Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz wrote, “Exceptional…even astonished me…reveals an enormous ability for grasping reality.”

To get to know him more, we’ve decided to ask him several questions.

The Unconventional Courier: You wrote about your family's experiences in a Nazi labor camp and the harsh experiences that made others immigrate. What is your approach to writing such heavy topics?

John Guzlowski:

My approach to writing such heavy topics?

When I taught creative writing at Eastern Illinois University, the first thing I told my students was to write about the things that affected them most in their lives, the things that gave them the most grief, the most joy, the most hope. For me, those things for a long time were connected with my parents.

My dad started telling me stories about his experiences in Buchenwald Concentration Camp when I was just a kid, five and six years old. He’d sit down at the table and have a drink, and then he’d start telling me about the horrors he saw and experienced, the women who had their breasts torn off with bayonets by German soldiers, the friends who were crucified in the camp for doing something the guards didn’t like, my dad being beaten until he was blind in one eye because he begged for food.

When I started writing poems, these memories were there, fresh and ready.

The first poem I wrote about my poems when I was 30 years old was a poem that wondered about those memories, about what my mom and dad were thinking about 33 years after the war.

What I try to capture in all my poems about my parents – poems that, by the way, I’m still writing today – is the reality of my parents’ memories. When they told me these stories of the war, they told me in plain and direct and visual language that I would never forget. Let me give you one example, a short poem called “Life Story” based on a story my mom told me about something she saw happen to the baby of one of the girls she knew in the slave labor camp:

Life Story

She was born

in a concentration camp

in 1944. She weighed one pound

eight ounces. She was

a leaf of grass. She was lovely.

She was born dreaming

her mother’s dream

of flying like a robin

through the sky and eating

everything that was pure

and good and golden.

And then the women guards

smashed her into the wall

and wrapped her in newspaper

and threw her into the garbage

with the others.

Toward the end of my mom’s life, I started sharing my poems about her experiences in the war

with her. I would show her a poem and watch her reaction.

I knew a poem was finished when I would hear her say, “Yes, that’s it. That’s the way it was,”

TUC: What’s the most difficult thing about delving into these themes?

JG: Some of these things about the war that my parents told me were truly terrible. People don’t want to hear it. I’ve been asked to do readings in high schools and middle schools where the principals have asked me not to bring up things that happened that were bad, very bad. I understand that.

One time toward the end of her life when I was about 58, My mother started

telling me about something my father was forced by the guards to do that was so horrible that a minute into the story I said to her, “Mom, I can’t hear any more.” She said, “Don’t be such a baby. You need to hear this about your father.” I said, “I can’t hear this story. If you don’t stop telling it, I’ll leave and not come back.”

Writing about my parents’ experiences in the war brings my parents and their suffering and the suffering of the millions who were in those camps to me. Writing puts all that on my desk in front of me to crawl into my memory, my life.

I have a friend who said to me after I published Echoes of Tattered Tongues, my book about my parents, he said, “Well, I hope you got it all out of your system. I hope you’re all holocausted out.”

I wasn’t. Writing about my parents doesn’t lessen the effect their grief and suffering has had upon me, but writing, talking about those experiences, sharing those experiences does help.

TUC: As a retired Professor of English, you taught literature and

creative writing at Eastern Illinois University until 2005.

What is your approach to teaching the craft of writing?

What are some do’s and don'ts for creative writing? Or any kind of writing, for that matter?

JG:

I could give you the long answer to the question, an answer that would require me sharing the lesson plans I worked up over 25 years of teaching creative writing, but I won’t.

Here’s the short answer. It’s a poem I wrote when I was invited to speak to a creative writing class at Western Kentucky University:

Advice to Mary Ellen Miller’s Poetry Writing Class

First, listen carefully to the advice of older poets, like me.

Some of what they say will be the most important thing you’ll hear about poetry. Some of what they say will be useless. How can you tell the difference? You can’t right now, but you will in five or ten years.

Second, find someone who believes in your poetry, a wife, a lover, a friend, and believe what they say about your poetry, the good and the bad both, and keep writing, writing all the time, writing emails, letters, notes on the backs of books, term papers about Dostoevsky and the rise of realism, write jokes

about mules that speak only French and teachers that wear red ties and white wide-brimmed hats, and writing like this, you’ll find you’re writing poems, all the time, every day, everywhere you’re writing poems.

Third, write a poem every day, and if you can’t write one everyday write one every other day, and if you can’t do that write one every third day, and if you can’t do that write one when the muse hits you – when two words explode in your head, appear from out of nowhere.

Whatever you’re doing when that explosion hits, stop, and write down the sound of that explosion

because if you wait ‘til later it’s lost--absolutely.

Fourth, find a muse. I’m not kidding. Mine is a mother of two who died in the snow outside of Stalingrad, shot in the forehead by a German foot soldier from a little town in Bavaria. She comes to me when I’m busy grading papers or talking with friends, and she begs me to remember her children, all the children.

What will this muse do for you? Ask her, she’ll tell you.

TUC: What prompted you to pursue academia and become a writer?

JG:

I went to grad school to pursue an MA and a PhD in American literature to escape the fucked up life I was leading.

In my early 20s after I got my college degree, I was drinking too much and doing drugs and working as a longshoreman. It was a crazy job where I drank too much. Every day, a guy would show up on the pier and sell us half-pints of booze, and I would buy and drink on the job. I was a mess, losing friends and girlfriends, and I didn’t care.

At one point of absolute madness on a midnight beach in Chicago, I figured that I was just about at the end of my life if I didn’t change it all. The next day, I started applying to grad schools, hoping that one of them would take me and straighten me out, and it did. Purdue University accepted me and gave me the opportunity to fix my troubles, and let me tell you, it wasn’t an easy process.

Why did I become a writer?

My parents were pretty much illiterate. My dad couldn’t read, my mom could read a little. I saw my first book when I was 4 years old visiting a friend. He had comic books, and I opened one up, and it was like a visit from God or some saint. I fell in love with reading. Got my first library card when I was 6. Went to the library once a week after that and picked out books and read them, and I started writing soon after that.

The first poem I wrote was in 2nd grade when the teacher, a nun, read Joyce Kilmer’s poem “Trees” to the class. It blew me away, and I started writing poems that tried to be just like “Trees.” I was always reading and writing after that.

Writing poems and stories and comic strips and comic books.

For a long time, I dreamt of being a comic book writer, but that didn’t work out.

By the time I got to college, I was reading the beats and dreaming about being Kerouac or Ginsberg. I think I was dreaming too much about being Kerouac because that fed into my drugs and drinking. But I was also doing academic writing, and that truly prepared me for the grad school experience that helped change my life.

TUC: Do your approaches for prose versus poetry differ? How so?

JG:

Not everyone will agree with me, but for me the difference between writing poetry and writing prose is like the difference between going out for a walk on a nice sunny day and running a marathon.

A poem, for me, starts with a sudden word or phrase sparkling in me, and I write it down and then another and another and another until the poem is suddenly all there. It happened like this with my first poem about my parents. That poem started when a phrase showed up in me. The phrase was “dreaming of Warsaw.” I wrote it down. And then I had another thought, about my parents, and I wrote that down, and then I wondered about their dreams of Warsaw, and there was the poem.

Usually, poems grow like this for me. They pop up, and they’re sort of done right there and then. This isn’t to say they’re finished. I’ll have finished a version of a poem, but then I’ll tinker and tinker and tinker with it.

Prose – and I’m talking about novels and not my newspaper columns – have more process involved.

Let me tell you – for instance – about the first novel I wrote, Retreat – a love story. It began as a sonnet about the day the German soldiers came to my mom’s house and killed the women in her family and took my mom to the slave labor camps in Germany. I wrote the first draft of that sonnet all in one sitting. An hour tops. And then I got to the last line, a line

describing a German soldier pushing open the door of my mom’s house, and I wondered what happened next. And that became the novel.

I wrote a chapter and while writing the chapter I was thinking of what would happen in the next chapter and the chapters after that. The writing of the first draft took 2 years, and while writing it, I was constantly thinking of characters and situations and developments and throwing out

chapters and adding new ones and restructuring the book and restructuring it again. I’m currently writing my 6th Hank and Marvin mystery novel, and it’s pretty much the same. I’m thinking about character and plot all day long, in the shower at night, at the dinner table, and while shopping for bagels at the local bagel place.

And this is a process that will go on and on. Even when I’m done, I’m not done. I’ve just finished going over the final draft of my third Hank and Marvin with my publisher, cutting and adding and re-writing and re-writing some more. It’s a process that generally takes an additional couple of months.

TUC: In the work you published with us, "My Life in Postmodernism",

you discuss the evolution of this cultural and literary movement

over the decades. How has postmodernism adapted to or been

influenced by the digital era and the new dimensions brought by it

do storytelling and narrative forms?

JG:

I think postmodernism opened up society to a sense that all definitions are kinda of purposeless, and that – to quote songwriter Cole Porter – anything goes.

The novel was not just what Dickens wrote and a poem wasn’t just what Wordsworth wrote and a play wasn’t just what Shakespeare wrote.

I’m publishing mini-novels that are less than a 1000 words long. I’m writing haiku that don’t look like haiku. I’m publishing broken sonnets that are not 14 lines long. I’ve published another sonnet, one about my mother’s death, that went on for about a 1000 words. Each line in that sonnet was followed by an explanation of that line that provided more of my mom’s story.

I’m writing things that look like no autobiography writing anybody has ever seen, and I’m not the only one.

Let’s look at Facebook. I help administer a facebook page called Poetry Universe. It has about 115,000 followers. Each follower can post as many of his or her poems on the site as they want. There are about 100 poems posted a day. They range from the wildest beat poems to the most clichéd religious sonnets to prose poems that look like no poem written before 1999 to

free form poems that no terms will describe or prepare you for.

And Poetry Universe is not the only such page. There are probably hundreds of other such sites.

The lesson they teach is that you can write any kind of poem you want to write. That doesn’t mean anybody will read it, but you can definitely write it.

To me, that seems totally postmodern.

TUC: Finally, how do you envision postmodernism continuing to evolve

in the coming decades? Are there emerging trends or directions

that you find particularly intriguing or promising?

JG:

I can’t predict where all of this will go, but it will definitely evolve. I think YouTube and zooms and TikTok and webinars are offering all kinds of possibilities to writers. All of this opens writers up to endless sorts of possibilities.

What’s next? Poems that become novels that become autobiographical podcasts that become haiku that become whispers between a world of sounds and images and a world of silence.

Maybe.

Fin