Lars Fad - Yopo, IL
We follow I-55 looking for a state highway, then take it into a regional park where we pick up the first of two dirt roads on our way to Yopo, a tiny town about twenty miles from Kankakee, Illinois. When we pull up, the poet Lars Fad is waiting on a large painted glider. He gives a big wave and heads over to us. He is wearing a striped shirt, long khaki shorts, and flip flops. It is 33 degrees and it is raining like that scene in Year of Living Dangerously.
He shakes my hand and kisses my suprised wife's outstretched hand in a sort of continental fashion and then the three of us go inside his log cabin. "I built it myself," Fad says. "From a kit. It's really quite simple if one follows directions well and has an inordinate amount of time and patience. Of course it helps to have an endless supply of grad students, too." His laugh is high and piercing.
Fad shows us around, lets my wife hook up our laptop at his kitchen table, and then he and I go into his study to talk. He's fascinated by my minidisc recorder and only drops it once while turning it over and over like it was a shiny stone. "You look tired," Fad says, by way of getting us started.
Fad has lived in Yopo for the past fifteen years, writing and publishing his work widely in literary magazines all around the country. His second book has just been released, Two Nights in a Castle (Kankakee University Press), and he's giddy about the future.
"I turned my back on New York and the publishing world a dozen years ago," he says. "I turned my back on all of them. And here I am." He slaps his hands flat down on his legs. "Tenure. Books. This cabin, really my sanctuary. It's a sacred place to me," he says, suddenly solemn, almost whispering.
He tilts his head back and admires the open beam rafters. "In this room, my friend. In this room I let the muse dance with me." He looks at me, nods a bit, closes his eyes.
After we finish our chat, he brews up some cinammon tea on a large wood stove. He invites my wife out back now that it has stopped raining and he points out mushrooms on the ground. "Later," he says, "some of my students are coming out and we're going to use the mushrooms in a nice barley soup I make from scratch."
I shoot some photos of Fad out in his back yard. He first of all runs inside to get his cape. We shake hands all around, this time with Fad embracing me furiously and whispering: "Keep writing. Keep the words coming." He whispers something to my wife as well, but I can't make it out. She rolls her eyes once we're in the car.
We're backing out down the muddy bog of Fad's driveway when suddenly we spot him running toward us with a book in his hand. "My first book," he shouts in at me. "I'd like to give you a copy."
"Thanks very much," I say, reaching out my hand.
He lays the book open on the hood of the car. "It's out of print of course. Those sons of bitches in Urbana froze me out years ago. I told them I would rather photocopy my next book then have them make a mess of it." He tilts his head at me and poises a pen over one of the first inside pages. "It's ten bucks unsigned. But if I sign it, I'll have to charge you fifteen."
Karen Volkman - Chicago, IL
Karen, a young and brilliant nomadic poet, buzzes me into her apartment in Ukranian Village, a close-knit urban neighborhood just a little north and west of downtown. She tells me she's been here for about six months after more than a year in Hyde Park, a much different part of the city. She tells me Hyde Park is an enclave unto itself, while her new neighborhood is tied to the city in a real way. It's clear which she prefers.
We go up a set of narrow stairs to her apartment. Karen's place is done up grad-school-funky, books on plain wood shelves, a futon, and the majestic $23 desk she bought years ago in New York. It all goes with her in some combination when she moves on, and she's been a lot of places since leaving her childhood home of Florida: Syracuse NY, Houston TX, Boston MA, New York City, Tuscaloosa AL, and Pittsburgh PA.
And in a few months she's on the move again, on to Missoula MT where she'll teach in their MFA program starting in August. It's a terrific job, and they're getting a terrific poet, one with two highly lauded books - and better yet - an adventurous and passionate voice. Her work in her second book, Spar, is surprising and intense. The prose poems are riveting, "relentless" in the words of one reviewer, and a reader can't help but go through them unblinking and silent.
Karen sits on the futon and I face her in a straight backed chair. We run through some of her geographical moves. She laughs easily and often as she talks. She remembers the stunning temperature shift of moving to Syracuse, where suddenly she saw winter, spring, and fall, after two decades of endless Florida summer.
After we talk, I rave on a bit about Missoula, a town my wife and I spent some time in last year, and a place we love. We stand on the street in front of her apartment shooting some photos and it occurs to Karen that she's only got 4 months left in Chicago, a city she's come to love. She gives a sort of wistful look up and down the block, but after we say goodbye she goes inside, up the stairs.
Wherein The Author Eats at The Rainbow
At the Rainbow Restaurant and Pancake House in Elmhurst, Illinois, they really bring the food to the guy at the next table. He starts with a three egg omelette full of sausage and covered with cheese. He's got hash browns, four pieces of toast, a double side of bacon.
His wife and kid sit across from him eating their own food. The kid, about 8 or 9, eats a short stack of pancakes, leaving half of one drenched in syrup. The wife eats a skillet breakfast, two scrambled eggs mixed up with hash browns and peppers.
The guy, though, he's heroic. After his own meal he signals across the room to Anna, one of the waitresses, who comes over within 30 seconds with a stack of 3 pancakes. These pancakes are about the size of the hubcap off a 75 Buick Le Sabre and the guy goes after them with gusto.
Gusto. That's a good word for Chicagoland, a town, an area full of big people, all smiling, 1/2 of them smoking, virtually all of them red faced and ready to give a visitor directions to the nearest place to get a polish sausage. The guy next to me is fat. Now, please understand, I admire him. I love him. What I mean to say is I love this guy. He eats with an abandon that is intoxicating. I'm big, too, as you must know. In fact my exterior dimensions are exactly the same as those of a double doored Kenmore refrigerator freezer. (Okay, I'm exaggerating. I'm not that tall.)
So, my admiration of the guy next to me is hard-won. I pause during my own meal when I see him finish the hot cakes. I'm praying, rooting, dreaming that he'll raise one meaty finger to Anna again and another plate will come. But he doesn't. He drinks some water. Smiles at his family. They pay the check and leave. When he's gone, the place seems a little quieter, a little less fun. My own meal doesn't taste as good.
I shot this sad photo long after he's gone.
Mark Strand - Chicago, IL
There is one real reason people live in Chicago instead of New York: Lake Michigan. On a pretty Sunday morning, I'm sitting with Mark Strand about ten floors up looking out over Lake Shore Drive, while the 70 degree weather pours in through a bank of open windows. The blinds flutter sometimes, and the sound of weekend construction floats up to us as we talk. From my chair I can see the water and I think about heading over there after the interview to walk alongside the lake, watch the joggers and dogs. Peer up the lakeside all the way to Milwaukee or whatever is north of here.
We're just on the edge of the University of Chicago, where Strand has been for the past several years. He is - as it is clear - a revered and monumental American poet of this or any generation. His work is frankly astonishing in its breadth. His early work virtually reinventing what we understand to be the contemporary poem; his later work clear-eyed and unflinching, poems about age and love and beauty and light.
We sit in his white-walled apartment for a pleasant chat that is long-awaited for me. Strand was among about 5 poets I had at the top of my list more than 6 months ago when this journey started. On my first contact, Strand told me that he was flattered I wanted to chat, but that he really didn't have much to say. When it appeared I'd have a chance to make another loop through the area, I reconnected. He was again very kind, but this time our schedules were off-kilter, and he likely would be elsewhere when I was in Chicago.
Finally, I enlisted the help of one of his long time friends. A phone call on my behalf was made; lies were told about how pleasant I was to meet (!), and when I contacted Strand a few weeks ago, his one line response told me to come on.
So we found our way to Chicago and I waited outside his high rise for a full hour, unwilling to risk traffic, tides, or acts of God that might keep me from the door.
Strand, now unthinkably 70, is tall, lanky, and still the handsome rake. It is not unusual to see the word "swoon" in any retelling of a meeting with him. He's soft-spoken, erudite, and he puts me at ease.
He's pleased that one of my early questions probes a notion that he sees in his own work. He develops the idea for me in his answer. We talk about some of the places of his life, Utah, especially, and then Canada, my home, too. He recalls the watery summers in Nova Scotia, blueberry pies, the beauty and the fishing of St. Margaret's Bay. "I still say 'eh,'" he says with a big warm smile, when I ask him about the Canadian things he has retained besides the memories.
After a time we get up to do some photos. He's got six inches on me easy, and I awkwardly raise the camera a bit above my eye level to get him head on. He stands there, relaxed, smiling. He doesn't think to duck down a bit, and I am glad to be there, reaching up, trying to capture him.
