About Stuart Dybek: A Profile

Stuart Dybek works with a curious mix of spontaneity and retentiveness. He wrote most of the stories for his first collection, for instance, under a spell. He'd put on Eastern European classical music, and the words would simply pour out. To this day, Dybek relies on music for inspiration, listening to jazz, jotting in a notebook, improvising, not knowing or caring if the lines will beget a poem or a short-short or a novella. Yet he can be superstitious and fussy -- a perfectionist. He is reluctant to analyze or even discuss his ongoing projects, fearing he might "talk away a story," and he has not published another book since his second collection in 1990, although he has four full-length manuscripts that have been interminably close to ready.

Dybek, a second-generation Polish American, lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and has taught at Western Michigan University since 1974. His wife, Caren, works in the school system near Kalamazoo, and their daughter and son were raised there. But as Dybek's readers know -- and his fans are cultish in their reverence for his work -- he writes almost exclusively about the Southwest Side of Chicago, where he was born in 1942. Later known as Pilsen and El Barrio, the neighborhood was populated by working-class Poles, Czechs, and Hispanics. The Catholic church bridged the various ethnic groups, which mingled with a remarkable lack of tension. "It was a benevolent time," Dybek says. The area was considered an urban ghetto, and he was in a gang, but he witnessed little oppression or violence, none of "what has become a kind of genocidal urge in lower-class neighborhoods today."

What Dybek remembers is joy. "I was an ecstatic kid," he says. He was surrounded by hundreds of children, products of the postwar baby boom, and he and his friends ran around with utter abandon, playing baseball, hopping freights, trespassing through factory grounds. His father nicknamed him "The Weed," partly because he was so skinny, mostly because he was so wild. His father, Stanley, was a foreman at the International Harvest plant, which manufactured trucks and farm implements -- including a manure spreader, regarded as "the only product we won't stand behind" -- and his mother, Adeline, worked as a truck dispatcher for extra income. They were taxed enough without having to deal with their three rambunctious sons. Dybek, the oldest, attended Catholic schools throughout his childhood, and he was always getting into trouble in classes. "I was a year younger than everybody else, and because of that, I think the nuns gave me the benefit of the doubt and ascribed a lot of my behavior to immaturity, which my
father knew all along should have been ascribed to weediness."

He was an indifferent student, even in college, where he was put into remedial English, but he did have his passions. A major influence was his grandmother. She barely spoke English, and Dybek hardly knew any Polish, but they had a bond that transcended language. "I was madly, madly in love with her," Dybek says. "There was just a quality of pure emotion that didn't require much in the way of language. She just made me
feel. She had a tremendous sense of humor, and there was an ancient quality about her -- odd superstitions, and body language and smells, and just everything about her communicated someplace other than America." Another visceral, otherworldly source of emotion was music. For reasons Dybek has never been able to fathom, he became obsessed with jazz, and was determined, at eleven years old, to play an instrument. He thought of taking up the trumpet, until his brother knocked off a piece of his front tooth with a belt buckle, ruining his embouchure, so he settled on the saxophone, taking lessons and later forming a band. (They never had any professional gigs, although they occasionally joined a polka band for a couple of sets, "which was something that filled you with a certain amount of humiliation.")

Writing was a distant interest. He read quite a bit -- "Again, it was in a weedlike manner" -- fascinated for a time with Greek mythology, but writing itself was not imaginable as a vocation. However, Dybek does remember distinctly an epiphany that struck him in the fourth grade, when he woke up one morning to find his mother with the flu. She prepared cream of wheat for his breakfast and then went back to bed, and Dybek, who'd always hated cream of wheat, happily flushed it down the toilet and worked on a school composition about Africa. "I was trying to describe the trees in Africa, and in groping to describe how tall they were, I thought about the tallest things I'd ever seen, which were skyscrapers, and I wrote the phrase 'the tree-scraped skies.' And I mean, I had such a sudden bolt, it jacked me out of my seat at the breakfast table." He sprinted into his mother's room, where she was in the midst of vomiting. "Here she is, heaving over the side of the bed into a bucket, and here's this kid standing
there reading this composition about Africa. I'd never done anything like that before. From that moment on, writing was no longer just an academic exercise."

Yet when he entered nearby Loyola University of Chicago, the first in his family to go to college, it wasn't with the intention to become a musician or a writer, but a doctor. After a year, he abandoned that folly and switched to English literature. He became heavily invested in the civil rights and antiwar movements, and his resistance to paternalistic authority, his desire for reform, led him, after graduating from Loyola in 1964, to become a caseworker for the Cook County Department of Public Aid for two years. "I think I believed that you could somehow engage in this social change, do-gooderness, with a job like that," he says. "And one of the huge things that I learned was that, at least at that time, you were as much a part of the problem as anything else. It was a very disillusioning experience." He turned to teaching, first at an elementary school in the Chicago suburbs, then at a high school in the Virgin Islands, of all places, fulfilling a dream to be closer to the natural world (he was a
closet butterfly collector as a kid -- "That was the kind of thing that could get you branded for life in my neighborhood"). "One of the things that made me love teaching was that I finally did find, within the system, some kind of a job that I felt you could do with a minimum of compromises and that did have a benevolent effect on people's lives. Two of the happiest years of my life were living in the Caribbean, between being able to teach these absolutely wonderful local kids and at the same time becoming absolutely obsessed with the ocean."

Teaching would be his mission. He agreed with the philosopher John Dewey, who had deemed education to be the great democratizing force. "My goal was to reach a point where I could either do something in curriculum, or maybe even have my own school someday." But writing was now equally compelling to him, and he hoped he could do both by enrolling in the Ph.D. program at the University of Iowa, where he would be allowed to submit a creative dissertation. "I had never met a real writer at that point, and it was only after I got there, in the company of people like Richard Yates, Cheever, Don Justice, that I began to realize the enormous commitment writing really demanded." He surrendered completely to his writing, taking poetry and fiction workshops simultaneously.

His classmates -- among them Tracy Kidder, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Denis Johnson, Larry Levis, Laura Jensen, Thom Jones, and Michael Ryan -- challenged and inspired Dybek, but he also grew weary of the place on occasion. Dybek recalls: "I was walking across a parking lot in the rain, talking to Jon Jackson, and saying to him, 'I don't think I could stand reading another goddamn worksheet this semester' " -- worksheets were how student work was distributed in those days, on mimeographs -- "and suddenly, a wet piece of paper was stuck to my foot, and I pulled it off, and I said, 'Look, it's a goddamn worksheet! You can't even walk without them sticking to you.' And I looked at it, and I started reading it, and they were these fantastic poems. They were by Tom Lux. So it was that kind of place, where you'd be walking across the parking lot in the rain, and suddenly you'd be reading this wonderful stuff."

After receiving his M.F.A. in 1973, Dybek spent one year in the Florida Keys, then landed in Kalamazoo. He published a collection of poems,
Brass Knuckles (University of Pittsburgh Press), in 1979, a collection of interrelated stories,
Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (Viking), in 1980, and another story collection,
The Coast of Chicago (Knopf), in 1990. Along the way, he has won a Whiting Writers' Award, a Guggenheim, an NEA fellowship, a Nelson Algren Award, numerous O. Henry Awards and
Best American Short Stories selections, a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a PEN/Malamud Award.

Dybek is one of the progenitors of the short-short as a form, and in
The Coast of Chicago, he interleaves seven short-shorts with seven longer stories, binding them so tightly in place and theme, the book deservedly earns comparisons to Anderson's
Winesburg, Ohio, and Joyce's
Dubliners. In those stories, he shifts seamlessly from gritty naturalism to magic realism, transforming the tangible into the mythic. It's a metafictional technique, melding memory with imagination, that came to him listening to Eastern European music many years ago. Before then, he hadn't found a narrative voice that had suited him. He'd been trying to crank out conventional short stories with generic American characters, but they didn't feel right. Then he happened to read about the Hungarian composers Bartók and Kodály, who had toured the Hungarian countryside, seeking Gypsy music to incorporate into their own compositions. Dybek hunted down a Kodály record, and from the moment the needle hit vinyl, images of his family and his own Eastern European neighborhood appeared before him. He began reading Kafka and Isaac Babel, and started a story, "The Palatski Man," that ended up being his first publication, in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (sixteen literary journals had rejected it).

Stylistically, he has become renown for his lyricism, which often borders on incantation, as evidenced in a passage from a recent story, the prize-winning "We Didn't." He takes a banal situation -- a Chicago teen in the throes of hormonal delirium who cannot sway his girlfriend to sleep with him -- and gives it majesty:

Along the Gold Coast, high-rises began to glow, window added to window, against the dark. In every lighted bedroom, couples home from work were stripping off their business suits, falling to the bed, and doing it. They did it before mirrors and pressed against the glass in streaming shower stalls, they did it against walls and on the furniture in ways that required previously unimagined gymnastics which they invented on the spot. They did it in honor of man and woman, in honor of beast, in honor of God. They did it because they'd been released, because they were home free, alive, and private, because they couldn't wait any longer, couldn't wait for the appointed hour, for the right time or temperature, couldn't wait for the future, for messiahs, for peace on earth and justice for all. They did it because of the Bomb, because of pollution, because of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, because extinction might be just a blink away. They did it because it was Friday night. It was Friday night and
somewhere delirious music was playing -- flutter-tongued flutes, muted trumpets meowing like tomcats in heat, feverish plucking and twanging, tom-toms, congas, and gongs all pounding the same pulsebeat.

Of late, Dybek's inclination to mimic the emotion of music with prose has become more explicit. "When I first started writing," he says, "I thought it would be about
saying something. I don't think that now. I think of writing as
making something. What's come to fascinate me more and more is trying to use language the way that the mediums of other arts -- music in particular -- are used, so that they lead you to nonverbal places. I don't know if it's a paradox or just foggy thinking to believe language can do the same thing, that language can in some way or another lead you to something unsayable."

His process is still to scribble in notebooks, filling pages with verse. Whether the verse eventually yields a poem or novella is somewhat unimportant, although he would like to work in longer forms more: "Genre is sometimes treated like a religion. But for me it's primarily a tool. Working in different genres, the material gets transformed in different ways." But he is careful not to rush the transformation, and faces his publisher's and his readers' demands for a new book with equanimity.

In Kalamazoo, he tends to the mail and more prosaic business in the morning, writes in the afternoon, and teaches at night, a job he continues to think of as an enormous privilege. He returns to Chicago often, visiting friends and family. He claims he doesn't need to go back to his hometown for material anymore. He has enough memories of the old neighborhood to carry him through several more books. He will, he promises, release a collection of stories and a novella soon. "I'm getting close," he insists. "That's all I can say."