July 2003
Joe Benevento
Kirksville, Missouri
Joe Benevento, professor of English at Truman State University and co-editor
of The Green Hills Literary Lantern, took the B.A. in English
and Spanish from New York University (magna cum laude, Phi Beta
Kappa) and the M.A. in English from Ohio State University before finishing
his doctorate in English at Michigan State University with a dissertation
comparing the literary theories and practices of Walt Whitman and Jorge
Luis Borges. His first book of poems was published in 1996, and his
first novel in 2003. His second collection of poetry is forthcoming
in Fall 2003. In addition, he has published poems, stories and essays
in close to 200 different places, including U.S. Catholic, Bilingual
Review, Poets & Writers and The Southeast Review.
Tell me a little bit about your origins.
I was born November 15, 1955, in Brooklyn, though my family had just
recently moved to Queens, so that's where I grew up, in a house on 130th
St. in the section known as Richmond Hill. My parents still live there,
in the same house, where they have now been for about 50 years. My folks
were both from Brooklyn, both children of Italian immigrants, both Brooklyn
Dodger fans. When the Dodgers finally beat the Yankees in the World
Series, in October of 1955, my mother was close to giving birth to me.
So
two reasons to celebrate, eh?
You didn’t train specifically for the writing
craft, did you? What do you think of creative writing programs?
I only took one creative writing course, a poetry workshop while at
Ohio State. I think MFA and other creative writing programs are fine,
but certainly not the only, and sometimes not the best, way to train
writers.
Most writers feel like they have to go from the heartland
to the Big Apple, but you did it the other way. It's a long way from
Brooklyn to Kirksville. Was there a kind of transplanting-shock?
Well, I transplanted a little at a time. First I moved from Queens to
Columbus, Ohio. I remember being very culture-shocked then, couldn't
believe how bad the pizza was in Columbus, or that people really thought
it was a city. But then I went on to East Lansing, a smaller town, though
a pretty cool one, and, for my last two years in Michigan, I lived in
tiny Hickory Corners, as my first wife had to study at the Kellogg Biological
Station there. So, after Hickory Corners, which is a town of about 100
folks, outside of the MSU scientists who live there, Kirksville didn't
seem that small. But lots of my writing, both poetry and fiction, touches
on my New York past, and on adjusting to the small town Midwest, after
growing up in a working class, multicultural neighborhood in Queens.
I know writers don't like to have their work reduced
to mere autobiography, but a lot of your work seems to come out of that
long arc—certainly that’s the case with your books Plumbing
in Harlem and Holding On. Does the idea of "holding on" loom
large for you?
I don't mind thinking about the ways that autobiography affects my writing.
Certainly, Plumbing In Harlem has its basis in events that really
took place in my life: I really did spend the summer of 1980 as a plumber's
helper in Harlem, as my protagonist, Gus Perazzo does. Like him my mother
had liver cancer, like him I had a troubled marriage then. But, of course,
I changed tons of things, and just used some of the interesting elements
of setting and character as a basis for a fiction. As for "holding
on,” that is a metaphor I am comfortable with; one can see the
title of my second book of poems, Willing To Believe, as just
a variation on the same theme. I've always liked work that was faintly
optimistic, writers like Saul Bellow and Frank O'Hara and even Hawthorne
come to mind in that regard—writers who make you feel they understand
how crummy life often is, but it doesn't really defeat them. You need
to hold on until it gets better, or hold on by showing grace in crisis,
as some of the characters do in Plumbing In Harlem. And realize
the cyclical nature of most things, "If winter comes, can spring
be far behind?" though, of course, if summer is here, can fall
be far behind? That’s equally true.
Hmmm, Bellow, Hawthorne and O’Hara…I wonder
if those three have ever been mentioned in a single sentence before.
Your scholarship touches on magical realism, what might be thought of
as the eruption of a specifically poetic vision into a horizon of prosaic
expectations. Is this an influence on your work? How do the poetry and
the prose relate to one another?
Magic realism has mostly had its influence, overtly, in my short fiction,
where about a little less than half the stories I have published have
had obvious ties to some of the magical realists, especially Borges,
and Garcia Marquez. Maybe Plumbing In Harlem also has a few modest
touches of magic realism—or a Catholic variation thereof, with
the mother's trust in saints and a near-saint, Padre Pio. I enjoy writing
both poetry and fiction; I think my poetry is usually more overtly autobiographical;
I don't take the opportunity that often to get into a "persona"
in my poems. The poems and fiction deal with a lot of similar thematic
material—family, growing up in New York, unrequited love, memory,
growing up with a core group of black and Latino friends, finding reasons
in nature and life for the "faint optimism" I was talking
about earlier. I don't know if I'm more a poet than fiction writer and
I'm pretty sure it doesn't matter, either to me or to anyone else out
there, for that matter.
Let me pick up on that. You've published a couple of
pieces in U.S. Catholic—one of the few publications not devoted
to literature that still prints poetry. Do you think you're identifiable
as a "Catholic" writer? How would you feel about that?
Yes, I have had poems two different times in U.S. Catholic, a
story in the March issue of St. Anthony Messenger, and a poem
recently accepted in St. Joseph Messenger. I might be willing
to identify myself as a Catholic writer, but a fairly unorthodox one,
I think. I have published poems that poke fun at too unexamined use
of ritual in the Catholic church, including one called, "Does the
Holy Ghost Really Like Red?" and even one of the poems U.S.
Catholic took, "Expecting Songbirds," was one that I myself
was uncertain about, as to whether it affirmed faith or instead affirmed
a belief that you have to support your children's ability to believe
for as long as that can last. Certainly, the editors at U.S. Catholic
took it as a faith-affirming poem, and even bought it a second time,
for inclusion in their newsletter to new parents. Certainly, I'm very
culturally aware of what it means to have grown up Catholic, and particularly
New York, Italian-American Catholic, which is strikingly different from
small-town Midwest Catholic, in everything from the importance of the
concept of "Godfather" to the way we celebrate occasions.
And lots of that kind of Italian-Catholic stuff comes up in my stories
and poems.
Now let's go back to one of the questions I rolled
your way at the outset: Is it hard juggling your academic and artistic
duties? Are they in tension, or synergy?
No, I don't find it hard juggling academic and artistic work. For one
thing, I write with my students in any creative writing class I teach,
so some of my poems, stories, and chapters of novels get done because
of my job as a creative writing teacher. And this year I've gotten especially
good feedback from student writers. A story I published with St.
Anthony Messenger really got a lot of help from the students in
my Fiction Writers Workshop. But my writing is also a little apart from
my work, since I don't consider myself a particularly "academic"
poet, since so much of my writing still comes from my working class
roots. But being a schoolteacher is one of the only ways to have a summer
off for writing, aside from those very few who make enough money from
fiction writing not to have to have some sort of "regular"
job. So, really, the academic position is mostly a help in getting some
writing done.
I asked you about the relation between your writing
and your teaching. How about the relation to your work as an editor?
Being an editor has been a great opportunity to converse with writers
across the country. I've been very tight with my ethics, though, never
publishing anyone just so they might publish me in their journal, and
I've repulsed the few subtle overtures I've had from people to do just
that. Editing also has made me all the more aware of what I do and don't
like in writing, and why. So, overall, it's been a fully positive experience
and a help to me in defining what I am as a writer.
What advice would you give to newbies? What do you
know now that you wish you'd known way back?
Advice is usually easy to give but hard to take. So, knowing that, it's
hard for me to give advice. I feel that my career as a writer has been
stunted by my not having any contacts, by not having studied with anyone
with pull, by not having studied a creative writing track at all, and
by trying to etch out a career in the small-town Midwest. So it would
seem I'd be ready to advise people to go ahead and get into quality,
prestigious MFA programs and to make as many contacts as possible. But
while I'm convinced that my career has been harmed by a lack of contacts
or connections, I'm not certain my writing has, and I still have hopes,
with my just-published novel, with a new one I'm working on, etc., that
my writing will justify itself and I'll triumph in spite of being a
nobody for so long. It's a nice dream, in any case. And certainly my
advice, predominantly, has to be write what you want to write,
not what you think people want you to write. And it's easier to do that
outside of an MFA program, at least for most people. And don't be in
a big hurry to publish. And read all the time. Those should be givens.
Interview conducted by Dr. Adam Brooke Davis, professor of
English at Truman State University, Kirksville. Davis is a member of
the Missouri Center for the Book’s board of directors and also
serves as president of the Missouri Folklore Society.
Books by Joe Benevento
Holding On. Warthog Press, 1996
Plumbing in Harlem. Publish America. 2003
Willing to Believe (forthcoming). Timberline Press. 2003
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