Had we but world enough and time

At the Caxton Club

At the Caxton Club:


Always nice to read to a hometown audience. The Chicago Caxton Club  was founded in 1895 by fifteen Chicago bibliophiles. It was named after William Caxton, the first printer to set up shop in England. The Knox College Caxton Club was founded by members of the English Department about 1978. It was almost named the Wynken de Worde Society after the second English printer. Past speakers have included Stuart Dybeck, Aimee Bender, Denis Johnson, Junot Diaz, Peter Orner, Alice Quinn, and Michael Martone.

 "I kept my eyes open and didn't argue with myself before squeezing the trigger. The hammer was already cocked. I didn't want to wait for 'nine.' I could see him tensing up to make a move, and I didn't think he'd wait for the full count."

TEMPTED AND TRIED

TEMPTED AND TRIED

            About two weeks ago I gave a talk for the religious studies program at Beloit

College in Beloit, Wisconsin. My assignment was to initiate a conversation about the

challenges and benefits of living with uncertainty in a secular world.

            I took as my text an old hymn that was unfamiliar to all but one or two or the students but that will be familiar to most people my age (72):

         

Debra Majeed, Chair, religious
studies program, Beloit College

  

  Tempted and tried, we're oft made to wonder

  Why is should be thus, all the day long;

  While there are others, living about us,

  Never molested, though in the wrong.

   Farther along we'll know all about it,

   Farther along we'll understand why,

   Cheer up, my brothers, live in the sunshine,

   We'll understand it all by and by.

            What is it we want to understand? We want to understand a lot of things, but perhaps the most important thing is why bad things happen. Why is my grandson severely retarded? Why did my neighbor die of cancer at an early age? Why did God permit the Lisbon earthquake or the Holocaust? Why did God permit the shooting of Michel Brown in Ferguson on the night of August ninth?  My wife and I were in Ferguson that night visiting our daughter and her husband, and we were forcibly reminded that if there is a providential plan, it seems not only incomprehensible but ill-conceived or even malicious. It’s hard to see wars, terrorism, genocides, epidemics, grinding poverty, natural disasters, the shooting in Ferguson, as part of a plan that we’ll understand by and by.

            The problem is, what do we do if we’re no longer confident that we’ll understand it all by and by? What if we need to understand it right now?

            In the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, which is really the first important text in the history of western literature, Gilgamesh, prompted by the death of his friend, Enkidu set out on a quest for immortality. Out on the edge of the known world he comes to a kind of bed-and-breakfast place run by a “barmaid” who is also a hierodule or sacred prostitute. Her name is Sidhuri, and after feeding and bathing Gilgamesh, and comforting him with her body, she offers him some advice:

Gilgamesh, whither rovest thou?

The Life thou pursuest thou shalt not find.

When the gods created mankind

Death for mankind they set aside,

Life in their own hand retaining.

Thou, Gilgamesh, let full be thy belly,

Make thou merry by day and by night.

Of each day make thou a feast of rejoicing,

Day and night dance thou and play!

Let thy garments be sparkling fresh,

Thy head be washed; bathe thou in water.

Pay heed to the little one that holds on to thy hand,

Let thy spouse delight in thy bosom!

For this is the task of mankind!

I quote this passage because it’s a passage I keep coming back to, in my own life and in my writing. There’s a Sidhuri figure in almost every one of my novels. I give one example.

            In Philosophy Made Simple my protagonist, Rudy, a widower who has moved to Texas to raise avocados, struggles with all the big questions. Like Gilgamesh he encounters a high-class prostitute on the edge of his known world. He’s introduced to her by his foreman, Medardo, at an exclusive Mexican “club” just across the border from Rudy’s avocado grove where he’s gone for what Medardo calls a “cultural Friday.” Her name is María Gracia and she gives him some advice as they’re eating dinner:

            “This is it, Rudy. This is what you’re looking for—alegría. The embrace of a woman. And the love of your daughters, your three lovely daughters. Rejoice in them, and remember your wife with love. Your whole world is full of love, Rudy, and I think you know that. ‘Gratitude’ is the word that should be on the tip of your tongue. Not ‘I’m worried I’m worried I’m worried,’ but ‘Thank you Thank you Thank you.’ For your daughters and the good times you shared with your wife, for hot water in your bathroom and this good wine, and for these wonderful seafood enchiladas. Don’t be afraid.” She stuck her fork into the last bite of her enchilada, pointed it at him, and then stuck it in her mouth.

            Most of us find ourselves in Gilgamesh’s shoes, so to speak. Or Rudy’s shoes. Are Sidhuri and María Gracia tempting us to abandon the quest to discover the larger meaning and purpose of human life, or are they offering us the accumulated wisdom of the ancient near east? Personally, I’m inclined to accept the accumulated wisdom of the ancient near East. At the same time, like Gilgamesh, I can’t entirely abandon the quest for some larger meaning.

            When I try to reconcile the impulse to continue this quest with a desire to accept the accumulated wisdom of the ancient near East, I get all tangled up. And maybe that’s true of all storytellers. Maybe this is why we become storytellers rather than philosophers or theologians. 

                                                          

Conversation/reading at Beloit College

Book signing at Stone Alley

I'll be signing copies of THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANCES GODWIN at
Stone Alley (53 S. Seminary St.) on First Friday (5 September, 6:00 - 7:00).

Chicago Book Review + an unhappy conservative

Chicago Book Review

This is a masterful effort. The Confessions of Frances Godwin should be at the top of the to-read list for fans of Hellenga’s work. For those who are new to his work, it still should be at the top of that to-read list. (Read the whole review at the Chicago Book Review — 19 August 2014.)


And from an unhappy conservative:

Just read The Confessions of Frances Godwin.  Enjoyed most of the book.  Tiresome proving of leftist credibility in the brief scene when Frances is choosing a mortuary for her husband.  Concerned about a REPUBLICAN ?  Be serious! In an area of Polish, Italians etc?  Reality is this is chosen by ethnicity and convenience.   

Sometime I think that leftists don't think.  More new writing is spoiled by the gas they breathe and don't even see.  

Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere (below): an important location in Confessions.

Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere

Fountain in Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere

Author's Corner, garlic, typos

I recorded an 80 second passage for The Author’s Cornor on Public Radio on (I think) 2 August, when we were in New York. The person from Author’s Corner didn’t like any of the passages I proposed, but we managed anyway. You can listen at http://bit.ly/1uoBYzm

If anyone is reading The Confessions of Frances Godwin, would you keep track of any typos you find and let me know so we can correct them for the paperback. 1000 thanks.

Harvested our garlic this morning. Looks pretty good.

Washington Post review of CONFESSIONS

Ginny and me with my editor, Nancy Miller,  at Bloomsbury

The Shelby Cobra next door.

   As in Hellenga’s earlier work, secondary characters have professions and interests that allow the author to leaven the story with short, lucid passages about astronomy, physics, piano tuning, the wholesale produce business, opera and long-haul trucking. Meals are lovingly prepared and described so clearly that you can use a Hellenga novel as a cookbook.
   In many ways, “The Confessions of Frances Godwin” sums up and surpasses Hellenga’s previous body of work. This is a story of maturity by maturity for maturity, written with subtlety, deep learning and wisdom. 
   Read the full review at The Washington Post, 8/1/14.

Saint Louis Post-Dispatch (review)

Retired teacher shows passion in Hellenga's new novel

      How many of us, as students, had a teacher like Frances Godwin?

      The protagonist in Robert Hellenga’s novel “The Confessions of Frances Godwin” is one of the good ones. She engages her students — in Latin class, no less — dreams up innovative lesson plans and challenges them to reach greater heights.

      So when she winds up a retired widow, she thinks much of her life has wound down. Ah, the surprises that await. Because Godwin winds up having some long and very entertaining conversations with God, and there’s plenty to discuss.…

      Hellenga creates a teacher you will wish you had studied with, and a character to remember.

Read the entire review in the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, July 20, 2014.

New York trip / Reading at Anderson's Bookshop

21 July 2014

            Back from a week in New York on Monday. Went to see my agent, editors at Bloomsbury and Soho, the Swann Galleries, Bob Mankoff (cartoon editor at The New Yorker), did an 80-second reading for Author’s Corner and gave a reading at a New York Knox Club event hosted by Marilyn Webb and John Sheedy. The reading included a mention of the very apartment in which I was reading. Virginia was with me at all times to make sure things went smoothly.

            On Wednesday (7/23) I’ll be reading from Confessions at Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville. 7:00 pm. Anderson's Bookshop Naperville | 123 W. Jefferson Ave., Naperville.

Bloomsbury, Nancy Miller

Bob, Bob Mankoff

View from Marilyn and John's

New York Knox Club event

pub day

John Crouse

Jennifer (her first book store reading ever)

Pub day (8 July) has come and gone. Great audience at Prairie Lights last night. Drove down to Iowa City from Galesburg with my old college (U of Michigan) housemate whom I hadn't seen in fifty years. (He's the one on the  left.)

Tomorrow (8 July) is pub date for THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANCES GODWIN. I'll be reading at Prairie Lights in Iowa City.

Robert Hellenga will read from The Confessions of Frances Godwin, the fictional memoir of a retired high school Latin teacher looking back on a life of trying to do her best amidst her many transgressions. From a small town in the Midwest to the Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome, The Confessions of Frances Godwin touches on the great questions of human existence: Is there something “out there” that takes an interest in us? Or is the universe ultimately indifferent?” Robert Hellenga is the author of The Sixteen Pleasures and The Fall of a Sparrow. He is a professor of English at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.

Interview about CONFESSIONS

An interview with me about The Confessions of Frances Godwin–part of WNIJ’s Summer Book Series–will be broadcast on June 27 at 6:34 am and at 8:34 am. You can hear it live on Morning Edition at www.WNIJ.org. The web posting will go live at around 6:30 am.

Three reviews of CONFESSIONS

Publishers Weekly (5/19/14)

In Hellenga’s (The Sixteen Pleasures) latest novel, a Latin scholar on the precipice of old age wistfully recounts her life—beginning in 1963, the year she and her husband “joined our bodies—if not our souls.” Francis Godwin, a lapsed Catholic and graduating senior at Knox College in Illinois (where Hellenga has taught since 1968), met Paul at a party in celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday. “Paul and I began a torrid affair—at least that’s how I thought of it at the time, though ‘torrid,’ from Latin torridus, meaning parched or scorched, — is perhaps not the right word.” Their marriage was a meeting of the minds, but also a pairing of opposites: “He loved Homer, I loved Vergil; he turned to Plato for his metaphysics, I turned to Lucretius.” In the last year of Paul’s life, their grown daughter Stella’s reprobate husband, Jimmy, wreaks havoc on their quiet lives, triggering a primal virulence within Francis unknown even to herself. Reeling from the aftershock of her impulsivity, which goes unpunished, she must reevaluate herself and her faith. The minor characters aren’t as strong as Francis, but Hellenga’s feisty and learned narrator, who travels from the Casa di Giulietta in Verona to TruckStopUSA in Ottawa, is an entertaining guide. (July)

Chicago Magazine (5/29/14)

Six Great Summer Books by Local Authors

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/June-2014/Six-Great-Summer-Reads/

The Confessions of Frances Godwin by Robert Hellenga

Bloomsbury USA (July 8)

The Galesburg, Illinois, novelist chronicles the twilight-year confessions of a widowed Latin teacher whose hernia operation prompts her to reexamine her life. In its best moments, Hellenga’s deceptively simple prose recalls that of Marilynne Robinson (Gilead).

Shelf Awareness (6/19/14)

The Confessions of Frances Godwin is told in the end-of-life recollections of widow and retired high-school Latin teacher Frances Godwin. She narrates her story in a no-nonsense, practical Midwest voice, yet faced with death and loss, she mostly wants to understand the spiritual value of her life. Despite growing up in a strong Polish Catholic farm family in Galesburg, Ill., under a matriarch who believed that homemade pierogi and a full church confession to "clean out your attic" were central to living a good life, Frances strayed from the church and fell in love with her Shakespeare professor, Paul. While attending a postgraduate Latin seminar in Rome, she met up with him and soon became pregnant with their daughter, Stella--all before Paul divorced his wife and finally married Frances. Paul's good humor and easy camaraderie with her uncles win over her suspicious mother, but Frances never quite shakes the nagging guilt over her adultery and out-of-wedlock pregnancy. When a grown Stella takes up with Jimmy, a thuggish ex-con Italian Catholic from a Milwaukee produce-distribution family, and Paul develops rapidly advancing lung cancer, Frances finds herself racking up more sins, guilt and remorse to protect her family ("I had crossed a line.... No going back. Not that there's ever any going back.... Actually, there was a way to go back. I knew the drill: contrition, confession, satisfaction. But I was in no mood to turn around").

Like his previous novels The Fall of a Sparrow and The Sixteen Pleasures, Robert Hellenga's new novel is based in the heart of the Midwest with significant interludes in the ancient cities of Italy. Both Classics scholars, Paul and Frances warm to the cadences of Romeo and Juliet in Verona, trade lines from Catullus and Shakespeare over Paul's special Parmesan lamb chops and an aged Barolo, track the constellations with a home telescope, and enjoy Chopin's études that Frances plays on their old Blüthner grand piano. Yet this is also a thoroughly Midwestern novel, with all its hog slaughtering, school plays, train whistles and truck stops. Hellenga neatly balances the pallet trucks of the wholesale produce business with the idiosyncrasies of translating the ribald poetry of Catullus. He even throws in an imagined dialogue between Frances and an irreverent God ("I have a lot of things to do. Do you have any idea how many galaxies there are, just in the visible universe?") and somehow makes it work.

The complex but homespun Frances, who genuinely wants to understand her life and live her last years well, carries the work. She sees clearly and speaks plainly when she finally confesses again after 43 years: "We're all stardust. But that's not enough. Not for me, anyway." Although the story ranges wide, The Confessions of Frances Godwin is firmly rooted in the culture and values of Hellenga's perfectly rendered Midwest.

            –Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kansas

Robert Hellenga's Midwestern widow looks back on a life of good intentions and disappointments with open eyes and hope for redemption.

                        A CHRISTMAS LETTER, Ploughshares, Spring 2014

            I was in Florence, Italy, when my father died. It was Easter Sunday and I was staying with old friends, the Marchettis, in their apartment near Piazza delle Cure, a quiet neighborhood on the north edge of town that you entered from via Faentina. We hadn’t gone into the center for the big Easter celebration, but we’d watched the dove and the exploding cart on the television.

            We were just sitting down to our first course–a rich broth thickened with egg yolks–when I got a telephone call from my sister. My sister doesn’t speak Italian, but she managed to make herself understood, and Signora Marchetti waved me to the phone in the small entrance hallway.

            “Are you ready for this?” my sister said.

            “I’m ready.”

            “Dad’s dead,” she said. “Out at the club. He fell down in the locker room. Drunk. They couldn’t rouse him. He was dead by the time they got him to the hospital.”

            “I thought they kicked him out of the club?”

            “He got reinstated. He got a lawyer and threatened to sue them.” . . .

I think this is my best story. It will be published on line by Electric Literature on June 11 and will stay on line for one week. You can read it by Googling <Electric Literature's Recommended Reading> or by just clicking.

First review of THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANCES GODWIN

The Confessions of Frances Godwin. Hellenga, Robert (Author) Jul 2014. 320 p. Bloomsbury, hardcover, $26. (9781620405499). Art conservators, college professors, avocado wholesalers, an elephant who paints, blues musicians, snakehandlers, Latin teachers, truck drivers—novelist Robert Hellenga writes about all kinds of people. His books are very different, as that list of characters’ occupations suggests, but they are similar, too, with themes reoccurring like motifs in a fugue: Italy, the nature of beauty, love found and lost, and the rhythms of daily life, which are somehow sustaining both in their intimacy and in their very ordinariness. His latest novel and one of his best, The Confessions of Frances Godwin, incorporates all of these themes while telling a story very different from anything he has done before. Hellenga, who teaches English at Knox College in downstate Illinois, is one of those writers who inspire a special kind of devotion in their readers. When two Hellenga fans encounter one another and learn of their shared enthusiasm, something happens that’s not unlike members of a secret society exchanging funny handshakes. Inevitably, the conversation turns to Hellenga’s first novel, The Sixteen Pleasures (1994), about art conservator Margo Harrington, who reappears in Philosophy Made Simple (2006) and The Italian Lover (2007). In Sixteen Pleasures, Margo is a 29-year-old woman of limited experience who travels to Florence to help with the restoration of art treasures damaged in the great floods of 1966. Living in a convent, she stumbles upon a rare volume of erotica in the convent library and subsequently tumbles into an affair with an older and supremely sophisticated Italian man. The novel is a sumptuous and sensual love story, but it’s also, as Hellenga has described it, an “occupational story,” in that the most sensual passages in the book describe Margo’s detailed, loving work on the damaged pages of the books she restores. Above all, though, the novel introduces Hellenga’s great theme of the melancholy transience of love. The lovers in Hellenga’s moving, profound novels do not live in a world of conventional happy endings. His romances often end in attenuated moments of both disappointment and tenderness, partings that have the feel not of failed relationships but of life moving on and working out as it must. The theme reappears in Snakewoman of Little Egypt (2010), about a young woman named Sunny, who grew up in a snakehandling church in Illinois’ Little Egypt area and who falls in love with an anthropology professor, Jackson, entranced by her stories of the Church of the Burning Bush with Signs Following. Jackson and Sunny dance between the “safe harbor” of their life together and “the wider sea of courage, risk, and adventure,” each teaching the other about the many forms of joie de vivre. Yes, it is a melancholy story, but it is also immensely satisfying and even uplifting in that unique way that only deeply felt life can provide. That same sense of deeply felt life pervades Hellenga’s new book. Frances Godwin is a retired highschool Latin teacher looking back at her life with her late husband, Paul, and musing over wrong turns taken and roads untraveled. With marriage and career behind her, she assumes that her life is winding down but quickly learns differently, as she comes to the aid of her daughter, trapped in an abusive marriage. What happens is shocking—the world of decisive action suddenly interrupting the quiet of a contemplative life—but it isn’t the action that drives the story but Frances’ attempts to make sense of it. She calls her story a “spiritual autobiography,” and despite being anything but pious, she engages in ongoing conversations with God, who turns out to be quite a wily fellow. Frances wants desperately to believe that “the universe itself cares,” but what if it doesn’t? That’s the question she grapples with in the most compelling of terms, never blandly abstract, always grounded in the particulars of the everyday. And it is in those particulars that Frances finally approaches some inevitably tentative answers, or what pass for answers in a world defined by change: “That’s the problem with autobiography,” she reflects. “You see a shape, you see ups and downs, conversions, turning points, reversals. But then you keep on living, . . . and every time you look down on your life, you see a different shape.” The beauty of this novel and, in fact, of all of Hellenga’s work, lies in the scrupulous attention he pays to those different shapes that life takes. Like Frances, we find in their very concreteness a way of living with the uncertainty that surrounds us. Theresa Collier | Publicist| Bloomsbury

Unsung Heroes of Literature

Just came across this item in The New Yorker, 20 December 2004, p. 138. The "Unsung Heroes of Literature":

The Phone Book,
The Mail-Order Catalogue,
The Lease,
The Takeout Menu,
The Computer Handbook.

I can't think of any others.

Blurbs for THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANCES GODWIN

Bloomsbury

Publication date: 8 July 2014

I stayed up all night with Robert Hellenga’s beguiling schoolteacher-murderer and her talkative God, and will now re-read at leisure to savor this author’s usual grace notes: music, recipes, learning, philosophy, and travel.  The Confessions of Frances Godwin is Hellenga’s most audacious fling at just about everything in our culture. 

                                                — Gail Godwin, author of Flora

Robert Hellenga is a great storyteller and a most elegant writer. The Confessions of Frances Godwin is a page-turner that made me want to linger on the page.

                                                — Hilma Wolitzer, author of An Available Man

As enjoyable as it is profound, The Confessions of Francis Godwin, tackles our most unanswerable questions as only a novel can - not by answering them but by exploring the reasons why we ask in the first place. What did I know for sure? Francis asks herself after a long life. What insights could I count on? This is the sort of rare book where the familiar starts to look brand new, and a reader comes to understand that faith is as much about how one sees as it is about what one believes.

                                                — Peter Orner, author The Last Car Over Sagamore Bridge

The Confessions of Frances Godwin” is a journey towards the spiritual by way of the sensual: good food, music, poetry, and one amazing sports car. It’s a wonderful ride, with some unexpected and lovely detours.”

                                                — Jean Thompson, author of The Humanity Project

EPITAPHS

            About a month ago I received a letter from a woman whose book club had been discussing The Fall of a Sparrow. Everyone was pleased with the fact that my protagonist, Woody, had recovered from the tragedy of his daughter’s death in a terrorist bombing in Italy and had gotten on with his life. But they were distressed by the epitaph he chose for his daughter’s tombstone.

            The original epitaph, which Woody’s wife had chosen, was la sua voluntade è nostra pace, a line from Dante (“His will is our peace”).

            Woody had the stone sanded down and reinscribed with the following epitaph:

contra vim veneris

non herbam inveneris,

contra vim mortis

non crescat herba in hortis.

Against the strength of love

You will find no herb;

Against the strength of death

No herb grows in the garden.

I like this epitaph because I think it tells the truth without being morbid, but in a later novel, The Italian Lover, Woody’s wife, as she lies dying in a convent, persuades Woody to change it to “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.”

            Last week I received another letter:

Dear Professor Hellenga,

I just wanted you to know how pleasantly surprised I was to receive your letter. When I shared its contents with my book club, it sparked another lively discussion about which of the three epitaphs each of us would pick and why.

As a seventy-year-old woman who has been battling ovarian cancer for the last ten years, my choice was, “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” To me, it not only means that things happen when they are supposed to but also that every life, no matter how small, has meaning. And besides, it takes us full circle back to the title of your book. (I must tell you, however, that there were others in the group that sided with you and Woody!)

Thank you so much for taking the time to share the information regarding the original source of Woody’s selection for Cookie’s inscription, as well as his motivation for choosing it. It was interesting that it came from Bernice Fox, the very person that you were honoring with your lecture on the date (March 3^rd) I received your letter.

Best wishes in all your future endeavors. I will periodically check the shelves t Barnes and Noble for anything new under the “H”s.a

Sincerely,

A Christmas Letter (Ploughshares)

 

           Here's an entry that I wrote in my journal on 24 October 2009:

           "You don’t feel like it, but you’ve got to keep writing. You were telling George about your father’s letter. He said, ‘good short story.’ Why not? Combine with 'I was in Italy when my father died.'”

           Even so, it's a work of fiction.

 

Hellenga's Literary Life

Hellenga’s Literary Life

Accomplished novelist and former professor reflects on ups and downs of writing career

By Charlie Megenity, Editor-in-chief

February 12, 2014

When Robert Hellenga was on his second trip to Italy in 1989, he got an encouraging letter from his agent: a publishing deal for his debut novel “The Sixteen Pleasures” was expected by the time he returned stateside.

But for the next five years, he was met with nothing but rejection.

Hellenga recalls some generalities from the marketing suits at 39 publishers — all of whom turned down the chance to print his first novel.

“It won’t sell enough.”

“Nobody would be happy.”

“It’s a quiet novel.”

But Hellenga, then in his third decade as a professor of classical and Renaissance literature at Knox College, had no intention of giving up creative writing. By that time, he was already hooked.

Finally, in 1994, a small New York publishing company — Soho — picked up “The Sixteen Pleasures.” And soon thereafter, the tale of a 29-year-old book conservationist named Margot, who discovers in a Florentine convent the only known copy of a rare, Renaissance-era pornographic work, was launched to national bestseller status.

Two decades later, as the novel still sits on bookstore shelves and first editions are considered rare books, Hellenga keeps on writing. Though he no longer teaches at Knox, he has been met with widespread success since “Sixteen Pleasures” was first published. A 20th anniversary release of the debut book is in the works and Hellenga has 2010’s critically-acclaimed “Snakewoman of Little Egypt” under his belt, with a seventh novel set for release this July.

“Snakewoman” generated plenty of buzz at Knox in 2010, especially after it made the Washington Post’s list of top 25 novels that year. Succinctly put by the Post tagline, it’s the story of “a darling anthropologist (who meets) a lady convict who shot her snake-handling husband.”

There are “three reasons to love Hellenga,” according to a Kirkus review. “He’s a fine storyteller; he gives us new eyes; he restores our sense of wonder. Attention must be paid.”

Hellenga is now a professor emeritus for distinguished service to the college, a largely honorary title recognizing his accomplishments as a professor. He is also Knox’s writer-in-residence, and it shows. In all, the college archives hold about five large cartons of notes, composition books and manuscripts with his name on them.

But Hellenga never imagined himself a fiction writer before Knox.

“I just thought we already had enough good fiction, and I didn’t really feel the need to produce any more,” Hellenga said. He started at Knox in 1968 while finishing his Ph.D. in English at Princeton University, at a time when Knox’s creative writing program, spearheaded by Professor of English Robin Metz, was taking off.

“Everyone seemed to make a fuss over students’ stories, so I thought, ‘Maybe I could do that and people would make a fuss over me.’”

So Hellenga started small. He sat in on Metz’s creative writing courses. He got a couple of short stories published. That turned into a $5,000 grant from the Illinois Arts Council. And after a few applications, he was appointed director of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest program in Florence in 1982 and 1983.

“That was a life-changing experience,” Hellenga said. He moved to Florence with his wife, Virginia, and their three daughters. He took intensive Italian language courses and has returned periodically. “In a way, that became my material.”

And in that way, every part of Hellenga’s life becomes his material. Most of his novels have some connection to Italy. In “The Sixteen Pleasures,” Margot, the book conservationist, is modeled after one of Hellenga’s daughters. Margot used to work at the Newberry Library in Chicago, where Hellenga directed the ACM program earlier in his Knox tenure.

Metz sees plenty of Knox in Hellenga’s work. “I think there’s value in that a lot of the work has been roughly about the Knox community,” Metz said. “I’m a firm believer in writers drawing out of their own experience.”

Robert Hellenga, Knox’s distinguished writer-in-residence, plays a blues song in his Seminary Street apartment Sunday, Feb. 2. Hellenga, a retired literature professor, has had a successful fiction writing career over the last two decades. (Charlie Megenity/TKS)

Every novel reflects Hellenga’s love of music.

“It’s hard for me to imagine a character who doesn’t play the guitar,” said Hellenga, himself a seasoned blues guitarist. “When I move toward things that feel like an emotional center, I keep coming back to the same things, like the blues. Country blues is so important to me. It’s just hard not to include it.”

Hellenga sees danger in repetition, though, and he’s trying to “branch out.” Though he has moved away from writing the guitar into his novels, instruments still play a pivotal role: the Snakewoman plays the harmonica, and the protagonist in the forthcoming “Confessions of Frances Godwin” plays the piano.

This is not to say that every aspect of his novels has a personal connection. For instance, “The Sixteen Pleasures” revolves around a rare work of Renaissance-era pornography, which includes 16 sexually explicit engravings accompanied by the pornographic sonnets of Pietro Aretino, an Italian Renaissance writer. (For obvious reasons, most copies were destroyed by the Catholic Church.)

“I didn’t find the drawings very appealing, and I thought the poems were mostly disgusting,” Hellenga said. “But in my novel, Margot finds it pretty mind-blowing.”

Still, Hellenga’s tendency to write his own experiences into his novels stems from his ideas about what literature should be. For him, literature is about the reading experience, not the act of interpretation.

“I don’t mean you shouldn’t ask interpretive questions, but I don’t re-read Anna Karenina because I forgot what it meant. It’s a certain kind of experience,” Hellenga said, hearkening to a passage in “Sixteen Pleasures.”

“He doesn’t believe in talking too much about art, especially while you’re looking at it,” Hellenga writes in the debut novel, through the voice of Margot. “The pressure to appreciate is the great enemy of actual enjoyment. Most people don’t know what they like because they feel obligated to like so many different things. They feel they’re supposed to be overwhelmed, so instead of looking, they spend their time thinking up something to say, something intelligent, or at least clever.”

As Knox’s distinguished writer-in-residence, Hellenga writes from his own residence, a spacious Seminary Street apartment above Chez Willy’s. There, he lives with his wife, now a retired Latin professor at Monmouth College and part-time substitute teacher for Galesburg schools.

The open living area in the apartment includes the kitchen, creating a space for lively visits from his daughters and their families, who are now scattered throughout Illinois. Bookshelves occupy the space that might otherwise be occupied by a television. Simone, Hellenga’s aging black lab, is never far from his side.

Hellenga, with his dog Simone at his Seminary Street apartment. (Courtesy of Robert Hellenga)

Though he has seen major success as a writer, Hellenga misses the daily life of teaching at Knox. Hearing issues have kept him out of the classroom in recent years. Still, he offers one big piece of advice to Knox’s aspiring writers.

“Be open to surprises at every step of the way, even in revising,” Hellenga said. “Don’t think everything is set. Let something percolate up from the subconscious and take you by surprise.”

“I think you need to surprise yourself if you want to surprise the reader.”

I asked Hellenga if he imagines a point at which he would stop writing.

“Been thinking about it, actually,” Hellenga said. “I worry about repeating myself, but now I’ve reached a turning point in a new project. So I’m eager to get up in the morning and keep working on it.”

“There’s still a lot of room to discover things.”

Advanced Reading Copies

First-pass galleys for The Confessions of Frances Godwin came last week. I read them and my wife read them, and we found some embarrassing mistakes, but not too many, and not too embarrassing. The worst thing was that I misremembered several things about Verona. I had Frances sitting in Piazza Signori looking up at the Scaligere Tombs, which are not in fact in the piazza. Hard to sort it out even with my guidebooks.

But now the advanced reading copies have arrived. The cover is so lovely I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't want to say something nice about this novel. Here's a photo.

(I could get these into a single photo but I couldn't figure out how to rotate it. Any suggestions? I imported it to iPhoto and rotated it, but when I posted it here, it was the wrong way.)

Fox Lecture: Confessions of a Fictional Classicist

Maxine Kumin

10 February 2014

   I was very sorry to learn of the death of Maxine Kumin. Marilyn Webb sent the link to NYT obituary. Maxine spent four weeks at Knox a few years ago (quite a few) and  ate dinner with us several times. At that time we’d been thinking about remodeling the kitchen in our old house. We didn’t raise the subject, but Maxine said, “How nice to eat in an old-fashioned, unreconstructed kitchen.” I wrote to her later telling her that she’d saved us a lot of money. Our daughter and her family live in the house now, but the kitchen is still unreconstructed.

   I wrote to Maxine last August after hearing her voice on NPR and seeing her poem, “Xanthopia,” in The New Yorker. She responded right away: Dear Bob: “Hearing from you was a happy surprise. I imagine seeing the poem in the New Yorker reassured you that I am still alive, which is a surprise to me too. I think that is my last poem. I added it to my final book of poems which is coming from Norton next April, titled And Short the Season, drawn from Brittle Beauty, a sonnet by Henry Howard Earl of Surrey.”

   She also commiserated us on the death of the two dogs that were living with us when she visited.

Contra vim veneris,

Non herbam inveneris;

Contra vim mortis,

Non crescit herba in hortis.