Thaddeus Rutkowski in conversation with JOHN WISNIEWSKI
Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of seven books, including the poetry collection Tricks of Light (great weather for MEDIA, 2020). His novel Haywire won the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s members’ choice award, and his memoir Guess and Check won the Electronic Literature bronze award for multicultural fiction. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, as well as in Copper Nickel, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Faultline, Fiction, Fiction International, Pleaides, Potomac Review, Sou’wester, and many other magazines. He lives with his wife, Randi Hoffman, in Manhattan.
John Wisniewski: Thad, your latest collection of poems, Tricks of Light, has been published. Could you tell us what inspired these poems?
Thaddeus Rutkowski: These poems were inspired by my experiences over the past year or so. My mother hasn’t been well, and I’ve visited her fairly often. Sometimes my wife and daughter have accompanied me to central Pennsylvania. Those visits reminded me of my childhood—of rural scenes—and of my brother, who passed recently.
Otherwise, the poems came from my life in the city. I live in Manhattan and teach in Brooklyn, and I ride my bike to class. The ride is about ten miles round trip. On those rides, there is nothing to do except pedal and look (I don’t listen to music). So I spot things as I go over Williamsburg Bridge; I interact with drivers and other riders. I’ve been hit (gently) by a cab, honked at by a steamroller, and called “Papi” by more than one driver.
I have also written poems that are meditations on states of mind: fear, anger, curiosity, and so on. Writing about these concerns is a way to bring order or calm to hard times.
John Wisniewski: In these poems, you make references to Buddha. Are you a spiritual person?
Thaddeus Rutkowski: The references to Buddha might signal a desire to be spiritual. I believe my mother is a spiritual person, though she says she is an atheist. She grew up Christian—in a YMCA in China, where her father was a Baptist minister. But there were more Buddhists, and Buddhist monks, around her than there were Christians. She could hear monks chanting in the hills, and she knew their stories and lessons. She also learned the proverbs of Confucius, which she applied to her own family when she had children of her own. One was "You can’t argue with a mad dog." There was a mad dog in our house, and it wasn’t my mother.
More recently, I had the opportunity to visit East Asia (Hong Kong and Singapore), and during each visit I went with my family to a Buddhist temple. Seeing the carvings and gardens, eating food with the monks, smelling the incense, and hearing the chanted prayers gave me a hint as to what the religion is about. Whenever I see a Buddhist shrine, even a small one, in our neighborhood (we live near Manhattan’s Chinatown), I stop for a second and take notice.
John Wisniewski: Can we talk about the republication of Haywire, Thad? What inspired you to write the book? It tells of your early days.
Thaddeus Rutkowski: The reissue of my novel Haywire came about when the original publisher, Starcherone, shut down. Blue Streak, a small press in Brooklyn, re-released the book last year. The novel is made up of forty-nine flash fictions, each about five pages long. All of the pieces are told in the same voice, and they span a lifetime, from childhood to present day. The first part of the book covers early years, my life in rural Pennsylvania.
The writing was inspired by the emotions that one—anyone—feels during childhood. In my case, I wanted to belong to a community but was unable to belong. This inability came partly from me: I was not encouraged to see myself as “American,” since my mother is Asian. And it was hard for me to identify as Asian, because there were no Asians, other than my mother, around. So this otherness has stuck with me, and I draw on it to tell stories based on how things went.
John Wisniewski:. What was it like to read in the home of the former East German president Erich Honecker?
Thaddeus Rutkowski: In the mid-1990s, I read with a group of six New York poets in the former East Berlin. The readings took place in the compound of former East German president Erich Honecker, not in his actual house. We read in the home of a former state official on a semicircular street with guard posts at each end, and we stayed in a Soviet-style hotel meant for diplomats. The hotel had large rooms, high ceilings, and big bathtubs. The rooms were chilly in November; we joked that Berlin was like Siberia then.
The house we read in had been renamed the Literaturwerkstatt, or Literature Workshop, and it was basically a modern, two-story ranch house. The living room had been set up with a mic and speakers, and folding chairs. We read there, with a German translator.
I sensed that people in the former East Germany were hungry for Western culture. The Wall had come down, and there was free travel, but not a major exchange, between the two sides. My work apparently was part of Western culture, though I didn’t consider myself pop or MTV or anything like that. In hindsight, I wish I’d brought more books or poetry CDs, because people were curious about such things.
John Wisniewski: You have written a creative memoir called Guess and Check. Could you tell us about writing this?
Thaddeus Rutkowski: Guess and Check is similar to my earlier books Roughhouse, Tetched, and Haywire in that it consists of short prose pieces told in the same voice. I would have called Guess and Check a book of fiction, but the publisher, Gival Press, saw it as creative nonfiction.
I wrote the pieces as I did the stories in those earlier books—not in order, but as I fastened on a topic. There are a couple of actual essays in this “memoir”—pieces that ran in newspapers and contain helpful facts about where I was, who I was with, what we did. There’s an essay about encountering wild monkeys in Hong Kong with my wife and daughter, and another essay about how my wife acquired a pet turtle, a red-eared slider, for our apartment in New York. (The turtle, named Mystic, is doing fine.)
John Wisniewski: Could you tell us about writing Tetched and Roughhouse?
Thaddeus Rutkowski: I wrote Roughhouse (1999) and Tetched (2005) by dredging up memories and putting them in words. These memories were often visual or aural: images in dreams or reality, or overheard as snippets of conversation. I also wrote about what was happening in the present. Visiting the rural place where I grew up, losing a partner, finding a partner, repeating the routines of office work—all triggered the bits that came together into these manuscripts.
The writing wasn’t fast; it was sporadic. Those two books took a combined eighteen years to produce. There were times of not being able to see the whole picture, of having the pieces of a puzzle that didn’t fit together. There were times of asking myself, “What do I do with these pieces? How do I put them together?”
John Wisniewski: What will your next book be about, Thad?
Thaddeus Rutkowski: I think my next book will be a collection of flash fictions, but hopefully it will be something more than a collection. I’ve been gathering short prose pieces and arranging them in what I hope will be a linked sequence. Sound familiar? It’s what I’ve done with my earlier books Roughhouse, Tetched, and Haywire. My book Violent Outbursts was different; it was a collection of unlinked short prose pieces, most of them begun as exercises with my workshop students.
My next project is to look at all of these new prose bits and make something larger out of them. The process will require weeding, adding, and rearranging. Somehow, it’ll work out.
John Wisniewski: What was your finest moment as a poet and author?
Thaddeus Rutkowski: The finest moments are those times when I connect with an audience, through the printed page or through a live reading or performance. This whole process has to do with sharing some feeling or insight with another person, or with a number of other people. I don’t mean to be new agey about it, but the craft is just a means of making that connection.
Since we are talking during the current health crisis, it’s hard to look at fine moments when everyone is basically submerged. I’m happy to get a couple of hours between my distance teaching and my distance copy editing to do my creative work. When I push ahead and put something down in words, that’s a good moment.