Starting From Paterson by Garret Keizer, Eastover Press, 222 pages, $28.99. For more than 40 years, writer Garret Keizer and his wife, Kathy, have lived in an 1832 farmhouse on a dirt road in Sutton. But in a certain spiritual sense, home for Keizer will always be in and around Paterson, N.J., a former mill town and the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution. In his latest volume of essays, Starting From Paterson, out on Tuesday, June 16, Keizer traces his mature preoccupations — including, but not limited to, organized labor, God and married life — back to their north Jersey roots. The essays in Keizer’s 10th book have two organizing principles: They’re all somehow connected to the greater Paterson area, and they all mention Kathy, whom he started dating when they were both teenagers. He writes with unsentimental tenderness about their courtship — at one point, they both worked in a plastics factory — and his future father-in-law, Walt, a man of unfailing hospitality and humor who packaged his trash for the garbageman as if it were a Christmas present. He also writes about his grandmother Florence, who loved giving little gifts and riding the bus, and the Dutch Reformed church of his adolescence, where he honed his contrarian tendencies. Even if the pieces in this collection are parochial by definition, their concerns are anything but. An essay on the Price Chopper in St. Johnsbury, for example, becomes a meditation on capitalism, morality and impermanence after he discovers that the chickpeas have been moved to a different aisle. “[I]f you’re desegregating a school system in Little Rock, Arkansas, or closing an internment camp in Guantanamo Bay, change is good,” he writes. He later concludes: “But if all you’re doing by effecting a change is making it harder for people to find chickpeas, I’m not sure change is good.” In one way or another, Keizer’s work interrogates what it means to be and do good. A 2006 Guggenheim fellowship recipient, he has written poetry, fiction and nonfiction on a huge range of subjects — religion, anger, his experience as a public school teacher in the Northeast Kingdom, the phenomenon of noise. Among many other places, he’s been published in the New Yorker, Lapham’s Quarterly, Mother Jones and Harper’s Magazine, where he is also a contributing editor. Keizer speaks in unnervingly complete sentences, and he is manifestly kind. On a recent Wednesday, I met him in his driveway; to keep his private life private, he’d politely explained, he doesn’t conduct interviews inside his house. We set out in his Subaru Forester for the West Burke village green, where he unfolded a couple of lawn chairs for us in the shade. “If we’re lucky, there’s a young fellow who will stand in the middle of the park and play his bagpipes,” he said. We didn’t get lucky in the bagpipe department, but the blackflies mercifully kept their distance as we talked. What’s the significance of Paterson for you? How has being from there, or from around there, shaped your sensibilities? Paterson formed the hub of my geographical place in my imaginative universe when I was young. Even though I love where I live — and I’m going to be buried here, and I don’t want to live anywhere else — I’ve sometimes said I’m not so much a Vermont writer as a New Jersey writer-in-exile. I’m not so much a Vermont writer as a New Jersey writer-in-exile.Garret Keizer When I go back to New Jersey and I go into a diner and hear people’s voices, there’s something in me that says, “This is where you belong.” Part of it is not so much geography as class. I feel at home with working-class people. When we had some work done on our garage, the carpenter happened to be from Jersey, and my wife would tease me and say, “You want to go out and play with the boys and hang out and watch the heavy equipment.” Well, I do. There’s more of a union culture in New Jersey, although Vermont has some great labor history, too. I’ve got an essay in the collection called “Labor’s Schoolhouse,” about the 1913 silk mill strike in New Jersey, and at roughly the same time, the granite workers in Barre were striking with some of the same agitation, some of the same politics. I wonder sometimes if I don’t enjoy being the guy from New Jersey in Vermont, and the guy from Vermont in New Jersey. Which is part of just being human, I guess, and probably doesn’t hurt us, as long as we don’t fall in love with our own roles or use them as a cover for dishonesty. Many of the essays in Starting From Paterson recount experiences from your childhood and teenage years. How do you avoid imposing your adult self on your recollections of your younger self? Well, you don’t — or not completely. Your question reminds me of a story of a Chinese philosopher who asked a centipede how it managed 100 legs in such perfect coordination, and the centipede said, “Well, that’s easy. Let me tell you.” And as the centipede started to explain, it became so twisted up that it never walked again. This is not to belittle your question. I say this to explain that I’m not sure I can articulate any “how” to what I do. I don’t think I could lose my current perspective even if I wanted to. I can do that a little bit, but I’m egocentric enough that I don’t lose the “I” who’s writing those essays when I’m seeing through the eyes of that child that I was. I’m usually not spending much time thinking about that, to be honest. I’m spending more time struggling with the sentence I’m writing and then interrogating it afterward. What’s the relationship between the “I” in your first-person essays and the “I” off the page, the guy across from me in this lawn chair? There are ways that, on the page, I may even be more myself than I am in a casual encounter, because I say things in print that I wouldn’t necessarily say at a table. That doesn’t mean I’m not inhibited to some extent. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t some things I’m holding back because I don’t want readers to know them, or because it’s a sentiment that I think doesn’t conduce to the reader’s well-being. I think when you stop struggling with that, you’re probably in a bad place. You taught English for 15 years at Lake Region Union High School in Orleans. How did being a teacher impact your writing life? On the one hand, it was a great impediment to my writing life, because I took the teaching life seriously, and an English teacher doesn’t have a whole lot of spare time to do much writing, although I did write in the summers. But on the other hand, it gave me material for two books [the memoirs No Place but Here: A Teacher’s Vocation in a Rural Community and Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher], and it also helped me by acquainting me with many people’s lives, the conditions they lived and worked under. And in the process of trying to help my students write better, I learned a lot about writing. Anything that you want to know well, try to teach it to somebody else. I owe a real debt to my students and to the community. I wrote my first book on a sabbatical from the Lake Region School District. This is a tough, working-class community. How many farmers get a year off at three-quarter pay to write a book about milking cows? [The school district] gave that to me. That was my first grant. Do you have any particular writing routines? The routine involves me getting to write as soon as possible. In good weather, I find it harder to go round the clock, unless I have a piece that’s due. By afternoon, I’m ready to get outside and do physical work — although I’ve actually discovered that my writing is served well by physical work. I get some of my best ideas with a tool in my hand. What is the job of an essayist? This is a world of a lot of pain and a lot of loneliness, and I think any writing in any genre, at its best, will help reduce the amount of loneliness — and maybe, too, find words that express the joy. Many times, a writer will hear someone say, “You know, I’ve felt that. I just couldn’t have said it that way,” or “I went through something just like that. But you say it so much better.” So maybe you’re performing a service: writing a love letter to the world for someone else. ➆ This interview was edited for clarity and length. The post Garret Keizer’s New Essay Collection Is a Return to His Roots appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less