Q&A: Polish-American Author John Guzlowski

Author John Guzlowski

Dear readers, you are in for a treat today.

Polish-American author John Guzlowski joined me for a Q&A that I’m sure you will love. Since he retired from teaching college literature and creative writing in 2005, he has published eight books of poetry and six novels. He is also a columnist for the oldest Polish daily newspaper in the United States, Dziennik Zwiazkowy.

John's work is heavily inspired by his parents' experiences during World War II and his life as a Polish immigrant to the United States. His work is powerful, poignant, and purposeful—giving a voice to his family and his heritage.

I first met John a few years ago at a local writers critique group and have crossed paths with him at author events. Recently, I read his novel Retreat: A Love Story, which is inspired by his mother’s experiences during World War II. Thank you, John, for answering my questions!

Q&A with John Guzlowski

When did you first begin writing literature and poetry?

As far as I can remember, I’ve been writing at least since I was in third grade. The teacher showed us a poem by Joyce Kilmer called “Trees,” and I fell in love with it. I memorized it and wrote poems that looked just like it. The same stanzas, the same rhyme scheme. 

When I was about 12, I started writing other things. I was reading a lot of comic books and science fiction, and I tried to write stuff like that. I even tried drawing a comic strip about a superhero. The first thing I ever published was a fantasy short-story called “A Perhaps Fairy Tale.” It appeared in a comic book fan journal called Spa-Fon. It contained work by some of the best comic artists of the ‘60s.

My writing never stopped. It just changed. In college, outside of my writing for literature classes, I focused primarily on writing poems and letters. Both were influenced by the Beat writers, Kerouac and Ginsberg. The writing was about the crazy life I was leading as a hippie, beat, comic-collecting, hitchhiking college student. 

Toward the end of my college years in 1979, when I was finishing up my PhD dissertation, I started writing poems about my parents and their experiences in World War II. My dad spent five years in a concentration camp and my mom spent three years as a slave laborer in Germany after seeing the women in her family killed by the Germans.

That was my primary subject for probably the next 20 years—when I wasn’t writing and publishing academic critical essays about writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer, Thomas Pynchon, and John Barth.

When I retired from teaching in 2005, a weird thing happened to my writing. Not only did I abandon academic critical writing, I started writing novels. Since then, I’ve finished six novels and eight books of poetry. Also, since 2018, I’ve been writing a column for the oldest Polish newspaper in America.

I seem to always be writing, but the writing changes: poems become stories become letters become academic essays become poems become novels and become newspaper columns.

As both an accomplished author and poet, how do you decide whether a piece is better suited to poetry or prose?

I really don’t know how I decide. When the muse speaks to me and sticks an image or a phrase in my brain, I start writing. Sometimes the writing becomes a poem and sometimes it becomes prose. Sometimes I take the poem and turn it into prose, and sometimes I take the prose and turn it into a poem. 

My novel Retreat: A Love Story is a good example. It started as a sonnet about the day the Germans came to my mother’s farm. In the sonnet’s last line, a German soldier is about to open the door to her farmhouse. Right at that point, I thought, “What happens next?” and I started writing prose, and the prose went on for hours and hours and then pages and pages until I had a novel. 

Much of your work centers on the Polish-American experience and World War II, particularly Nazi Germany and its impact on Poland and your family. What first drew you to explore these deeply personal themes in your writing?

It was my father. After five years in a concentration camp and six years in a refugee camp after the war, he was living with what would now be called PTSD, and he could not stop telling me about what he saw. 

When I was a kid, 5 years old, he would sit down at a table with me and start telling me about the terrible things he saw. He would talk about his friends he saw killed by the German soldiers, the priests shot and left to die in the roads, the women who had their breasts torn off with bayonets. He didn’t care if I was 5 or 10 or 30 or 50. He had to tell me these stories. When he was dying in 1997, 42 years after the war, he told me about a friend of his who was castrated and then crucified in Buchenwald concentration camp for smiling at a German woman. Nothing could stop my dad from sharing these stories.

When I first started writing about my parents’ war experiences, many of the poems were based on the stories my dad told me of his experiences and my mom’s experiences. It was only after my dad’s death that my mom started telling me about her experiences.  

Let me also say that after my years reading relatively impersonal sci fi and comic books, my reading focused pretty much on poems and novels that were very personal. Kerouac and the Beats led me in that direction, and then my creative writing teachers in college did the same. 

When I taught creative writing for 35 years in the university, personal writing was what I always encouraged. I told students to make a list of the ten things that were most painful or most joyful to them and to write about them.

Several of your books focus on your parents’ experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany. How did writing about their stories shape or change your relationship with them?

They both thought that their stories needed to be told. When my mother saw my first book of poems about their experiences in the war, she wept. Later, when I would do a poetry reading based on my book of poems about my parents, my mom often would remind me to tell the listeners that my parents weren’t the only ones to experience such grief in the war. I believe that my mom and dad both felt I was speaking for all those millions and millions who died in World War II. I was their voice.

I still feel this way. I recently published a book of columns that I’d written for a Polish newspaper here in the U.S.  Many of the columns are about my parents and coming to America. Writing them I felt like I was sitting with my dad and my mom again talking with them about our experiences as immigrants. When I recently gave a reading based on those columns, I felt that I was again speaking for my parents and telling the world about the horrors the war produced in so many civilians.

While reading Retreat, I was struck by the vivid detail and depth of research. Could you share a bit about your research process for historical fiction? Were there particular conversations or visits that stood out to you during your research?

The process is pretty straight forward. I’ve done a lot of reading about the war. I especially like memoirs, personal recollections about what the war was like. I’ve read memoirs by Poles, Germans, Brits, French people, Italians, Russians, and Americans. 

When I was writing Retreat I sometimes felt like I was writing a memoir. The reading I’ve done helped me recreate the world I was describing in Retreat. 

Another major part of the research process for me involved Google searches. There was a lot of stuff that I didn’t know and that I needed to know when I was writing the novel. I found Google a great source for information about what specific conditions were like in specific places that appear in the novel.

Google also helps me a lot in writing my Hank and Marvin mystery novels. The novels are all set in Chicago in the years I lived there, but my memory is sketchy, and there are things that I just don’t know about the city, its politics, its neighborhoods, its history. Often when a question about that kind of stuff appears while I’m writing I immediately go to Google. This morning, for example, I was working on a chapter of my sixth Hank and Marvin novel. I needed the name of a specific hotel in a specific neighborhood of Chicago in 1995. Google was there immediately.

What advice would you give to writers who want to tell family stories but aren’t sure how to begin?

Earlier I mentioned making a list of the most painful and/or joyful moments in your life. I think that’s a good place to start. What was the happiest thing that happened? What was the most painful? 

Pick a moment and tell me about it.

Start by telling me where you were sitting or standing. If it’s a poem, do it in a line or two. If it’s prose, make it a paragraph. 

Then write the thing out and find someone to read it to. 

When you’re reading it, do you feel the happiness or the pain again. If not, think about what you can add to help you feel that. Then add it and keep writing and writing. 

Are you currently working on any new projects or upcoming works you’d like to share?

I’m working on the sixth Hank and Marvin novel. The series follows them from when they are young cops in their 20s to old retired detectives in their 70s. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the novel. I think it will be my last novel. I’m 77 years old now and will probably be 78 when I finish the novel, and then it will probably be another 2 years before it gets published. 

The idea of starting another novel doesn’t appeal to me. I can’t imagine waiting until I’m 85 to see the thing published. 

Other projects?

I’m still writing a column for the Polish newspaper in Chicago. I’ve been doing it since August 2018. When I started writing the columns, I did one a week. Since then I’ve slowed down. I’m probably doing a column every two or three weeks. I write about my life in Chicago when I was a kid, the Polish and Polish American writers I love, politics, the traveling I’m doing, and the bits and pieces of my life. This week I wrote a column about a billboard I saw on the road to Roanoke a few days ago. The billboard said, “JESUS IS NOT GOD!” This freaked me out, and I did some research about the religious ministry that put up the sign.  I enjoy this kind of writing and hope to continue it. It reminds me of when I was a kid in high school and teachers would have me writing about all kinds of crazy things that I knew nothing about.

I’m also still writing poems. I doubt if I will ever stop writing poems. I’ve published eight books of poems so far, and I’m working on at least three others. One is a book of poems about Franz Kafka. A couple of years ago I read two great biographies of Kafka, and while reading them I started writing poems in which I imagined him doing stuff he never did: going to Starbucks for coffee with me, climbing up Mount Fuji in Japan, sitting in Hell with Dante and me and talking about the meaning of life.

Strangely, I’ve also started writing poems about doors. One day I was going through a stack of my old poems and I noticed that about ten featured doors. It got me thinking it would be fun to write more door poems. So far I have about 35. I hope to get to 102. That’s going to be the title of the book, 102 Doors.

Other projects? 

Come back tomorrow and ask me.

What I always told my creative writing students was “Never stop writing.”

And I don’t plan to.    

---

You can find John on Facebook and learn more about him and his work on his blog. His books are available on Amazon.