Photos courtesy of FSG Books, Picador

July 4, 2004
Chicago author’s life, stories flavored by faith

When the Chicago Public Library announced that it had chosen Stuart Dybek’s “Coast of Chicago” as the One Book, One Chicago selection for spring 2004, it was calling on a product of Chicago’s neighborhoods. The book, originally published in 1990 and re-issued in paperback by Picador in March, is a collection of connected short stories about Little Village in the mid-20th century, as the neighborhood began its transformation from an Eastern European to a Mexican enclave, where the church spires that rise above the homes still define place for many residents.

Dybek, 62, attended St. Roman and St. Procopius schools and St. Rita High School before earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Loyola University Chicago. Now teaching at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, he still follows the Chicago news, he said. He talked by phone with staff writer Michelle Martin about how the pervasive presence of the church has affected his life and work.

 

The Catholic New World: You grew up in an environment where it seemed like there was a church every couple of blocks. How did that affect you?

Stuart Dybek: It affected me in a number of ways. If they haven’t experienced it, people, when they hear you come from Chicago, think that you came “from Chicago,” that your experience was that of the entire city. But mostly people growing up in the city, especially if they’re coming from a working-class or lower-income community, don’t experience the city. What they experience is their particular neighborhood. It’s very parochial, and remains so to this day.

The churches every couple of blocks … later became significant to me in terms of images. Because we weren’t in view of the vertical density of downtown, those churches conveyed the meaning that spires were supposed to convey. The spires were not dwarfed by high-rises. The spires were still the tallest thing in the neighborhood. All the subliminal messages that a church is supposed to give, in terms of what the architecture is telling you, were conveyed in a way that gets distorted when the proportions of a city are thrown off by the enormous skyscrapers that dwarf everything.

This was a neighborhood in which a three-story building was tall. There were a lot of bungalows, a lot of two-flats and sunken front yards, and you had these spires kind of towering over everything. That old-faith message was there.

 

TCNW: What was that old-faith message?

SD: For me, the message of the spire is the message of transcendence. What the spire is saying is that when you come into these doors off that street, with its backfiring bread trucks and Schlitz beer deliveries and kids playing stickball and all kinds of profanity being hollered and jokes being made—just by stepping through these doors you’ve entered another dimension. I think for me as a writer, I became a kind of doorway writer. In a lot of my stories and poems, what constantly happens is the characters step through a doorway, from the profane to the spiritual, from the ordinary to the non-ordinary, from the present to the past.

Another thing that those churches kind of symbolized was that whole long tradition that kind of bound you to the European tradition, and all those things that you would study in class about martyrs and Rome and all that. The language was still Latin, and when you stepped in you had all these figures dressed in old robes and the sunlight was filtering in through stained glass windows with scenes from 2,000 years ago. … Entering a church was entering a time machine, and the smells and all the sensual messages—incense, candlelight—were saying you’re entering a different realm, and the realm was in part flavored by the past.

 

TCNW: In a lot of ways, literature does the same thing, bringing the reader into a different world. Do you consciously try to create a different world for your readers?

SD: To me, that’s just as important if not more important than creating the story itself. You can create an interesting story with car chases and people being killed and having huge wild romances or whatever, but for me, without creating the context of the world in which all this is going on, it’s one-dimensional. All the resonances of the story, its secret meanings, the shadows that it throws, all that is coming from the dimension of the experience of the world you’re creating.

 

TCNW: What do you want your readers to understand about the world you create for them?

SD: Understand about it? I think my first desire is that they experience it, and that most of my energy goes into making it sensual and tactile, so that the experience occurs. Literature is the most abstract of the arts, so my energy is always trying to make it approximate the other, less abstract arts, like music or painting. Those all really operate first and foremost on a sensual level. The world I’m trying to get them to experience is a world that’s got a lot of contradictions in it, the sacred and profane being only one of them. The contradiction between minority culture and mainstream culture is another. One aim is to give the reader an experience that the daily, the ordinary, what goes on in one’s backyard, can be exotic.

At the same time, I also want the reader who hasn’t grown up in an ethnic neighborhood to make a human connection with characters who might seem foreign or exotic, to quote your average American. I think that kind of vicarious experience that results in empathy is one of the things that all literature is about anyway. If we go to African-American writers or Hispanic writers or Asian writers, one of the things we’re constantly doing is gaining the multicultural experience which makes us empathetic toward cultures which we might not have been born into.

 

TCNW: The other thing particular to growing up in Chicago is how neighborhoods are tied to churches. There’s a counterpoint to that in the way the church transcends place and time. So in some ways the parish can be limiting, but in other ways transport people beyond their neighborhoods?

SD: I never wrote about this, but it’s up there on the psychic bulletin board as something I might write about in the right context. I remember this very clearly: My father was a typical immigrant who comes and gets a job and saves enough money and eventually buys a six-flat and becomes a landlord. So in a generation, he’s gone from immigrant status to landed gentry. I was tremendously religious as a kid, in that my imagination was really captured primarily by the imagery (in the church), but also by some of the ethical teachings. I still remember my shock one night when my father went off to a meeting at the parish, organized by the local priest, of all the landlords in the neighborhood, about trying to hold the line so far as selling to blacks.

It wasn’t that I was shocked that there would be such a meeting. Everybody who grows up in Chicago knows what racism is and has probably been touched by it. I was shocked that it was at the church. At that time in my life, I was more of a black-and-white thinker, as I think kids are. The various economic complexities and so forth—I’m not saying understanding them makes it forgivable, but I didn’t have the sophistication where I would understand how this could be. I was 10 or 11.

That is one example where I began realizing that what represented the entire institution—my little parish church—was actually, in my mind, behaving in a way that was contradictory to its own teachings. That was one sense of limitation, where I began realizing the limitations of the institution itself, as it was represented by that little parish.

The social change went on anyway, no matter how many meetings they had. The evolution into a Hispanic parish was going on even as they had that meeting. …

What really kind of struck me was how one virgin-worshipping culture, with the black Virgin of Czestohowa, who was turned dark as legend has it because of the fires that the Tartars set—the smoke from the fires turned her complexion dark—so easily translated into the Virgin of Guadalupe, who is also a dark-complected virgin. The incoming Mexican population, just absolutely easily inhabited the two main bastions of culture in that community, which were the neighborhood bar—even the music sounded similar—and the churches.

 

TCNW: Your stories tend to have a spiritual undercurrent, even where it’s not explicit. How intentional is that?

SD: My main energy goes into trying to create the images, bringing the characters and the environment to life with as much vitality as possible, and I know that if I can do that, the other stuff will happen naturally. You can’t write about the neighborhoods and cultures I’m writing about without writing about grand themes. But the wonderful thing is you never have to approach those grand themes head-on. You’re going to be writing about universal experience, race, assimilation, ethnicity, questions of ethics and so forth, just by writing about these streets.

Religious imagination, which so caught my attention as a child, which I so loved participating in as a child—because you’re exposed to it as a child doesn’t mean there’s something childish about it. It doesn’t mean you have to abandon it as you become a sophisticated and skeptical adult. The Catholic imagination for me is essentially sacramental, meaning that it operates through images. It operates through association, through analogy. It isn’t linear. And it believes in miracles, and miracles are an expression of mystery. It believes in awe, and it gives you a language with which to express awe. Having the vocabulary to express mystery and awe, which stays with us all our lives, and allowing yourself to understand that as a human being, you think on many levels besides just the logical level, is an important way of being a complete human being. I guess that’s what Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock are about on “Star Trek,” that kind of dichotomy between logical thought and instinctive, analogous thinking. That to me has nothing to do with nostalgia. That to me means that as you grow older, if you can’t bring those aspects along with you, you’re losing some of the richness of life. That’s the way that my Catholic background manifests itself in art.

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