Let me begin this self-interview by saying that I wouldn't cross the street to interview myself.

One of my favorite writers is Isaac Bashevis Singer, a man who gave more than a million interviews.  Once, an interviewer asked him who his favorite writer was and what would he like to say to him if he were interviewing him.  

What did Singer say?  

He said his favorite writer was Dostoevsky (a surprising answer) and that he wouldn't cross the street to talk to him.  

(I wrote an OS blog about brushes with fame that includes this story--Click here to read it.)

Don't get me wrong I like to be interviewed--what writer doesn't--but I wonder what the point of interviewing is finally.  The writer's writing, his work, is there on the page.  If it raises questions, shouldn't the writing also answer those questions?  If it's good.

I've been interviewed about 12 or 15 times.  The first time was in 1963 or so by a reporter from the Chicago Tribune.  He wanted to know why I collected comic books.  At that time, I thought that was great.  I was like 14-15, and when you're that age and somebody pays attention to you that's pretty miraculous.  The upside was also that when the article appeared in the Trib, I got a lot of people contacting me to buy and sell comics. That was perfect.  The interview gave me some notoriety and the notoriety brought in some bucks.  

And isn't that the way it should work?

Recently, OS Blogger AIM sent me a bunch of interview questions that she got from OS Blogger Cartouche.  One of the questions was why I started to blog on Open Salon.

Honestly, it was to sell some books.  

I have been writing poems about my parents and their experiences in Nazi concentration camps for the last 30 years or so and have compiled those poems into 4 books of poems. And I am always looking for ways of getting my parents and their story in front of people--which is not easy.  Poetry is not a big seller in this country unless you're Jewel or Jimmy Stewart or a 12-year-old poet with some kind of serious disease that is killing you. If you're a former university professor writing about his parents and their experiences in the slave labor camps in Germany, you have a long hard row to hoe.

Open Salon seemed like a good place to do that.  

Has it worked out that way?  

I don't think so.  I was hoping to sell some books by blogging here, but that hasn't happened as far as I can tell.  I haven't heard from anyone who's read my Open Salon blog and written to me to say he was buying 10 copies of my book Lightning and Ashes or Third Winter of War: Buchenwald.

It would be nice.

So if that hasn’t happened why do I keep coming back to Open Salon, posting here.

Honestly, I don’t post that much any more.  Not as much as when I started.  I have four other blogs (Lightning and Ashes, Everything’s Jake, Writing the Polish Diaspora, Writing the Holocaust) and they take up a lot of time—and sell books occasionally. 

But what keeps me coming back to Open Salon is the company.  At my blogs, I’m the writer, writing stuff and posting it.  Here at Open Salon, I’m a writer and also a reader.  Open Salon is a great place to read.  There are a lot of talented writers here, and I’m reading so many people that I really enjoy reading.  And it’s the kind of reading I like to do—personal, heartfelt, and honest.  And another great thing about the Open Salon writers is that they are generous with their time.  If you write a writer here, most of the time you’ll hear back.  That’s nice.

I just looked at the interview question sheet that Cartouche worked up and realized that I missed about a million questions.

Let me see what I can do with a couple of the questions:

 What author most inspired me? 

I read a lot, always have, and I can’t think of a single author who’s inspired me. 

There’s a bunch: Kerouac, Isaac Singer, Stan Lee (Marvel Comics), Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, Raymond Carver, Saul Bellow, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald (F. Scott).  And pretty much that’s just the fiction writers.  There are also a bunch of poets: Whitman, Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, T S Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, and Richard Hugo.  And how about those non-fiction writers: Primo Levi, Paul Theroux, Henry David Thoreau, and Emerson?

And there are probably writers I’m forgetting, and I haven’t even started on the movie directors.  I’ll just mention two: John Ford and Orson Welles.

Looking over this entire list and wondering what the common threads are, I come up with a couple.  I like writers who are not afraid of talking about the gloomy things in life, difficulties, adversity, the hardships that break people down and leave them weeping and praying for some one to help them.  And I like writers also who keep moving despite this gloomy stuff.  In fact that might be something you see in the poems I write.  I write a lot of poems about my parents and what happened to them, and I’m always amazed by the fact that they kept going.  I wonder about that, and I write about it.

Let me finish this whole thing up with a poem I wrote.  It’s called “What My Father Believed,” and it pretty much sums up -- except for the money part -- what I’ve just been saying about my writing and these writers. 

(If you want to hear Garrison Keillor read the poem instead of reading it yourself that’s fine with me.  Here’s the link.)

By the way, remember to buy a copy of my book Lightning and Ashes.  You can get it at Amazon. 

Here’s the poem:

What My Father Believed 

He didn't know about the Rock of Ages
or bringing in the sheaves or Jacob's ladder
or gathering at the beautiful river
that flows beneath the throne of God.
He'd never heard of the Baltimore Catechism
either, and didn't know the purpose of life
was to love and honor and serve God.

He'd been to the village church as a boy
in Poland, and knew he was Catholic
because his mother and father were buried
in a cemetery under wooden crosses.
His sister Catherine was buried there too.

The day their mother died Catherine took
to the kitchen corner where the stove sat,
and cried. She wouldn't eat or drink, just cried
until she died there, died of a broken heart.
She was three or four years old, he was five.

What he knew about the nature of God
and religion came from the sermons
the priests told at mass, and this got mixed up
with his own life. He knew living was hard,
and that even children are meant to suffer.
Sometimes, when he was drinking he'd ask,
"Didn't God send his own son here to suffer?"

My father believed we are here to lift logs
that can't be lifted, to hammer steel nails
so bent they crack when we hit them.
In the slave labor camps in Germany,
He'd seen men try the impossible and fail.

He believed life is hard, and we should
help each other. If you see someone
on a cross, his weight pulling him down
and breaking his muscles, you should try
to lift him, even if only for a minute,
even though you know lifting won't save him.