I’m happy to announce that my essay, Marquette Park: Members Only, is going to be included in an anthology: The Best of the Rust Belt. It’s set for release in the summer of 2024.
Marquette Park: Members Only was originally included in The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook, a quirky and eclectic anthology of Chicago writers (and one guy from New York) pontificating over their neighborhoods. Readers interested in urban writing will be sure to enjoy this new anthology from Belt Publishing.
I’m thrilled to announce my forthcoming book, “What is a College Student?” It’s a textbook due for publication in the late summer of 2023.
While this textbook is appropriate for any Rhetoric, Composition, Study Skills or Developmental language course taught in any college or university, its lessons are informed by my two decades of experience teaching first-generation, urban-commuter, and community college students. Students will find provocative ideas about active learning and the perspective shifts that occur when they dedicate themselves to college study. The book introduces reading methodologies and reflective exercises. It can function as a course of its own or a supplement to any course focused on orienting students to college expectation and culture. The book should also prove an honest guide to high school students curious to know if college is the right path for them.
I’m excited to be partnering with Kendall-Hunt for this project. I’ll offer more news in the coming weeks.
I’m sad to report that my memoir, which won Memoir Magazine’s Grand Prize, is going out of print. Those readers who always wished to pick one up but kept putting it off should still be able to buy a copy over the coming week or two. If you have not heard of this title, you can find information about it on my Publications page. The book is currently available anywhere books are sold, but will more than likely require a personal order.
While this is sad news, it’s just the way of publishing. Thank you to all the readers who have supported my work over the years.
Between the years of 1996-1999, Gint Aras lived a hapless bohemian’s life in Linz, Austria. Decades later, a random conversation with a Polish immigrant in a Chicago coffeehouse provokes a question: why didn’t Aras ever visit Mauthausen, or any of the other holocaust sites close to his former home? The answer compels him to visit the concentration camp in the winter of 2017, bringing with him the baggage of a childhood shaped by his family of Lithuanian WWII refugees. The result is this meditative inquiry, at once lyrical and piercing, on the nature of ethnic identity, the constructs of race and nation, and the lasting consequences of collective trauma.
I haven’t written much here for a while, primarily because I’m at work on some new writing.
In the meantime, I’ve got a short story in this anthology, titled “Open Heart Chicago: An Anthology of Chicago Writing,” edited by Vincent Francone. The story is titled “The Parabola of a Single Bullet Shot into the Night Sky.” It features the things you’ve come to know an love from yours truly, including death, love and mind-bending stuff.
An Excerpt from The Memoir Prize 2021 Grand Prize Winner: Relief by Execution: A Visit to Mauthausen, by Gint Aras. The full Relief by Execution: A …
Relief by Execution: A Visit to Mauthausen by Gint Aras
Just yesterday, I received unexpected holiday news. My memoir, RELIEF BY EXECUTION: A VISIT TO MAUTHAUSEN, was awarded the Memoir Prize for Books from Memoir Magazine.
Huge thanks to the judges at Memoir Mag. It’s a tremendous honor.
I published a new essay today in Re-Imagining magazine. It’s a response to our collective longing to be able to live our social lives again, though I provoke some questions readers of Liquid Ink will find interesting.
I’m wondering if anyone else is noticing the perception of accelerated time. For me, the days don’t seem to drag, despite me spending almost all of my time in my condo. I sense them barreling forward; it’s almost evening before I’m finished with my late morning chores. Given this, it seems I had inhabited a completely different consciousness when I first submitted that essay to an editor.
How to describe it? When I wrote the essay, I was feeling inquisitive, and I hoped for hope. As the days barrel forward, I’m noticing myself becoming more belligerent. I don’t mean that I argue with people, or that I sense some enemy or assault—I go outside to exercise alone or ride bikes with my children, and I’m hardly active on social media. I also don’t mean that I’ve formed an idea I want to push.
Instead, I feel an alarm going off, and my belligerence is the panic of a man reaching around in a dark room to try to silence it.
But it doesn’t quiet down. It seems to strengthen as my arm reaches and swings more desperately to find it in the dark. Strangely, I’ve longed for this alarm. Sometimes I even feel that I’ve heard it before.
I hope you’ll read my new essay.
If you’re feeling generous, or you’re one of those actually benefiting from the pandemic, wondering how best to share your resources with those in need, I hope you’ll consider donating to Volumes Bookcafe. Click here to access their GoFundMe page.
Volumes holds a unique place in Chicago’s cultural scene. Situated in the heart of Wicker Park, only blocks from Nelson’ Algren’s former home, the bookstore sprung up to become, virtually overnight, an institution in Chicago’s literary community. Bookish but not highbrow, nerdy but not lame, Volumes welcomes absolutely everyone, and sells books, beers, pens, magnets, puzzles or muffins to suit virtually every taste.
When independent publishers Tortoise Books picked up my novel, The Fugue, back in 2016, I faced the daunting task of marketing it with virtually no budget, few leads and limited knowledge of marketing or salesmanship. I looked at a map of Chicago’s bookstores, and decided to walk in to each one to talk about holding some event, or leaving books on consignment.
A lot of bookstores in Chicago aid writers of all stripes. However, the support I received from Volumes was particular in its warmth and openness. They did not look at me like a formal business partner, or a token that allowed them to claim support for small artists. Because their goal was to create community and foster cultural activity, Volumes welcomed me to a space that felt nothing short of family, and allowed me to access readers I never would have reached without their help. They seemed unaware of how strange, even exotic their habits were. It was just the way they went about selling books.
Well, we’re at risk of losing them. Yes…we’re at risk of losing so much…but saving Volumes is a noble goal, not only for the city: tourists from around the world buy books here, drink coffee here, and feel as welcome as I did when I came to say, “Um, hi. I’m an obscure writer with holes in my pants. Can you help me?”
They helped. Let’s help them.
This is a great question. Let me roll up my sleeves.
Asking this is similar to criticism I often hear of teachers. People would learn a lot more if teachers made learning interesting and fun. Without getting into the tedium of contemporary schooling, let’s agree that whoever says this probably assumes learning isn’t interesting or fun all on its own.
In the same way, a person demanding comfort from artists must not be feeling it while making their morning coffee. Maybe it’s worse…maybe they’re looking for distraction from whatever they feel or think. They might be seeking reassurance. They can relax because plenty of writers, artists (and teachers) will oblige them.
It’s clearly stupid to make learning boring. But people get this whole thing backwards. If memorizing a list of eventful dates alongside names of dead politicians is boring, maybe it’s because we don’t learn all that much by doing it.
Yet notice what crazy and complicated shit people memorize when self-motivated or linked to community. My son and his friends can tell you meticulous details about the myriad Pokémon characters. When I was a kid, I could recreate AD&D saving throw grids and combat matrices from memory.
Could I recite the names of all 12 apostles?
At a certain point in our development as adults, we end up weighing the difference between tasks that cause immediate discomfort while offering potential for wisdom, community or skill. This is how we learn to play music. It’s how we train to take penalty shots, win street fights, manage large groups of people or sew up wounds. It’s not comfortable for a trauma surgeon to treat a person who fell out of a rolling truck.
Ah…you say…but the surgeon is well compensated!
Sure. But I won’t agree that comfort is commercially viable while discomfort is a liability. Sex, drugs, gambling and arms have proven their commercial demand for millennia. Does porn offer comfort? Does heroin? The roulette table? Is American military might a cause of widespread paranoia or a result? Does it pacify our fear of the world or trigger it?
My favorite books were always the ones that turned me inside out. Some of my favorite writers sent me reeling. Others satirized while entertaining. What does it say, after all, for the answer to life, the universe and everything to be 42? We laugh because, in the face of absolute ignorance, the alternative is to get fussy.
I could make a fuss. I’ve always been stunned by readers who think their comfort is universal. In other words, if they curl up by a fire to read Agatha Christie, they guess it’s masochism to read Wittgenstein while seated on a rock. Maybe it is. Of course, some people really like to get hooked. It turns them on.
Photo of Napoleon’s bed from Wikipedia.
This reader is responding to an answer I gave to Rob McClennan as part of his 12 or 20 Questions series. You can read the entire interview at the link. However, here’s an excerpt to the bit that provoked a question:
Fiction…is the more demanding art form, at least for me. It’s rooted in deeper traditions, and the risks you take leave more at stake than just personal embarrassment, or someone taking issue with an idea you have. When you’re writing fiction, you’re sitting in the room with all the ancestors, the lineage going all the way back to Homer, to the Old Testament, Christ’s parables, the myths and legends that form the foundations behind the fundamental assumptions we use to create a reality for ourselves. So, you’re adding a patch to that quilt, as you stretch and bend it. It’s a really demanding moment.
Several people have found this answer surprising. My memoir, Relief by Execution: A Visit to Mauthausen, handles heavy themes, not least of which is the Holocaust. The belief is that themes, not mediums, determine difficulty.
There’s truth to that assumption, though my novels also handle themes like sexual assault, domestic violence, collapsing identity, wartime trauma, family dysfunction, religion, artistic process, etc.
I’m sure there are writers who find memoir-writing impossible. Writing my memoir was frightening; however, I could do it, whereas I can’t write poetry without it sounding like a nursery rhyme, bad rap song or random grocery list. I don’t bother with it. It’s too demanding.
Demanding how? I think it’s important to separate emotional demands from technical ones. They’re related, sure, but I find it much easier to say “this hurts” or “here’s where I messed up” or “here are my flaws” than implementing the scalpel, rib shears, protractor and carpenter square necessary to write even a short story of a few hundred words.
Of course, the demands are largely determined by me.
I’m aware and respectful of traditions, use a fair amount of allusion in my fiction, and when I draw water from the well that is the English language, I let the pail sink for a while before drawing it up. I’m bored otherwise.
At the same time, I think there’s an important note in English that colors my awareness of the past, as the words we use to categorize prose are fiction and non-fiction. That implies the default form is fiction, while the other form is its negation.
Imagine if, instead of saying vegetable, we used non-fruit or something. Fruit would clearly be the primary reference point.
To me, fiction is the primary reference point. The great lessons in Western civilization come in stories. Myths, fables, parables and allegories make up the reference points that both progress and define our culture, and we engage in much more soul searching and theoretical “what if” in our fiction than we do in our laws, news reports or histories. American philosophy—Emerson or Thoreau—is blithe stuff compared to Moby Dick or Huck Finn. Homer and Sophocles get me going much more than do Aristotle or Kant.
It’s true that a great historiographer must use her imagination to connect one dot to the next while arguing for some cause. Historiography is demanding, but I’m not an historiographer. I don’t have that kind of mind. I’m an artist, and when I want to put myself to the test, I try writing fiction. It’s sad that more people don’t read it, and that economic and social obstacles have prevented me from writing more than I have, but that doesn’t change what I find engaging.
I think the best example of what I mean should come from writers I admire. If we compare Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory to Lolita, I think we’ll find he’s working much harder in Lolita. Dostoevsky hardly breaks a sweat in The House of the Dead, even when he’s describing gruesome scenes. But in his great novels, he’s carrying massive stones up the hill.
Some writers who find memoirs more demanding than novels might come up with examples of novelists who have it easy compared to their memoirs. I can’t think of any off the top of my head.
Ultimately, art is a kind of perversion in which the artist creates some problem and tries to deal with it, usually alone. Notice that dealing with it is different from solving. Beware artists who think they’ve got something figured out.
Photo of Memory by Olin Levi Warner (1896) from Wikipedia.
Liquid Ink 
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