By Rachel Swearingen
Anthony Bukoski is a rare writer, gifted with a communal vision and a deep sense of origin that has led him to center much of his life’s work in Superior, Wisconsin. In nearly forty years, he has published seven collections of stories, beginning with Twelve Below Zero in 1986. The author belongs to the grand tradition of American “regional” short story writers that includes Sherwood Anderson, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Elizabeth Strout, Randall Kenan, and Stuart Dybek, among others. Born in the East End of Superior in 1945, Bukoski went to Vietnam as a marine in 65, returning to study at the college in his hometown, and then to attend Brown University, and later the University of Iowa, where he earned an MFA and a PhD. He settled back in Superior, teaching at the University of Wisconsin, and turned his writerly attention to the region he knew best.
A quintessential Bukoski story begins realistically and then turns lyrical, opening to what is most mysterious or baffling. In The Blondes of Wisconsin, his most recent collection, characters work on freighters traveling the Great Lakes, visit run-down taverns for back-room boxing matches, sew garments in a tailor shop in Poland as Germany invades, deliver the mail along desolate rural roads, or sit around the dinner table conversing. Bukoski is as much at home exploring moments of everyday domesticity as he is depicting lives forever altered by war, immigration and the passage of time. He salts his narratives with humor and juxtaposes gritty details with moments of imaginative flight. The Blondes unfolds much like a novel, with characters reappearing at different stages of their lives. We see a culture changing, disappearing, and re-emerging in vestiges.
Meticulous, thoughtful, and unflinching, Anthony Bukoski has developed his craft through a slow, and at times painstaking, process. In May of 2022, we struck up an e-mail correspondence, resulting in this interview.
Hi, Anthony. I’m thrilled to talk to you about The Blondes of Wisconsin. How did the book come about? When did you discover that Ed Bronkowski and Verna Larson would be recurring characters?
The Blondes of Wisconsin arose out of desperation. I don’t use the word casually. How do you spend a good part of your life learning to write then lose interest in writing?
I often describe my hometown, Superior, as being at the end of the line. It and Duluth mark the western terminus of the Great Lakes. Commercial shipping—lake boats, ocean-going vessels— can’t go beyond this port. I use the idea of the end of the line literally and figuratively in stories.
Over a period from, say, 2007-2012, I’d come to the end of the line. J. W. Beecroft, the independent bookstore which hand-sold my books, closed in late 2007. My beloved editor of eighteen years had tired of my work. Then in 2010, Southern Methodist University Press, my home all those years, suspended operations. Sometime during this period, the midwestern representative for Publishers Weekly hinted she might profile me for the magazine but instead profiled Marilynne Robinson, a better choice. After publishing four short-story collections with SMU Press, I’d gotten to the end.
I recall leaving Chicago on the Metra train for Harvard, Illinois, one late winter morning. I’d attended the Associated Writing Programs convention. At Harvard I’d get the car and drive 391 miles home. Tomorrow would begin another week of teaching at the University of Wisconsin Superior, my alma mater. I remember thinking that if I quit writing, no one would care. If I continued writing, no one would care either, but at least editors would look at my stories. That’s how the book came about, when I wondered if I’d had enough and should give up. I was really lost.
Thankfully, I had in mind the dim shape of Ed Bronkowski, a guy training for his pro boxing debut. The story “Prospects” concerns his first loss in the ring. Seeing his son the next morning, Mr. Bronkowski says, “Your face looks like the pu pu platter at Joe’s Pagoda.” Worse, Ed has to meet his girlfriend later and explain to her why he’s had the facelift. Other surprises come.
In time I wrote another Ed Bronkowski story. In this one, Ed, now forty years old, realizes he has no future in boxing. I think I made a good choice having him work as a deckhand on a grain boat heading from Superior to Buffalo and back. I also have him fall in love with Verna Larson, the second cook. Their story interweaves with others’ stories in the book. Verna’s husband, for instance, waits at dockside with cardboard signs whenever her boat puts in. The signs say things like “I’M DYING. HELP ME! HELP ME!”
I knew the stories would be interconnected when I added Verna.
It makes sense to me that Ed Bronkowski, a beleaguered boxer, would appear during a time of such uncertainty and disappointment. Do you think you could have written a collection like this, or a character like Ed, when you were younger? Did this breakthrough change your writing process?
When I began sparring with friends in the old fieldhouse at the University of Iowa, I had no idea I’d someday create the Ed Bronkowski character. Now I see I needed to experience such a life before I could write about it. I began sparring in Iowa City in the mid-1970s, and later elsewhere, and kept at it for probably ten years. A couple of my sparring partners were colleagues in the Writer’s Workshop. Others, strangers, dropped by the fieldhouse to see what was going on. One sparring partner, Jack, was a local barfly. Another was studying in the University of Iowa College of Dentistry. Still another was an undergraduate political science major. Occasionally, a U of I Spanish teacher, Jorge something-or-other, stopped in. He didn’t want to get hit in the head.
One time I answered an ad in the Daily Iowan, the college paper: “Sparring partner wanted.” Bob Johnson, I think his name was, had had amateur fights. I believe he was six and one in the ring. A U of I student from Goshen, Indiana, he worked part-time making commercials for KCRG-TV in Cedar Rapids. I appeared in one of the commercials as a tenth-rate fighter.
Up until a few years ago, I attended pro and amateur fights whenever I could, in Cedar Rapids, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Duluth. I saw Ron Stander fight in Omaha. In the story “The Vocabulary Lesson,” Ed gets pounded in that city.
There’s no way I could have written the book without such experiences and the empathy I gained from them. I saw fights in crummy places. One card was held under a tent behind a bar in Carlton, Minnesota. It was raining. The ring card girls carried signs that read “Cassandra Bail Bonds.” Neither the weather nor the venues mattered to me. I like fight crowds. You see guys, ex-pugs, wandering around half-there. Later, I became one of them, not always steady on my feet, unsure of myself mentally. In June of 2019, I learned there was something wrong in my own head and, in late September, I had surgery to correct it.
This short book has taken a lot of living. I wrote it and now I’m done. It was worth the effort. I couldn’t have written it when I was younger.
If anything changed in the way I write and put together a story collection, it’s in the connections between characters, the Bronkowskis, the Larsons, their next-door neighbors. The connections are tighter in The Blondes of Wisconsin than in my earlier books. I’ve been moving in this direction for years, maybe trying to write the novel I’ll never write.
Introducing Ed’s love interest, Verna Larson in “The Second Cook on the Henry L. Stimson,” was the real breakthrough in the book because Verna, a seagoing cook, reinforces the book’s maritime sensibility and allows me to explore, what would I call it? the affective side of Ed’s personality.
Now Ed’s shadowy figure in my imagination had merged into Ed and Verna’s.
Now I understand where some of your wonderfully gritty settings and unusual characters originate. I love that it was Verna, Ed’s girlfriend, a cook on a Great Lakes vessel, who appeared later in the writing process and helped you to pull the stories together. You mentioned that connections between characters are tighter here than in your previous books. Did that yield some interesting surprises for you?
In my earlier books, the same character might figure in two or three stories, Corporal Vankiewicz in the first and last stories in Children of Strangers (1993), Ted Milzewski in Time Between Trains (2003).
A lot changed between those books and The Blondes of Wisconsin, which also centers on ethnicity and on the emotional and psychological geography of a place. This time the stories concern four families, including the family of Verna and her estranged husband Lloyd. Ed Bronkowski appears in eight stories, his brother, Alphonse, in five. Mr. Slinker appears either directly or indirectly in six stories, Verna in three, which are very important.
Before she shows up, the stories center on the Urbaniaks, Bronkowskis, and Slinkers. The families live so close on either side of the Bronkowkis that they hear the music of Chopin and Paderewski in the summer garden where Alphonse Bronkowski, one of the sons in the family, plays a phonograph. A nephew, Andrzej, can look from upstairs into Mr. Slinker’s second-floor window. Through the north-facing windows, they see Superior Bay and know when the Henry L. Stimson, bound for the lower lakes, will sail past. In another story, Alphonse struggles through Marine Corps boot camp. Later, he drinks to forget Vietnam. As I was writing, all kinds of tensions and surprises arose because of the proximity of the three houses and the connections between the families. This was new to me, one story insisting that another be told.
Whereas the Polish families live close together, Verna’s been exiled from land (and from houses) for seven years. Only twice does she come ashore, both near the end of Ed’s life. In another example of how one story led to another, Ed leaves the Stimson, yet I couldn’t have Verna not see him again. In “The Shipmaster’s Ball,” she visits him in the nursing home with an envelope of secrets they sealed in a motel in Sault Ste. Marie. At a key moment when Ed’s nearly lost to her, she opens the envelope of memories for him. Nor could I leave Ed’s wife, Adele, without describing what’s happened in her life, which I do in the last story. Through a stroke of luck, I found a universe revealing itself to me.
Let me add a little more. When the late Frederick Busch recommended that SMU Press publish Children of Strangers, he remarked that the stories were like an archaeological study of a place. A teacher-friend of mine said something similar about Polonaise (1999). This wasn’t bad, she said, but she thought I was looking in at Superior not from within.
In The Blondes of Wisconsin with its interconnections, I look from within. I am a part of every male character in the book, the former marine, the boxing enthusiast, the product of the East End. This may be truest in “The Vocabulary Lesson,” where Andrzej walks over the ice to Hog Island and Mr. Slinker takes the same walk later that night. As a youth, I was a frequent visitor to the deserted island. In the story, I’m the boy and the man discovering who and where they are, reveling in the discovery, and writing about it.
Landscape and waterways run throughout the book, so much so that the rivers of Poland seem to flow into the waterways of Superior, Wisconsin. Perhaps this is why the stories seem to flow in and out of each other, in a nonlinear, branching way. Could you tell us more about this “maritime sensibility” you mentioned earlier, and perhaps why you chose “Tributaries” as your first story?
On the bayfront on stormy days, you can hear waves from Lake Superior pounding ashore on Wisconsin Point. The Edmund Fitzgerald sailed from here on her last trip. In his song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” Gordon Lightfoot says the Fitzgerald was “comin’ back from some mill in Wisconsin.” She wasn’t coming from a mill but from the Allouez ore dock in Superior. Her cargo of taconite had been shipped by rail from a mill on Minnesota’s Iron Range.
My dad was an ocean and lakes’ sailor. Many of my friends sailed the lakes. One was the captain of the Stewart J. Cort. Another, a pilot, guided foreign vessels into port. I thought about sailing when I got out of the service but decided not to. A marine, I’d been to sea, sailing on a troop transport in rough weather from San Diego to Honolulu, Yokohama, and finally Okinawa. A few months later, I sailed from Vietnam to Hong Kong and back to Okinawa, then two or three months later sailed back to Vietnam. To return to your question, in and around Superior and in my books, water is everywhere. Ex-Great Lakes’ sailors are everywhere.
You’re right literally and figuratively to say “the waterways of Poland flow into the waterways of Superior.” Polish ships used to put in here often for grain. I’ve been aboard the Ziemia Białostocka, the Pomorze Zachodnie, and others. I’ve written stories about Polish seamen escaping their ships to claim asylum here during the Solidarity Era. In The Blondes of Wisconsin, a portion of one of Mr. Slinker’s short stories appears in Polish and English. As I say, water is all over in my hometown and in and around it in the lakes and bogs. River water too.
Superior’s Hebrew Cemetery, for instance, stands above the Pokegama River, which runs into the St. Louis River and that into the bay and finally Lake Superior. In “Tributaries,” Mr. Bronkowski pours some of the imported water from Poland on the summer garden where the music of Chopin plays. In “Tributaries,” his neighbor, in an expiatory gesture, also pours this water into the river below the cemetery. At the outset, I wanted the book to have a historical context. With the emptying of the bottles of water from the old country in a river in Superior, Poland’s Jews and Poland’s Catholics can be recalled.
Finally, I remember reading once in an encyclopedia that “Lake Superior receives no rivers of importance.” How can this be, I’ve wondered, when so many of my ancestors and other Polish immigrants lie in the cemetery across from the Hebrew Cemetery and in the cemetery above the Nemadji River in the East End? Their lives lend importance to the land and its water.
What a beautiful way of looking at history and place, of celebrating Lake Superior and the region you have come to know so well. Why the short story? Do you think you could have achieved as much depth and breadth writing in another form?
The few times I tried to write a novel I lost interest after obsessively rereading the first thirty or forty pages. I lack the discipline to write long fiction. I’ve read how-to articles on writing novels and have sought friends’ advice, but I always lose interest in the project. I have finished a novella, however. Once it’s revised, I hope “King Creole” comes out to seventy-five or eighty pages. This marks the longest fiction I’ll probably ever write. I hope I’ve achieved some depth and breadth by writing stories about a single, and singular, place—northwestern Wisconsin, Superior in particular.
Do you have any advice for young writers working on their first stories?
Many years after my first story appeared in print, this was in Wisconsin Review in October 1974, I tell myself I’m still trying to learn to write. If I view myself as a beginning fiction writer, I don’t get too upset if I make mistakes or get rejected. After all these years, I’ve never lost hope, except off and on during the time described earlier and then not completely. When I’m rejected, I doubt myself for a few hours, perhaps for an evening, then the next day go back to writing and revising. I’m happy how things have turned out. The hard work has been worth it.
Anthony Bukoski has published seven short-story collections. A Booklist Editor’s Choice, Time Between Trains was chosen as one of the best fiction books of 2003 for public libraries. Bukoski’s stories have appeared in New Letters, The Literary Review, Western Humanities Review, Image, Quarterly West, New Orleans Review, Arcana (Poland), Akcent (Poland), and other journals. His work has been recognized by the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, the Polish American Historical Association, the Council for Wisconsin Writers, and the Wisconsin Library Association. The Polish Institute of Houston awarded him its first Literary Prize “For Excellence in presenting the life of American Polish communities in the Midwest.” The Robert E. Gard Wisconsin Idea Foundation presented him its 2005 award “For the excellence with which [the author’s] stories celebrate his grass roots, the Polish East End of Superior, Wisconsin, thus bringing that community to life in literature.”
Bukoski has an A.M. degree from Brown University and an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. He is emeritus professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Superior.
Rachel Swearingen is the author of the story collection How to Walk on Water and Other Stories. Her stories and essays have appeared in Electric Lit, VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, Agni, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago and teaches in Cornell College’s low-residency MFA program.