In these fifteen personal essays, Gary Gildner comes of age at a Catholic school learning Latin, how the girls crossed their legs in algebra, and football in the school’s bomb shelter by exchanging punches with his best friend. He goes to Communist Poland to teach American literature and, in medias res, teaches the Warsaw Sparks baseball team how to win. Living in Czechoslovakia when that country is splitting in half, he learns the meaning of “Where the Dog is Buried” and fathers a daughter. Gildner writes about his Polish-German family’s immigrant story and his friendships with poet Richard Hugo and Raymond Andrews, his college roommate and the author of Baby Sweet’s and other African American novels. He writes about 9/11, stealing, meeting a cougar up close, meeting Michele, felling his barn in Idaho’s Clearwater Mountains with a crowbar, and boxing with Chuck Davey, a fellow Michigan State Spartan and one-time challenger for the World Welterweight title.
Essays from this collection have appeared in such venues as the New York Times Magazine, The Southern Review, and New Letters.
Gary Gildner has given readings at the 92 St. Y, Manhattan Theatre Club, Library of Congress, Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, and on the ferry crossing Lake Michigan. He’s been writer-in-residence at Reed, Davidson, and Randolph colleges, Seattle University, and Michigan State. Among his many books are two memoirs, a novel, four collections of stories and eight of poems. He is the winner of a National Magazine Award, Pushcart prizes, NEA and other fellowships, the William Carlos Williams, Theodore Roethke, and Iowa Poetry awards. He and Michele have traded the Clearwater Mountains of Idaho for the foothills of the Catalina Mountains in Arizona.
“The huge gift to the reader that hums through and grounds Gary Gildner’s collection of essays is a particular shine of talent: Gildner engages this world with both a storyteller’s and a poet’s heart. It’s a deep engagement vividly drawn in sensory and emotional realms, an exaltation of the everyday as well as the extraordinary. Gildner is a writer who embraces this bumptious life with the explorer’s sense of wonder. Each essay is a gem, a dazzler.”
—Maureen McCoy, author of Junebug and Divining Blood
“Have you heard the one about the Polish American essayist/poet/fiction writer/baseball-coach-in-Warsaw who tore down his massive old barn in Idaho at an age when most people are already dead? . . . but, no, probably you haven’t. That’s why you must read Gary Gildner’s sui generis essays in How I Married Michele. His always informal voice dances with sharp observations, subtle music, and no suffering of fools or the smallminded. He’ll teach you about some people you shouldn’t and won’t forget—among them Raymond Andrews, Richard Hugo, and Laurie Anne Rockwell—and he’ll expose for you the lesson behind a traditional Polish
saying, ‘where the dog is buried.'”
—Stephen Corey, author of Startled at the Big Sound
Distributed for BkMk Press.
