Reading Local Seattle

{ Jerome Gold, 7/22, Elliott Bay Book Co. }

Novelist and essayist Jerome Gold founded Black Heron Press with novelist Les Galloway in 1984. A Vietnam veteran with a PhD in Anthropology, Gold has long been interested in writing with a social consciousness. The press has awarded a prize for Social Fiction to books such as Leonard Chang’s The Fruit & Food and Farnoosh Moshiri’s The Bathhouse. However, Gold is generally clear about the kind of books he published; He only publishes books that he enjoys reading. Over the years Black Heron has published writers as varied as Judith Roche, Ron Dakron, Laurie Blauner, and James Sallis. On August 10th, Black Heron will celebrate its 25th anniversary at the Elliott Bay Book Company.

In addition to running a press and writing his own books, Gold also worked for fifteen years at a state facility for teenager offenders. Seven Stories Press released his memoir, Paranoia & Heartbreak, this last May. Gold will be reading at the Elliott Bay Book Co. on July 22nd. Gold describes the book as his journal of his years at Ash Meadow. “I recorded my recollections of events very soon after they occurred. I changed everybody’s name but my own, and I used a number of other devices to disguise kids’ identity, but otherwise everything is true.”

We exchanged some e-mails with Gold about his experience working at Ash Meadow.

Reading Local: How or why did you end up working at a juvenile facility? I guess by this question, many people just fall into jobs to pay the bills, but other people feel a mission or calling in the work they do. I have a friend who became an oncology nurse. I wasn’t familiar with this side of her character that she wanted her work to genuinely contribute to the well being of the other people. And of course being a nurse wasn’t poorly paid compared to being an administrative assistant, for example, but I don’t think she was drawn to nursing just because it paid well.

Jerome Gold: In late 1990, I was on active duty for Desert Shield, the prelude to the first Gulf War. A friend (Dick Teale, in the book) who worked at Ash Meadow asked me what I was going to do when I was separated from active duty. I told him I wanted to go on unemployment for a while and do some writing. He said I would enjoy working out where he worked and suggested I apply there. He said they wouldn’t be hiring for a few months, but I should get my application in now so I would be near the top of the list of those to be called. So I phoned Personnel and they sent me an application and I filled it out and returned it. A few days later, an administrator I call “Carol Ripito” invited me out for an interview. And a few days after the interview she hired me. I began work almost immediately. So I just kind of drifted into it. I was not idealistic, at least not consciously; though another friend accused me of thinking I could “make a difference.” But I think, too, that the path my life takes is there for me to discover; it isn’t something I make. So the idea of “drifting” into this job may not be quite accurate. Until I went to work at Ash Meadow, I had no idea that that kind of job existed.

Reading Local: In fifteen years, how many kids did you work with? What kind of relationships did you develop relationships with the kids? How did the facility work for them? And conversely, what were the challenges? A title like Paranoia & Heartbreak certainly doesn’t promise any happy endings.

Jerome Gold: I don’t know how many kids I worked with. I had on my caseload—as my “clients,” so to speak—perhaps 300, more or less. Some I had for two years or more (those who had committed serious crimes), others for only a few days or a few weeks (those who were in for parole violations). But the major part of my time there was spent interacting—talking with, training, monitoring, acting as mentor or father figure—with many hundreds more. I really have no idea how many.

Perhaps the best part about their being in prison was that, for the time they were locked up, they knew that no one was going to kill them or do them serious harm. I remember telling one gang kid who was new to us that no one was going to hurt him here, and immediately seeing the stress go out of his body. He just slumped as his body relaxed. Part of their experience with us, the major part, I believe, was being around adults (us, the rehabilitation counselors) who presented them with possibilities in life that they had been unaware of. Many of these kids were very bright, but they were not well informed. I had one boy with a very high IQ who did not know that there were colleges in Seattle other than the University of Washington. As he was black, and believed the U of W was racist, he did not see any possibility of his going beyond high school.

A difficulty that many staff, including me, had was that we knew we would be paroling kids, most of them, back to the same environment that got them locked up in the first place: poverty; drugs; violence; gangs, in many cases. Many kids were not of legal age to hold a job when we released them, yet their families, if they had families, needed the income they brought in. This meant they had to get involved with robbery and/or selling drugs. If they were on their own, without families, they still needed money. Nevertheless, a study done by Washington State Institute for Public Policy, the research arm of the state legislature, showed that 67% of kids who had been through the prison/ parole system in Washington did not re-offend, at least during the 12 months following their time on parole. I think that’s very good. Until that study was published (it’s referenced in footnote 2 in Paranoia & Heartbreak), most of us counselors felt pretty hopeless about what we were doing.

And the study was done before the requirement for Cognitive Behavior Training was instituted. This is a subject in itself, but let me say that two types were tested: Aggression Replacement Training and Dialectical Behavior Therapy. ART was shown in Washington state to reduce recidivism among juveniles by 24% in the 18 months following release from prison. DBT was found to be ineffective.

I think I’m drifting.

You asked if we developed relationships with kids. Yeah. Relationships were what it was all about. The last few years I was at Ash Meadow, psychologists became increasingly influential. Ash Meadow became more and more a vehicle for advancing the careers of certain people. The paperwork burden they placed on cottage staff (the counselors) worked to defeat staff’s efforts with the kids. Before the introduction of this paperwork, a staff was required to spend at least an hour per week in counseling with each of the kids on his/her caseload. Shortly before I left, staff was prohibited from spending more than half an hour per week with each kid, in order to insure that the paperwork got done. The administration considered the emphasis on documentation to be part of the professionalization of cottage staff. It took me a while to realize that the administration’s primary concern was to make itself look good to the legislature, while (most, not all) cottage staff’s primary concern was to do what we could for these kids. The twain did not meet.

Reading Local: Your book Prisoners contained poems and short prose pieces dealing with violence and its effects in sometimes very direct, plain ways. This book also drew on your experience working with teenagers, specifically gang youth and gang culture. Does Paranoia & Heartbreak deal with the same themes? How is this book, as a memoir, different?

Jerome Gold: As does Prisoners, Paranoia & Heartbreak deals especially with kids who have done violent crimes. This is because most of the kids I got to know best had done violent crimes. Not every staff worked with these kids; some dealt more with sex offenders, others dealt more with the mentally ill, some preferred to deal with kids who had done more mundane crimes, such as car theft or burglary. Often these categories overlapped, but I found that I could relate to certain kids in such a way that, over time, they would learn to trust me whereas they might not trust another staff as much. Here I believe my experience of war, and the physical sensations and the emotions that accompany the violence of war, and my ability to communicate that experience, helped me.

Paranoia & Heartbreak differs from Prisoners in that Paranoia & Heartbreak is nonfiction and Prisoners is fiction. The latter is fiction based on what I learned from some kids, but it is fiction—I combined events, I presented composites as individual characters, I gave an event in one kid’s life to another kid, I made things up. In Paranoia & Heartbreak I was limited to what actually happened and to what actually was said. Paranoia & Heartbreak is my journal of my years at Ash Meadow. I recorded my recollections of events very soon after they occurred. I changed everybody’s name but my own, and I used a number of other devices to disguise kids’ identity, but otherwise everything is true.

Reading Local: When violence is generalized in public events, there seems to be causes of violence. For instance people talk about media (video games, role playing games, movies, and music) contributing to a mythology of violence that gives permissions or somehow causes violent acts to occur.  They play a first person shooter game, snap, and go on a rampage. Do you think the culture of violence is part of our mass culture or does it come from somewhere else?

Jerome Gold: I do think the culture of violence is part of our mass culture, but I don’t know what the mechanisms are that make for this. I know that many kids (and probably many adults) don’t have a realistic view of violence. One girl I had on my caseload told me that she had no idea that there would be so much blood after she did what she did.

Reading Local: Conversely you have talked about how poverty and abuse is portrayed in mass culture. I remember you once saying that naturalistic books about the working class poor tend not to do very well and tend to be misunderstood. I am probably misremembering exactly what is you said. Why do you think that is?

Jerome Gold: I think novels about the working poor, or the poor generally, whether or not they’re working-class, don’t sell well because, by and large, the people who read novels aren’t from that class and don’t want to encounter the unpleasantness they associate with that class. It’s much easier to look at the poor as a people apart. That way, too, when they commit crimes, it’s easy to look at them as inherently bad, even evil. If you have the stomach for it, you might check out some of the “reality” TV shows; look for the narrators’ or hosts’ attitude towards the perpetrators. I caught a few minutes of one last night—the host was so contemptuous of a man addicted to meth, he (the host) turned my stomach. Are there any reality shows that depict white-collar crime? How many crime novels depict white-collar crime?

I think most Americans who read novels read them for entertainment, rather than enlightenment, much as they watch TV. All serious novels published in the U.S. have a problem in finding an audience.

Reading Local: Finally, you were working a very intense job during these years, and you also managed to publish a number of books including Prisoners, Sergeant Dickinson, and a collection of essays, How I Learned That I Could Push the Button. You were also the publisher of Black Heron Press. And on top of that you had a life, I think. How did you do this? I don’t mean for this to be a kind of time management question, although it actually is one. So few writers earn their living selling books that we can easily round down and say no writers earn their living from books. Most writers are always complaining, then, about their other commitments, about day jobs, various chores, and seem to dream of an uninterrupted day where all they have to do is write. I think your case is more extreme, for sure, basically three full time and then some jobs. How did your writing happen? Now that you are retired do you have those uninterrupted days?

Jerome Gold: Well, I kept my focus on what was important to me and I made time for those things. I was very fortunate in that I found my job stimulating. I looked at it, usually, as an important part of my life, but not the most important part. Writing came first, and the things that are associated with writing—like Black Heron Press. And writing, the act of writing, brings me a certain kind of pleasure, so there was no danger of my foregoing it, except on days when I was too tired to concentrate. I must say that this “time management” was not difficult for me. I can be obsessive, and obsessiveness can be a help. Also, I think I’m a little ADD, so I can often jump from one thing to another without much mental dislocation. I’ve never had “an uninterrupted day where all” I did was write, as you phrased it, not at least since I got out of graduate school. I would think that writers who don’t get their writing done either don’t feel the need to do it or don’t really want to do it. If you really have to do it, or want to, you use whatever time you have and you do it. Now that I no longer work for wages, I do write more often. When I was at Ash Meadow, I wrote as many as four days a week, one or two hours a day. For a short period of time, I wrote only one or two days a week because I was emotionally too exhausted to write more often. Fortunately I was able to reduce my work week at Ash Meadow to 32 from 40 hours. To me, it was worth the loss of income to be able to write more often. Now I write almost every day. Occasionally the world breaks in, but not usually.

Reading Local: Thanks, Jerry, for your time.

Author: Matt Briggs

Matt Briggs is the author of five books, including Shoot the Buffalo, a novel published by Clear Cut Press and winner of a 2006 American Book Award. His second novel, The Strong Man, will be released on March 1st 2010. Recent work has appeared in Spork, First Intensity, Seattle Magazine, and The Clackamas Literary Review.

Matt Briggs has written 78 articles for us.