Charlie Kondek Writes

  I’m an American with a Polish surname, but I am not very Polish. I don’t speak any of the language beyond a couple words, or know any of the folk dances and many of the traditions. I have for years maintained that everything I know about being Polish could be contained in a small essay. Here is an attempt at the essay. For starters, in my mind, there is no color in Poland, or in the early days of the Polish-American experience. That’s because all the pictures I have of my grandparents and their parents are in black and white. I think most people readily admit that their memories and imagination are affected by media, especially the media of photography and film. This has had both a lamented and lauded effect on the way we think. Lamented, because we cannot help wedding an image to our thoughts impacted as much as or more than the magazines, movies and television we have seen, to the point where we can even wonder if what we remember actually happened or was something we saw...

I haven't read all the work, but I am slowly reading it. I have a lot of thoughts on Harrison and appreciation for him, especially as a Michigan writer, one of my state's and region's leading voices (I also admire Bonnie Jo Campbell). I tend to think of Harrison as a religious writer, whose characters tend to use existing religions as their platform but then plunge into natural and personal symbolism, and experience, including the personal and historical, to create and/or constantly reinvent their own religion, obeying a basic religious impulse to sort themselves and their world into the categorical or recognizable. Here's I think a telling representative paragraph, from The Road Home (which does not take place in Michigan but Nebraska): That thought jogged my mind and when I got home I looked in a journal for my recollection of what Rosenthal had said during our picnic years ago. It had been occasioned by my telling him a story about when I was seven years old, in ...