Washington Square. On air is the audio town square for the Washington Square Review, Lansing Community College's literary journal. Writers, readers, scholars, publishing professionals, citizens of the world, gather here and chat about all things writing. Hey there. This is Melissa Ford Luckin, editor for the Washington Square Review. I'm here today with Jerry Wemple, whose piece Bus Stop will be in the Summer 24 edition of the Journal. Hey, Jerry.

Hi. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, thanks for coming by. So tell us a little bit about your piece. How did you come to write it?

Well, it's pretty new for me. Earlier this summer I was doing a couple of writing workshops at our town library. I was on sabbatical in the spring, so I was trying to do things in the community and other places and I was doing these workshops and I an exercise about writing about place. And I'm, I kept coming up with this, you know, this memory I had of when I lived in Florida for a while when I was a kid from 9 to 16. And I'm like, I don't know where this is going. So eventually as we do with drafts, you put it away and you bring it back out and keep tinkering with it. And this is, it's not a true story in that it's all literally true. But, but it's based on an incident where a kid was kidnapped on his way to the bus stop in my neighborhood when I was a kid in Florida and was killed. And what I found interesting and the kind of tension that I'm trying to bring about in this story is the lack of communication that today is something horrific like that happened. There would be counseling at schools and parents would talk to you and there would be police at the bus stop. Not, it was like people just like, okay, that happened and people just ignored it. No adults really talked to us about it, even school or parents. And you know, it was like, oh, that, that happened, but we're all just going to ignore it.

So did you kids talk to each other about it?

We didn't. And, and, and part of it was I think guilt because we were Florida, at least at that time and at least where I lived, there were very strict class based barriers. And this kid that this happened to, and in the story the kid is in a much different class. I mean they're not rich people, but they're renting a house because their new house is going to be built in this new development. And the kids in this neighborhood are just, you know, they're living run down trailers and run down houses and they're, you know, you can just tell that there's a much. There's a class distinction. And so the kids at the other kids at the bus stop don't talk to this so called rich kid, even though he's probably just a little better off than they are. Not. Not super better off.

So you think these class distinctions were kind of unsaid, that the kids just knew what the rules were?

Yeah, a lot of it had to do with where you lived. I lived in Florida for a while. This is, well in the 70s. It's a long time ago. But where I lived, your neighborhood, really, you could tell where, you know, that defined you. And there were kids whose parents were shrimpers and they talked and acted a certain way. And there were kids whose parent. They were transplant New Yorkers or from Ohio, and they had nicer homes with, you know, swimming pools and so forth. And there were like several different breakdowns. And it was, it was pretty stratified. It was. Yeah, there was a lot of tension and, and. But not 100%. Like, sometimes there was some overlap. Like sometimes, like sports brought people together, but sometimes there were. There was tension too.

Do you think that that has. Has had an impact in you over time, growing up in a kind of stratified environment like that?

I. Yeah, I think a lot. Because. Well, I grew up in rural Pennsylvania. Before that, I lived in rural Pennsylvania, and then I moved back and finished high school in rural Pennsylvania, where I was in my schools, the only person of color. Right? Yeah. So that had a big impact on me too. And then when I moved to Florida for those years, the schools had just been desegregated only like the year before.

Oh, wow.

So it was a much, much different place and a much different world. And trying to negotiate all that along with the economic tension between people was, was. It was really interesting. And so when I came back to Pennsylvania, it was interesting because there were pretty wealthy people who went to my public high school and there were pretty poor people who went to it. But. But everybod treated the same in that high school, which was different than the way it was in Florida.

That's quite a contrast. You mentioned that this is based on a true experience that you had that somebody did disappear and was murdered at a bus stop. And how did that. And then you were mentioning that if it happened now, there certainly would be a lot of wraparound services and counseling and people would talk about it. How do you think that affected you living through it at the time?

You know, it was obviously a long time ago, and I'm trying To remember, but there were a couple of bad things, really bad things that happened to people I knew and maybe not necessarily we're friends with. There was a girl in one of my classes, and I wasn't friends with her, but I knew who she was. And her family was kidnapped because her father was the president of a bank. And. And they were held hostage for a couple of days, and they. They survived, but I'm sure that was a terrible ordeal. And we were in middle school, and I remember another time in middle school. I'm not sure what happened, but another classmate, his father was essentially assassinated. He was shot in his backyard with a rifle. Like, Like. Like a sniper got him. And I was. And so it made you feel like, oh, you know, and it's also the. The seventies. So when I was a kid, I remember, I was really little, but I remember the assassination of Robert Kennedy, of Martin Luther King, you know, and so you just think that, wow, this world and the Vietnam War is going on. You think this world is a kind of a violent place. But people, they just keep going. They just like.

Yeah, well, that's interesting, because now when people think about the 70s, they think about, you know, like, living free and. And, you know, like, caring for the earth and listening to good music. So a lot of people that didn't live through that time don't realize how tumultuous it really was.

Oh, yeah, it was. It was a kind of crazy. I remember, like, especially when I was in Pennsylvania, guys getting drafted and coming back from Vietnam and being very. And I was little, I was like, you know, less than 10, like, 8, 9, 7 years old, and. And being very disheartened, sitting around talking with their parents or their, you know, the. The neighbors who were the elders and just like, talking down what was happening and what happened to them. And then it, you know, as the. The war kept going on and on, and I'm like, I'm getting closer to the draft age. I missed it by several years, but it was essentially something that was going on all my life up until, you know, I became, you know, a teenager. And so it wasn't out of the possibility, realm of possibility that it would continue.

Right. So you grew up wondering, you know, when is it going to be my turn to go and what will it be like?

Yeah, so it was. Yeah, so there was, you know, there was lots of crazy stuff going on in, in the 70s, people. Yeah. It wasn't like, hey, let's all eat granola and have a good time.

Right, right. For sure. Because now in the media, you see a lot of 70s imagery, and it all looks kind of, like, easygoing and, you know, joyful and. Yeah, it just wasn't that way. That's.

Yeah. I mean, not. It wasn't always horrific, but there were a lot of. I mean, a lot of crazy things going on.

Yeah. Very different. So you. You did not get drafted. You went to college. Talk a little bit about that, because I know you went to undergrad and then your MFA were fairly close together.

Yeah, well, actually, what happened is I went to. I went back to Pennsylvania after spending several years in Florida, and I finished high school there, and then I went to college for a couple of years, and I really. I don't. I wasn't ready for it. I didn't really have a family background of people going to college. And so after two years, I dropped out, and I eventually joined the Navy. So I did go.

Okay.

And stayed in the Navy for seven years and then eventually finished my undergrad degree and then went into. And was starting to write a little bit more seriously and start starting to publish some. And then I decided to go. I was working as a newspaper reporter, and I decided to go into the MFA program at University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

What do you think it was about the writing that intrigued you?

Yeah, I'm one of those people who always loved to write. I love to read. I started reading when I was really young. My mom taught me how to read before I went to school. I didn't go to kindergarten. I just, you know, so before I was in first grade, I knew how to read, and I liked reading. And then I'm like, well, I'm gonna try. You know, as we do, we're like, let's try to write something. And so I was always just tinkering around with that. But at. You know, and even in high school, I was working for the town newspaper covering sports, even though I'm not a huge sports person. But I was like, yeah, this is a chance to get paid to write. I'll do this. And so. So I was always interested in that. And, you know, but eventually I realized I didn't really like being a newspaper reporter because I didn't like going and asking people about their loved one getting shot to death and how they feel about it or covering a lot of horrific things. And so I like. I want to try this MFA thing. So I did.

Okay. I do want to talk more about your MFA and also your teaching experience, but. But before we move too far away from your piece, bus stop, I have a Book club question for you. So the formatting of the piece is without paragraph indentation. So it's written as one big paragraph. Talk about that. How did you make that decision?

Well, I'm thinking that it's kind of like just this memory that flows in and you can sort of feel the narrator weaving this narrative back and forth and going from one, jumping from one little detail to the next, until finally it's starting to make sense in, in his head. And so that's what that was. The kind of the feeling I was trying to get out of it is just that, you know, this going. You can see that it's very imagistic and very jumping from one detail and trying to sew all these little details and create this, this little portrait and jumping back. Like, for example, this kid called Big Eared Scotty appears. But then later you find out, oh, Big Eared Scotty not only gets picked on at the bus stop, he gets picked on at home. Like, these kids lives aren't all that great.

Well, your response makes me think about how keeping it all together kind of tucks it all in as one experience, the way that someone would with a memory. Right? Yeah. And as though when they're recounting it to someone else, it would get peppered with these other, other memories because they all kind of merged together to support the response at the end, which is, you know, how the kids handled it.

Yeah, yeah. It's just like this, this chunk of. Of memory Download Zoom here. This is everything I can kind of remember about this. This incident.

Yep. When you first did the first draft, was it in the same shape or did you have paragraph indentations?

It wasn't. It was often. I just. Again, I think in the first draft I was mostly writing under a time limit because we were in this exercise and I was just working with the people in the group and writing almost bullet statements and fragments and trying to flesh out as much as I could and realizing, well, this is not going to be a true story because I don't remember. I'm like, I know I'm mixing up details here, so what can I do to make it a better story? I guess, like now if it's going to be fiction, what can I do to make it engaging and try and try to get a sense of South Florida during those times? Because South Florida is a very different place than if you're in the north at all. And it's just its own place. And I'm trying to capture that a little bit.

Do you think there's Something other than what you were talking about earlier that makes South Florida its own place.

Well, the. I think there's a legacy of like people are getting paid back for the bad things they did. That sounds like a weird thing to say, but where I lived in South Florida, it was once pristine Everglades. A company came in, bought 120 square miles and leveled it. It was, you can look up this town, Cape Coral, and they just leveled it and put in roads and canals and just destroyed the environment. And that's not the only place that happened. The Everglades is just, you know, was, was basically ruined. And it's like there's this, you know, there's got to be some kind of karma there eventually, right? That just, just you've done so much damage and so much disregard to a place that, that it becomes hostile.

And these were people from like the outside? Not necessarily, you know.

Oh yeah, there were people, people who. From the north, land speculators. There's this whole. You can, can read about them. There's lots of articles about the, the Florida landscams of starting in the late 1800s, but through the 60s where people came in, bought land, developed it, but in a, not in an environmentally friendly way and, and sold it and a lot of these places failed. But people came down from the north because they wanted to escape the, you know, the bad weather of the north and thought that Florida would be a Shangri La and it wasn't.

Okay. And then. So the northern part of Florida was culturally different. They didn't have this. Oh yeah, yeah.

Once you get down and, and again, this is, I'm talking about a long time ago. So obviously things have changed. But I know that there's still this distinction between like, let's say Orlando north and, and like south. We were 125 miles south of Tampa, so we were pretty far south. There weren't too many towns below the area that we lived in. A couple, but not too many.

That's interesting. We could talk about that for a while because I know in Florida has a lot of politics involved with the environment and such, but let's talk about your mfa. What were you expecting when you went into that and what did you come out with?

Wow. Yeah, well, I went. I was, I was really kind of lucky. I went. I applied to several places and for some reason I would talk to other people. I was in Massachusetts and so people knew a lot about the UMass program. And James Tate, who had just won the Pulitzer Prize, so he was there and I was like, wow, that's pretty good. And John Edgar Weidman, who had just won the. The novelist who had just won the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, he was. And a couple other really good people. So I'm like, ah, I'll go. And then right after I accepted there, the University of Alaska at Fairbanks called me and said, oh, we want you to come up here. Because I thought it would be a big adventure to go into the middle of the interior. But luckily, because of different circumstances, it it. I took the UMass one and I had a really. I really liked that area of western Massachusetts. I had already been living in eastern Massachusetts for about or nine years, and so I really liked western Massachusetts, and I learned a lot. Aga Shahid Ali was there, and Darrell Wire, as well as Jim Tate. So I got to take workshops with all of them. Natasha Trethewey, who later became the PULIT Laureate of the United States and won the Pulitzer Prize, was there while I was there, and I had, I think, at least one workshop with her and some other really interesting people. Matthew S.A. pruder, who's kind of a nationally known name in poetry, he was there, and I know I had workshops with him. So it was like a really charged atmosphere. And I learned a lot about poetry writing. And for some reason, I'm not really sure why I figured this out. I started taking composition theory courses and teaching in the comp program because Peter Elbow, who was a really big name in composition theory at the time, was there at UMass. And that's really what got me my first job was not, you know, I was okay as a poet, but they were like, oh, you know, composition theory too. And so that's what got me that job.

Yes, everyone has to write an essay, but not everyone has to write a poem.

Exactly. So. So, yeah, so that. And I don't know why, how I figured that out, but I just did. And so I was fortunate because that's what's kept me employed all these years.

Awesome. Well, talk a little bit about what it was like when you first started teaching, because you came out of your experience mostly going in as a poet, but you came out kind of half composition, half poetry, or maybe a quarter composition, whichever part it was. So what was that like to be teaching composition when you'd been basking in the awesomeness of poetry?

It was fun even as an undergraduate. There's a good composition teacher training program at UMass. They have a PhD program in that. But some MFA students, students take some courses and. And teach in that program as well. So. So I was kind of, I was pretty well prepared and I. The first three years I was not where I am now. I was at a different small school in, in the western part of Pennsylvania and I kind of liked it. It's a, it's a lot of work, but it's, it's the place where you can see a lot of growth in one semester. If you're, if you are a dedicated teacher and you can get your students to do the things that they need to do, you'll, you'll see this kind of like, not with everybody, but with like the majority. You'll see this light go on and you'll see that they have gained much more confidence in their writing. So that, so it's very rewarding. It's also a very time consuming work. But yeah, it's, it's kind of fun. I still enjoy doing it. I'll be teaching a couple of classes in the fall.

So you have been teaching composition for quite a while. And then after, after teaching some composition, you also started teaching creative writing, right?

Well, I've always done both.

Oh, okay.

Yeah. Even in my first job, I was still able to teach creative writing. So I've always. And even as an, even as a graduate student, I was able to teach a creative writing class. So.

Nice.

Always done both.

That's wonderful. Can you talk a little bit about changes that you've seen either in composition classrooms or in creative writing classrooms?

I, you know, students just live in a. Like I started at this school in 1999. I started at the other school in 1996, and the Internet was like kind of new and people didn't carry cell phones. It's just a whole different world. And so you can't expect people to be the same. And students. So I have to adapt to them. Right. It's not like they don't have to adapt to me because they're, they're who they are.

Right.

So I, so I'm always trying to. I'm not one of those people who's always teaching the same thing for 10 years. I try to switch it up all the time. One of the things in the last few years is, even in my composition classes is I integrate graphic novels because I understand that if I bring a 250 page book about the Holocaust into my class, everybody's going to drop my class and nobody's going to learn anything. But if I bring Mouse by Art Spiegelman into that class and they can see the visual clues and start to understand, oh, this is pretty complex. What's going on here. And then they have to write a research paper on some aspect and it could be like, for example, I had a student who is on the spectrum and she last semester wrote about Asperger the, the Nazi doctor who the Asperger syndrome was named after. And she's like, this is me and I want to find out who this person was and why he did the things he did. And so that was like kind of an empowering assignment for her to, to, to take charge of that and, and find out more about this person. So, so I kind of like, oh well, they get a lot out of the graphic novels and they understand the visual clues because we live in a visual world. So they can start to see visual clues as well as the writing and then they have to translate it and figure it out.

Yeah, I teach composition as well and I also love it and I love reinventing my teaching and my topics pretty much every year. And like you said, because you have to meet the students where they are and that makes it constantly a challenge, which is also interesting. And I have often thought about using graphic novels and now you've just inspired me to go ahead and do it. I've used like picto essays and those are often research based. And I think that, I think that's really inspiring to think about whatever you can pull in that you're excited to buy. And if you're excited, then they're probably also going to be excited and also thinking about what it is that they, the toolkit that they come in with and helping them build on that. And yeah, not expecting them to do stuff that is probably just not reasonable. Like you said, a 200 page book on something. Because a lot of students have jobs and life and it's just fun, fun to think about how to meet the students where they are. So that's cool. Talk a little bit about your creative writing classes.

So we offer both a major and a minor here at, at the Bloomsburg campus. And so we have what we did. Well, I guess it was a while ago now, probably like 12 years ago. A colleague and I who were brought in to start the creative writing program in, in 1999. So we, you know, were both, you know, MFA and actually she has a PhD from Houston in creative writing. And so we, you know, pretty well experienced and we, we put together a program and after a few years we're like, there's something missing. And what was missing was that our students didn't really know the genres that well when they went to, to write them. You know, it's like, oh, you haven't read enough of especially creative nonfiction or poetry. I would ask a student, so who's your favorite poet? And they would say like, Dave Matth. Man. I'm like, stop, stop. Okay, but, and, and so what we, what the, like the kind of the, the center that holds everything together is like before you take a poetry workshop class the semester before you take a poetry literature class with a survey class, the same way with non fiction and the same way with fiction. So short story writing class. So, so those are kind of fun. I've been teaching the poetry class a lot and letting a colleague teach the poetry workshop. And then we have a junior and senior year seminar. And I've been teaching that because we found that our students, again, responding to the needs of the students, they were really doing well while they were here and then they were doing well five years out. But they were struggling for a couple of years afterwards. Like after graduation, we're like, oh yeah, because they're not accountants. They don't just like go, okay, now my job is accounting, so we have to help them. So we developed this junior year seminar and tweaked our senior year seminar to get them to think about translating the things that they're learning into job skills and talk to them about opportunities, get them to the career center, do all kinds of things, and also talk to them about, hey, there's this really cool graduate program and instructional design where you could get, you know, really, you know, do this in a year and then get this really high paying job that's really in demand, you know. So we, we talked to them about vocational things a little bit more in that junior year seminar as well as getting them to publish, to send out work to get published and talking about that whole process. And I think that's been really helpful. I think it's given a lot of students a bit of a boost so they're not just floundering for, you know, two, three years after graduation, working at, you know, a minimum wage job someplace. They're like, oh, okay, here's what I need to be doing. This is the direction I need to go.

For sure. That's really beautiful. I think that I can imagine your students would appreciate that quite a bit once they get out in the world and they realize, yeah, that is helpful stuff. They told us, you know, they guided us through. That's neat. I like that. What kind of stuff are you working on yourself right now?

Well, I just, I published a book last fall and then I've just been working on Some trying to work on some non fiction because one of the interesting things, this would be a whole thing in itself. But I only recently, like in like right before the pandemic started, I was able to find out who my biological father was. My family kept that a secret from me for many years, but kind of the shorthand is my birth mother put me up for adoption and sort of arranged for her childless older sister to raise me as her own. And it was all to be a secret, but it wasn't really a secret. Eventually, you know, things always come out and. But one of the interesting things was my father was obviously black, but they're not. They're Pennsylvania mostly Pennsylvania German, few other things, but. But mostly that. And so I was raised within this family, kind of looking different, even though I was biologically part of the family, but not told that I was until like I was. I found out as a teenager. And so it's like all complexity. But I've been researching both lines of my family and I'm able to go back into like, into the 16 on my German side, into the 1600s and even farther, but I can't read the language. Yeah, it's like some of it's in German, some of those in French, but with those relatives. And then I've been able to find one African American relative who is listed on in the 1780 census as a free mulatto. Right. So one of his parents was. Or somebody in his family was white, and he's listed as free in Virginia in Tidewater, Virginia in 1780. And then I look at the subsequent generations and they are. They go back and forth between mixed race and. And black, depending on who's taking the census, but they're always listed as free. So there's this whole, whole line of people who remain free in the south up until the end of slavery. And I'm like, this is kind of interesting. So I want to research those folks and, and others, but it's really hard if people were enslaved. It's. It's pretty hard to find out more information about them, but. So I'm fortunate that there's this line of free people that I can sort of, because the, the guy that I. His name was Dempsey Reed, the guy who was born in 1780, and it looks like he owned property that he had in the state, like maybe some kind of store or something or a mill where people owed him money when he died. So the state, because there's this kind of probate document from the courts that is online and so you can See where different people owe him money and so forth. And I'm like, this is. He must have been an interesting person. So I'm. That's the project I want to research at the research part now, but I want to write more about those folks.

That sounds fascinating and emotionally, like, challenging and rewarding for you, I would think, to be finding out more about yourself.

Yeah, I mean, it's. For a long time, there was this big unknown, like, I, you know, sort of knew, obviously knew that my father was African American and. But I didn't really know that. That's all I knew. And I, you know, so. But we have this thing called science, and you can, you know, put your saliva in a tube and send it away for not much money, and they'll tell you a little bit more. And luckily, after it took a while, maybe two years, but I got a match, and the woman turned out to be my cousin. And then she's like, oh, let me talk to you some. Some of my aunties and find out. And then I found out.

Wow. Wow, that's really awesome. So I know you have a website, so people want to keep in touch with you online. They can find you there. And they also have an Instagram. You have an Instagram?

Yes.

Okay, cool.

And I'm on Facebook just with my name.

All right. So they could look for you there and kind of keep an eye out for more to hear more about your family story and what you do with it.

Okay. Yes.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining me today. It's been really great talking to you.

Yes, thanks very much for having me.

Thanks for stopping by the audio Town Square of the Washington Square Review. Until next time, this has been Washington Square on air from Lansing Community College. To find out more about a writer's community and literary journal, visit lcc.edu. wSR writing is messy, but do it anyway.