Coming of age as a poet in Eau Claire

[gentle music]

– Nicholas Gulig: In central west Wisconsin, a pair of rivers rose as separate streams and met.

The city built a park around the confluence, the water intertwined and often shining, the shoreline wooded and kept up, where I was born, raised among the farmers and the forests and the punks.

I left.

[upbeat rock music] [typewriter clicking] Like Lorine Niedecker, the town where I was born defines itself through water.

For her, an island that is not in fact an island, a place that bears the name of a people who no longer live there.

And for me, a place where rivers meet.

Because the city’s largest factory, the Uniroyal tire plant, closed when I was young, the Eau Claire of the early ’90s felt largely solitary and insignificant.

In my memory, the streets downtown were always empty.

The world felt somewhere else.

My dad moved to Eau Claire first as a student attending the university.

And then, in 1969, as a conscientious objector to the war in Vietnam, the draft board returned my father to his alma mater for mandatory public service.

It was there he met my mom, an exchange student from Thailand studying ceramics.

A second-generation immigrant, my relationship to the community and culture of Wisconsin has always been obscure.

Growing up, I both did and didn’t feel connected to my state.

Home was somewhere else.

[school bell ringing] My mother recalls a moment I came home from grade school, distraught by the fact that I wasn’t white.

I don’t recall this incident myself, but there are other iterations of the experience that I do recall, memories in which the distance between myself and the broader world of the American Midwest felt strained by differences, both real and imaginary.

One of the first places I didn’t feel estranged was within the worlds and words of poets.

On nights I couldn’t sleep, my dad would sit on the bed and read me poems.

Thus set a young age, the first experience of truly belonging somewhere happened in the ebb and flow of my father’s voice.

But poetry built a home for me in other ways as well.

The first community with which I felt a palpable affinity was a group of punks and artists I met in high school.

They, like me, went about their lives largely disconnected from the culture happening around them.

Because the songs on the radio felt dead to us, we started our own bands in our parents’ garages.

We published our own books and literary zines on the copiers at Kinko’s.

We held readings in our bedrooms or in basements, or on of the tops of downtown roofs until the cops descended and scattered us away.

– Young Nicholas Gulig: “There was a Saturday night once “in early early April, “and even the sun seemed as systematic as everything else.

“We waited for it to go down and let us be.

We spent some time wishing upon Andy Christopherson to show…” – Nicholas: There was and is an inherent freedom in the act of making art.

For me, it was through the acts of making and conjunction that a new, more vibrant community arose.

[upbeat rock music] The poems and music of my friends became the spaces in which the place where I was born began again to feel like home.

In art, I found my tribe.

[typewriter knob cranking] Ironically, poems were also the reason that I left.

[plane engine whooshing] Because I wanted to be a writer, and because art felt very much like something that mostly happens somewhere else, my pursuit of poetry took me around the world.

First to Montana and to Iowa, and then to Colorado, and eventually back to my mother’s home country of Thailand.

How could I have known then I’d find myself returning?

[gentle music] – Announcer: Major funding for Welcome Poets is provided by: Fort Atkinson Community Foundation, Peter and Connie Roop, donors to the Focus Fund for the Arts, and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.