We were lucky to catch up with Dave Newman recently and have shared our conversation below.

Dave, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you share a story about the kindest thing someone has done for you and why it mattered so much or was so meaningful to you?

I have a letter of recommendation from Gerald Locklin thumbtacked to a piece of corkboard in my office. The letter must be 20 years old and the paper has started to go brittle and turn brown. It says the stuff that letters of recommendations say, but better, but more personal.

Gerald Locklin, a California author who wrote really accessible poetry that was also smart and terrifically funny, was one of the first poets I discovered on my own, away from the classroom. I found one of his chapbooks on a library bookshelf when I was 22 and just starting to read seriously. A chapbook is small collection of poems. In the 90s, chapbooks were usually paper folded over into a pamphlet-looking thing. I pulled the Locklin chapbook off the shelf because it looked ridiculous. I’d never seen a chapbook before, and it reminded of a church bulletin or a PTA newsletter. It felt light in my hands. Cheap. Not worth its space on the shelf. But, between the black and white covers, on pages that looked run off in someone’s garage, I found brilliant poems. I read the whole thing, standing in the library. It took five or so minutes. I turned back to the beginning and read it again. I checked the chapbook out. I re-read it a bunch of times. I immediately started to track down Locklin’s other books, all on small presses.

What I wanted to do when I was 22 years old was to be an artist. I wanted to read poems, I wanted to write write poems, I wanted to get drunk, I wanted to get laid. Then I wanted to write more poems about getting drunk and laid.

All of those things were already in Gerald Locklin’s books! He sounded like the smartest guy at the bar, or the jock about to give up sports to read, or maybe the funniest teacher ever, someone who understood art in such a way that he could write about an endless number of painters and paintings in an illuminating way without sounding like a pretentious known-it-all. He was married in some poems. Divorced in others. He had wives and mistresses and seemed to love both equally, except when he loved neither. Locklin was my dad’s age, so 30 years older than me. I knew people who lived and loved like that, some of them writers, but they never wrote with the pain and honesty that Gerry did. It was like finding a muse. I’d thought muses, for straight guys, were supposed to be lovely women. Gerald Locklin was about to become my muse, a gateway to muses, a way to see that anything could be art.

In my tiny one room apartment, I immediately started writing poems inspired by Locklin. Then I wrote poems about Gerald Locklin. Then I took my favorite Gerald Locklin book, The Firebird Poems, to a tattoo artist, a guy named Moose, and had him tattoo the cover, a firebird swooping with sharp talons, on my shoulder. I immediately put the whole experience into a poem and sent it to The Wormwood Review, a literary journal based out of California, famous for publishing Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, and a bunch of amazing underground writers who still deserve more attention than they’ve received.

It took a while for my poem to appear. Not long after publication, I opened my apartment mailbox, which was usually filled with bills and junk mail, maybe a small press book, and found a letter from Locklin. Lockin’s letters look they were written with his toes, a lackadaisical scribble that takes multiple readings to decipher. I must have checked the return address 20 times between the mailbox and my apartment, trying to confirm it was a letter from one of my poetry heroes and not a madman’s scribblings. I stepped into my apartment and ripped open the letter. It was Locklin. He’d seen my poem praising him in The Wormwood Review and wanted to say thanks.

We exchanged a lot of letters after that. He came to Pittsburgh for a conference, and I was lucky to spend time with him. He was funny and sweet and we swapped a lot of stories. We disagreed on a lot of things and agreed on a lot more. I was always respectful and showed him a lot of deference when it came to writing and literature. He knew so much more than me. He wrote so much better than I did. He never made me feel like either of those things were true. He was a blast to be around, telling jokes and adventures. He’d quit drinking but still liked to be around drinkers, and I was drinking a lot at the time. He wanted me to take him to a bar, so I did. He drank a lot of Diet Coke. We talked about bars and laughed.

I had a hard time becoming a writer. I grew up in a house where the only books were the Bible and books on the Bible. I attended a couple community colleges, and graduated from a branch campus. In graduate school, one professor asked me to leave the program because I didn’t need to be there to write poems about working as a janitor, even though I was working as a janitor and writing about it. Another professor, an old guy obsessed with the politics of race and gender, kept telling me, “Straight white guys have had it good for a long time,” meaning I shouldn’t expect anything, even though he was a straight white guy and the head of the writing program and the poetry editor at the university’s press. This was all terrifically confusing and disappointing to a working-class kid trying to make a better life from poetry and education. I’d taken out a pile of student loans to attend poetry graduate school and had started to realize what a mistake that was.

Into all this mess stepped Gerald Locklin. He understood the politics and dynamics of the poetry world and of the academy. He understood my frustration. I’m sure he had his own frustrations but he seldom complained and he always steered me towards places where I could be accepted.

Around this time, I asked an undergraduate poetry professor for a letter of recommendation. I’d gotten hired as a lecturer–a bad-paying job with a one-year contract that sounded like gold, like a step on the ladder too success– to teach writing. All I needed was a perfunctory letter of recommendation. When I reached out to my former professor, she responded with a message that said, in total, “Sorry, fluish.” I loved my professor. I thought her poems made no sense but I admired her success. She’d never been reliable, seldom provided comments on poems I turned in, and would say things like, “I must have lost the poems, but they were great.” I knew she was a mess, but I also thought she could be depended upon in moments of serious need. She was the opposite of dependable. Sorry, fluish.

Gerald Locklin was dependable. Alcoholic. Wild. But dependable. He was practical and knew how to negotiate things I barely knew existed. He wrote me a letter of recommendation, tailored specifically to the job.

Years later, he wrote me another letter of recommendation, unprompted. It came in the mail, multiple copies, all on university stationary, without explanation.

It’s the one I have thumbtacked in my office.

Gerald Locklin taught for over four decades. Imagine the number of students who needed his recommendations, his endorsements, his blurbs for the backs of their books. This sounds silly but I’m sure he would have been a a better writer, a more successful writer, if he hadn’t written so much praise about others.

It’s hard to find kindness in the world, genuine kindness.

Gerald Locklin died during the pandemic. He had bad lungs, and Covid made it impossible for him to breathe.

I’ve written a bunch of books, I know what that takes.

I miss Gerald Locklin every day.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m not a brand.

I understand the importance of branding, even for the smallest and least successful of creatives. I also hate the word “creatives” which feels like a business word for someone trying to create a brand.

I am always impressed by artists who can make the leap into business and monetize what they do, but it mostly feels phony to me.

I’m a writer. I write. I love to write. I have lived in the same place my whole life and want to tell those stories, the stories of people who don’t even know that words like “branding” and “creative” exist. I write about working class people, folks who wake up and dream off time alone, a space where they’re not working or taking care of their family. I stay true to that.

I am most proud of not branding myself, of not calling my art a product.

Most of my creative life has been pushing back against the things that professors and publishers and agents want. People with money and success, people who use words like “branded” and “creative”, often miss the point of art.

Here you are, standing alone.

That’s a good place to be.

It pays zero dollars and you get to say whatever the fuck you want.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I’m working class. My wife is working class. Her mom was a nurse who mostly didn’t work but stayed home to be a mom. My mom never held a fulltime job. My dad worked in factories. My wife’s dad worked in factories.

I’ve published nine books. My wife’s published seven books. We’d never published any books before we were married.

Now, we wake up most mornings, talk about the practical things that most couples talk about, groceries and bills and chores, then we complain about how unsuccessful we are as writers.

Why the fuck does the world not read us?

Then we step back and laugh.

Sixteen books between us. Writing more on the days that allow. Fighting for those days. The most rewarding thing is that it’s all rewarding.

Buy my books. Buy my wife’s books.

Or don’t.

We write and keep writing. Then we write some more.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

All of my books have been published on small presses. I have an agent. He used to submit my manuscripts to big publishers and the big publishers were like: meh, no thanks.

That was disappointing, because there’s a lot more money if you’re on a big press.

But being on a small press has its advantages. You meet wildly diverse people from crazy artistic backgrounds. The thing I love most is that I have some input on the covers of my books.

My friend Louie owns in a bar in Pittsburgh. It’s a cool bar, with bands and poetry readings and gay dudes having dance parties and open-mic comedy shows. My friend Louie made it that way.

I’ve known Louie since the 8th grade. He was an athlete who was also a badass. Football. College hockey. When we were young, if you hit on his girlfriend, and she felt offended, he’d come in with his fists and take your teeth. Later, he learned to play guitar. He wrote songs. He learned to play bass. He learned to paint, something I never imagined someone could do who came from where we came from.

This was all casual. I never said to Louie, “Hey, I write books.” He never said, “Hey, I make paintings.”

We did those things while we stayed alive by working jobs.

When time allowed, we played music together.

When time allowed, we drank until we fell down.

I always believed in him, no matter what his dreams.

I hope–no, know–he believed me, no matter what my dreams.

I have three books with covers based on paintings that my pal Louie did. It’s the best feeling. You meet someone. You love someone. You are both born to stock shelves and punch angry strangers then suddenly you both find a way to be creative.

If I was on a bigger press, my books would look like the books you see in Target and grocery stores. The covers would be mowed grass and shiny mountains.

But the covers of my books look like the world I live in, the world my pal Louie lives in. He painted them that way.

That’s a gift I didn’t imagine when I started writing.

Here I am, a guy who spent the night before high school graduation in a jail cell in Turtle Creek, talking about his pal who paints the covers of his books. What a blessing.

I love you, Louie. Thank you thank you thank you.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.davenewmanwritesbooks.net
• Instagram: DaveNewmanWritesBooks
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dave.newman.3760/

Image Credits

All photos by Phelan Newman