A Q & A with Joe Paddock

1) Where did you grow up? What was that like?  When did you become interested in writing?
Where did you go to school – public school and college?

            I grew up in Litchfield, Minnesota, to which after long absence I’ve returned. In fact, with my writer wife Nancy Paddock, I am now living in the house in which I grew up. In the 1940s and ‘50s, Litchfield, like most other small towns in our region, was a thriving community, more self-contained than is possible now. I’ve since realized that the sense of community closeness I was largely unconscious of back then made a greater impress on me than I could have imagined. In my childhood, I was surrounded by grassroots storytellers, and the words of those elder tellers still resonate in me and in my writing.

            I attended public school in Litchfield--one through 12 in the same building--and though arts education was limited, the teaching there was substantial.

            When I was in the second grade, an older neighborhood kid took me to our old Carnegie library, the first trip of a great many to come. Amazed by all the books in the stacks, I asked my friend where they all came from. “People write them,” he said. What a great way to make a living, I thought. I was hooked, and have never much deviated from the commitment that took hold in me on that day.

            While growing up, I was as interested in athletics as academics, and I went to the University of Minnesota on a combination athletic-academic scholarship. While there, I wrestled, got a degree in philosophy, and studied under poets Morgan Blum, Allen Tate, and Howard Nemerov (who would later become U.S. Poet Laureate).

2) How did you specifically become interested in writing about the environment? 

            As were many of his friends, my father was a passionate outdoorsman, and he mediated my relationship with nature from the time I could first toddle along with him. Like many environmental writers in their youth, my connection to nature took on an almost mystical intensity, and I deeply loved the little lakes and hardwood hills of Meeker County. My first publication, written the summer after I graduated from the University, was a comic short story in Sports Afield, heavily illustrated by an artist named Thorton Utz.

            Later, needing a course correction in my life, I spent much of a six-year period living in a primitive cabin on Minnesota’s wild Kettle River. My focus during those years was on nature observation, meditation, and dream-work, and it was then that I first began to regularly publish poetry.

3) What arts organizations have you been involved with in the past and also currently? 

COMPAS, SMAHC, the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the Creative Writing Department of the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Rural Arts Initiative, Self Expressing Earth.... Currently, I facilitate the Litchfield Area Writers Group, which I founded in 1990,  and I am scheduling readings for the Red Dragonfly Press which is housed in the Anderson Center in Red Wing and which has become a publisher of my poetry.

            While working with environmental organizations, my approach has always been to educate by way of poetry and story, a strategy I used while working with the American Farm Project and the Land Stewardship Project, and in giving programs in a great many other environmental settings. As Vice President of the Ernest C. Oberholtzer Foundation, having written the biography of wilderness preservationist Oberholtzer, I sometimes function as “keeper of the story” for the organization.

4) You have been a longtime advocate for the arts in SW Minnesota.  How are some of the ways you have helped influence the arts?  
You have been a long time member of SMAHC?  How have you been involved with SMAHC over the years? What is your history with SMAHC?

            In 1975, I became one of two first National Endowment for the Arts “Poets in the Community” in the little SMAHC-area town of Olivia. This was a pilot project funded by the NEA, with help from SMAHC, and administered by COMPAS. Olivia’s local arts group was intensely involved and very capable, but this was something new and fiercely resisted by many in the community. I soon found that the project couldn’t be about me as poet, and that it must have to do with enhancing the creativity of people in the community and in digging into and bringing to light the greatness of the community’s own story. It was then that I became an oral historian, and The Things We Know Best, the 140,000 word book that I collected and edited (with the help of a truly dedicated support committee) won the day for the project. In the end, the city council, which had previously been hostile, gave me the keys to the city.

            The lessons learned during my year in Olivia were burned into my nerve tree, and enhancing the creativity of others and helping to unearth local story became basic to the approach I would use while working in the myriad of projects, which followed. The first of these would be two one-year SMAHC-sponsored (NEA-funded) regional poetry projects, which I shared with my poet wife Nancy. I remember that during the first of these we worked in 42 different communities, providing readings and workshops and working as poets in the classroom. SMAHC published and distributed a chapbook of my poetry during each of those years. Other pin-offs included touring the region with Pittsburgh Symphony cellist, Jennifer Langham, and working as poets in residence for Minnesota Public Radio at Worthington.

            In the following years, while working with the American Farm Project and the Land Stewardship Project, I was often involved with short-term SMAHC projects and programs, including a number of oral history workshops given to communities in the region.

            After we moved back to Litchfield, SMAHC helped to fund the “Recovering the Story” project which I coordinated and which led to an extensive oral history collection covering much of the 20th Century, a produced play I wrote from this content, and the Litchfield Area Writers Group, the members of which have now published 13 books. COMPAS published the first, SMAHC provided a grant to publish the second, and from that time on, we’ve sold well enough to become self-sustaining.

 5) How has the arts impacted your life?
You have had an impact on many people over the years.   Tell us about that.

The arts, and I’m speaking here mainly about poetry and local story, have become so much a part of the fabric of myself that I no longer think of them as an impact from outside myself.

As for my impact on other people, it may not be appropriate for me to say a lot about this. However, I will say that I have always loved to help enhance the creativity of others, less that they will become professional writers than that they will become more fully aware of and connected to the creative dimension in themselves. In a similar vein, I take real satisfaction in helping others to more fully discover the story in which they are grounded.

Read the Joe Paddock essay, LOCAL STORY AND THE POWER OF ART.