Jonathan Gillman is the head of the Theater Department at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts, a public magnet high school, and the Director of Looking In Theatre, a "teen interactive social issue" theater group. In addition to poetry, he writes fiction, non-fiction, plays, and children's stories.
Visit his web site at www.MyFatherHumming.com
BooksAndAuthor.com: Why do you write?
Jonathan Gillman: To make sense of the world. Years ago I said: we write, the better to understand ourselves, the universe, and ourselves in the universe.
I do this in a narrative (a story) of some kind of another. We love stories—all of us. It is through them that we understand things. Doing this often involves figuring out things about myself, although I am usually not aware of that until much later.
BooksAndAuthor.com: Who are your literary influences?
Jonathan Gillman: That’s a difficult one to answer. There are people, and books, that I read and re-read many times. Sometimes they “influence” my writing, in that it feels like they spark it—but sometimes I just enjoy them. I have, for instance, read One Hundred Years of Solitude probably a dozen times, but know I can never write like that. When I re-started writing poetry, there were some people who, immediately after I read them, something was freed in me to write—Ethridge Knight, Francois Villon. Right now I keep re-reading the classic Chinese poet (in translation, of course) Tu Fu. I loved his dense simplicity and his basic humanity.
In terms of structure, a very strong influence is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, particularly his Partitas for solo piano, which, as he says, are composed of “little parts”. That’s how I write, building, I hope, something rather complex from a series of simple “little parts”.
Also contributing to that is my work in theater. I am the director of Looking In Theatre, a teen interactive social issue theater which creates simple short scenes about issues teens face, and does a series of them. For every performance we tie together these unrelated scenes in a way that tells a story and accumulates. Doing that over and over for years has very much infused how I create and structure my writing, whether it’s fiction, non-fiction, plays or poetry.
But I also love to return to the sing-song verse of the Mother Goose rhymes—what I call “people’s poetry”.
When I’m writing, however, I’m not thinking about any of that. I’m thinking about life, and people, and what they do and why they do it, and how best to tell that particular story in a way that feels most right to me.
BooksAndAuthor.com: What inspired My Father Humming ?
Jonathan Gillman: My father had Alzheimer’s. Here was a person who had been brilliant, and his brilliant qualities seemed to have disappeared. I really started writing to try to figure out: is the same person still there, we just haven’t figured out how to connect with him, or has he become someone different? In the process of writing this book, I discovered that he was still there. In the title poem, even though a casual observer might have said he had little left that was “human”, he could still “make music”, by humming along as I played his piano—he could still make art, which is a very human quality.
BooksAndAuthor.com: What is it about the poetry genre you enjoy?
Jonathan Gillman: I like the way poetry can say so much with what appears to be so little—its quality of “distilled essence”. It can, for instance, sometimes summarize or elucidate an entire lifetime in a phrase. It also illuminates things, sees and names the beauty that there is so much of, all around us, and we often are too busy or distracted to notice.
Even in the decline of my father to a terrible disease, there is music and beauty and “poetry”, and sadness and love and joy. All writing can do that—all art can. Poetry does it very economically.
I do have to say, though, that before I started writing My Father, Humming I had not written poetry in years. A few months earlier, I came back to writing poetry. Then, when it became clear that I needed to write about my father, it was equally clear that poetry was the way to do it.
There were other fortuitous circumstances, like this, that led to my writing My Father, Humming—as if something larger than me wanted it written, and I seemed to be the one to write it—and, in doing so, to speak for—and tell the story of—lots of others who have experienced something similar in someone they love.
To write something that touches so many so profoundly is very humbling. It made me realize that the process is not about me expressing myself, so much as tapping into something much larger that we are all part of and we all share, and doing so in a way that helps others.
The actual writing of the book was “easy”. Getting myself into the place where I was able to write it was what was difficult. It took years, maybe even my whole life up to that point.
BooksAndAuthor.com: If you had to name one poem in My Father Humming , What would it be and why?
Jonathan Gillman: I referred to “My Father, Humming, II”, the story of my father almost choking to death as he attempted to stop my playing his piano the wrong way, and ended up humming along with me, as “we go on like this/the two of us/making music/until the piece is done.” That is the key poem for the book; without it, and that event, there is no book—in it, we connect in a way we never had before.
The one right before it, “Anniversary”, is also pretty amazing; it demonstrates all the qualities of the depth of a long-term relationship as one of the partners approaches death.
However, what stands out about the book is not the individual poems, but the accumulation of them, as they overlap, play variations on each other, and build. The cumulative effect of this collection of little parts is much greater than the sum of those parts.
BooksAndAuthor.com: Tell us the process of turning My Father Humming into an audio book.
Jonathan Gillman: I feel poetry is meant to be spoken, and to be listened to, not merely to be read on the page. When I write, I hear the words and phrases in my head. Although the themes of the book are complex and universal, the writing of “My Father, Humming” is really very simple; it’s written in a very conversational style, as if someone was speaking it. I am also a theater person, and know the power of spoken word. I was very comfortable reading the poems to others and, the first time I did so, was surprised by how strongly these words resonated with so many. Turning it into an audiobook seemed both necessary and simple: I did the work, made the words accessible to the listener. All s/he has to do is sit back, listen and absorb.
BooksAndAuthor.com: What have readers been saying about My Father Humming ?
Jonathan Gillman: When I wrote the book, I thought it was about my father, and mother—his decline, her caregiving, my acceptance of him, and of myself. When I started reading in public, I was surprised to learn that I was telling the story of many other people as well. The book resonates with a wide variety of people, of every age and demographic.
A man I know gave the book to his 91 year old grandfather, who has never read poetry in his life and only talks to his grandson about World War II—but is also caring for his wife with Alzheimer’s. He read it in one night, and then came to talk to his grandson about it. The first thing he said: he didn’t realize so many others were dealing with this too; he thought he was the only one.
Here are some other sample responses:
This is a wonderful book. It feels like you wrote it for me, without knowing it.
This book is everything I wanted to express, so now I don’t have to do so.
Your poetry gave me great comfort these past few weeks. Great comfort.
It’s beautiful. My father died with Alzheimer’s six months ago, after a very difficult time. So much of this rings true.
Your words helped me cope with my mother’s passing.
After I heard you read, I went home and talked to my mother about her father; he has Alzheimer’s. (A teenager)
It is a book of hope, solace, and healing.
It speaks to the commonality in us all.
I recommend this book particularly to men who have lost their fathers, but it is not just for men, it is for anyone who has lost someone.
Buy this book. It will carry you through any journey of grief.
The book also received some more official recognition: It was one of WordBasket’s dozen “Best” for 2013, “books that linger long enough to matter.” As the reviewer says, in part, “Gillman uses poetry to expunge everything unnecessary from his father's story, exposing a taut, sinewy progress through his father's disintegration.”
It was a Kirkus Reviews Starred Review, “Clean, spare poems that resonate”, and was a 2014 Kirkus Indie Book of the Year.
For it I was a finalist for the 2014 Paterson Poetry Prize, won by Billy Collins, and at the awards ceremony got to read with Mr Collins.
But it’s the spontaneous feedback from “ordinary” people that means the most to me.
BooksAndAuthor.com: Obviously music seems to be the thread of My Father Humming - Did you grow up in a house with a love of music? Do you play and write music?
Jonathan Gillman: The first poem in the book is entitled “A House with Music In it”—my mother stepping into the house and hearing my father playing—and imagining what it will be like when she comes into a house without music in it.
Yes. Our house had lots of music in it. My father was trained as a classical pianist—he had a certificate from Juilliard. He ended up making his living as a mathematician, but he played almost his entire life.
I grew up hearing it, at all hours of the day and night. It’s in my bones, especially the piano music of Bach and Beethoven. My mother is a singer—but I was taught no music, I think so I could have a more “normal” childhood than my father had.
About 14 years ago I bought myself an upright piano and taught myself to play. I play the same notes (Bach & Beethoven) that my father did, but play them very differently. In the process of teaching myself to play, at first I played very slowly, as I gradually learned the instrument. At some point I thought, “Ok, that’s not how it’s supposed to go,” and started to speed up. My wife, who had been listening from the other room, said, “Don’t. Don’t play it like that.”
“But that’s the way it’s supposed to—“
“I know. But in the slow way you play, you make a different kind of music that is really good.”
So I continued to play slowly, finding my own music in the same notes played at a very different tempo.
That’s what my father almost choked about in the title poem: he knew it was wrong. In fact, when he played that piece the right way, it took four-and-a-half minutes. When I play it it takes twenty-three. Same notes—but very different music.
I don’t write music. I wanted to but haven’t been able to unlock that key. However, the way I play is a creative re-creation.
And now our house has music in it too.
BooksAndAuthor.com: What was the last book you read?
Jonathan Gillman: “Future Primal” by Louis Herman. The author examines us moving forward by also looking backwards, that our future is partially contained in connecting to our past, particularly, for him, how we lived, survived, and sustained ourselves back at our most basic. It is an idea I had already been thinking about, which is why I read it: that we are still connected to our remote ancestors and primitive state, even as we do things no previous generation ever imagined possible.
BooksAndAuthor.com: What's next?
Jonathan Gillman: I always have lots of projects going. They tend to take a while to come to completion. Some at the top of my list:
A “dramatic” reading version of My Father, Humming, for two voices, the son and the wife—almost half the poems are already from her perspective. To adapt this for audiobook, or stage, or DVD, with piano accompaniment—some of the music played the “right” way, some of it played by me, “my” way. I have recently been working on “scoring” it.
A Year of ‘Looking In’, a book that follows ten actors through a year of being in Looking In Theatre, as their issues intertwine and overlap with those of the audiences they are performing for. The book is done but needs editing.
A children’s picture book, How The Creatures Came To Be. The text is written. Illustrations are being done by classes of students at our arts elementary school. I am excited to see what they will bring to it.
Letters to A Parent—How to Teach (or Think, or Live) Like An Artist, a work about teaching and education which is still very much in progress. It was inspired by 3 students—of the 28 who graduated in theater from our arts high school this year—telling us, “Coming here saved my life.” Hearing that was both chilling and humbling, and made me appreciate that when it does that teaching might be more of a sacred calling than just a job. In the book I explore what it is we do at our arts high school (where I am the head of the theater department), how we do it, and if that might be of value to others. It is written as a series of letters to the parent of one of those whose life we saved.
Visit his web site at www.MyFatherHumming.com
BooksAndAuthor.com: Why do you write?
Jonathan Gillman: To make sense of the world. Years ago I said: we write, the better to understand ourselves, the universe, and ourselves in the universe.
I do this in a narrative (a story) of some kind of another. We love stories—all of us. It is through them that we understand things. Doing this often involves figuring out things about myself, although I am usually not aware of that until much later.
BooksAndAuthor.com: Who are your literary influences?
Jonathan Gillman: That’s a difficult one to answer. There are people, and books, that I read and re-read many times. Sometimes they “influence” my writing, in that it feels like they spark it—but sometimes I just enjoy them. I have, for instance, read One Hundred Years of Solitude probably a dozen times, but know I can never write like that. When I re-started writing poetry, there were some people who, immediately after I read them, something was freed in me to write—Ethridge Knight, Francois Villon. Right now I keep re-reading the classic Chinese poet (in translation, of course) Tu Fu. I loved his dense simplicity and his basic humanity.
In terms of structure, a very strong influence is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, particularly his Partitas for solo piano, which, as he says, are composed of “little parts”. That’s how I write, building, I hope, something rather complex from a series of simple “little parts”.
Also contributing to that is my work in theater. I am the director of Looking In Theatre, a teen interactive social issue theater which creates simple short scenes about issues teens face, and does a series of them. For every performance we tie together these unrelated scenes in a way that tells a story and accumulates. Doing that over and over for years has very much infused how I create and structure my writing, whether it’s fiction, non-fiction, plays or poetry.
But I also love to return to the sing-song verse of the Mother Goose rhymes—what I call “people’s poetry”.
When I’m writing, however, I’m not thinking about any of that. I’m thinking about life, and people, and what they do and why they do it, and how best to tell that particular story in a way that feels most right to me.
BooksAndAuthor.com: What inspired My Father Humming ?
Jonathan Gillman: My father had Alzheimer’s. Here was a person who had been brilliant, and his brilliant qualities seemed to have disappeared. I really started writing to try to figure out: is the same person still there, we just haven’t figured out how to connect with him, or has he become someone different? In the process of writing this book, I discovered that he was still there. In the title poem, even though a casual observer might have said he had little left that was “human”, he could still “make music”, by humming along as I played his piano—he could still make art, which is a very human quality.
BooksAndAuthor.com: What is it about the poetry genre you enjoy?
Jonathan Gillman: I like the way poetry can say so much with what appears to be so little—its quality of “distilled essence”. It can, for instance, sometimes summarize or elucidate an entire lifetime in a phrase. It also illuminates things, sees and names the beauty that there is so much of, all around us, and we often are too busy or distracted to notice.
Even in the decline of my father to a terrible disease, there is music and beauty and “poetry”, and sadness and love and joy. All writing can do that—all art can. Poetry does it very economically.
I do have to say, though, that before I started writing My Father, Humming I had not written poetry in years. A few months earlier, I came back to writing poetry. Then, when it became clear that I needed to write about my father, it was equally clear that poetry was the way to do it.
There were other fortuitous circumstances, like this, that led to my writing My Father, Humming—as if something larger than me wanted it written, and I seemed to be the one to write it—and, in doing so, to speak for—and tell the story of—lots of others who have experienced something similar in someone they love.
To write something that touches so many so profoundly is very humbling. It made me realize that the process is not about me expressing myself, so much as tapping into something much larger that we are all part of and we all share, and doing so in a way that helps others.
The actual writing of the book was “easy”. Getting myself into the place where I was able to write it was what was difficult. It took years, maybe even my whole life up to that point.
BooksAndAuthor.com: If you had to name one poem in My Father Humming , What would it be and why?
Jonathan Gillman: I referred to “My Father, Humming, II”, the story of my father almost choking to death as he attempted to stop my playing his piano the wrong way, and ended up humming along with me, as “we go on like this/the two of us/making music/until the piece is done.” That is the key poem for the book; without it, and that event, there is no book—in it, we connect in a way we never had before.
The one right before it, “Anniversary”, is also pretty amazing; it demonstrates all the qualities of the depth of a long-term relationship as one of the partners approaches death.
However, what stands out about the book is not the individual poems, but the accumulation of them, as they overlap, play variations on each other, and build. The cumulative effect of this collection of little parts is much greater than the sum of those parts.
BooksAndAuthor.com: Tell us the process of turning My Father Humming into an audio book.
Jonathan Gillman: I feel poetry is meant to be spoken, and to be listened to, not merely to be read on the page. When I write, I hear the words and phrases in my head. Although the themes of the book are complex and universal, the writing of “My Father, Humming” is really very simple; it’s written in a very conversational style, as if someone was speaking it. I am also a theater person, and know the power of spoken word. I was very comfortable reading the poems to others and, the first time I did so, was surprised by how strongly these words resonated with so many. Turning it into an audiobook seemed both necessary and simple: I did the work, made the words accessible to the listener. All s/he has to do is sit back, listen and absorb.
BooksAndAuthor.com: What have readers been saying about My Father Humming ?
Jonathan Gillman: When I wrote the book, I thought it was about my father, and mother—his decline, her caregiving, my acceptance of him, and of myself. When I started reading in public, I was surprised to learn that I was telling the story of many other people as well. The book resonates with a wide variety of people, of every age and demographic.
A man I know gave the book to his 91 year old grandfather, who has never read poetry in his life and only talks to his grandson about World War II—but is also caring for his wife with Alzheimer’s. He read it in one night, and then came to talk to his grandson about it. The first thing he said: he didn’t realize so many others were dealing with this too; he thought he was the only one.
Here are some other sample responses:
This is a wonderful book. It feels like you wrote it for me, without knowing it.
This book is everything I wanted to express, so now I don’t have to do so.
Your poetry gave me great comfort these past few weeks. Great comfort.
It’s beautiful. My father died with Alzheimer’s six months ago, after a very difficult time. So much of this rings true.
Your words helped me cope with my mother’s passing.
After I heard you read, I went home and talked to my mother about her father; he has Alzheimer’s. (A teenager)
It is a book of hope, solace, and healing.
It speaks to the commonality in us all.
I recommend this book particularly to men who have lost their fathers, but it is not just for men, it is for anyone who has lost someone.
Buy this book. It will carry you through any journey of grief.
The book also received some more official recognition: It was one of WordBasket’s dozen “Best” for 2013, “books that linger long enough to matter.” As the reviewer says, in part, “Gillman uses poetry to expunge everything unnecessary from his father's story, exposing a taut, sinewy progress through his father's disintegration.”
It was a Kirkus Reviews Starred Review, “Clean, spare poems that resonate”, and was a 2014 Kirkus Indie Book of the Year.
For it I was a finalist for the 2014 Paterson Poetry Prize, won by Billy Collins, and at the awards ceremony got to read with Mr Collins.
But it’s the spontaneous feedback from “ordinary” people that means the most to me.
BooksAndAuthor.com: Obviously music seems to be the thread of My Father Humming - Did you grow up in a house with a love of music? Do you play and write music?
Jonathan Gillman: The first poem in the book is entitled “A House with Music In it”—my mother stepping into the house and hearing my father playing—and imagining what it will be like when she comes into a house without music in it.
Yes. Our house had lots of music in it. My father was trained as a classical pianist—he had a certificate from Juilliard. He ended up making his living as a mathematician, but he played almost his entire life.
I grew up hearing it, at all hours of the day and night. It’s in my bones, especially the piano music of Bach and Beethoven. My mother is a singer—but I was taught no music, I think so I could have a more “normal” childhood than my father had.
About 14 years ago I bought myself an upright piano and taught myself to play. I play the same notes (Bach & Beethoven) that my father did, but play them very differently. In the process of teaching myself to play, at first I played very slowly, as I gradually learned the instrument. At some point I thought, “Ok, that’s not how it’s supposed to go,” and started to speed up. My wife, who had been listening from the other room, said, “Don’t. Don’t play it like that.”
“But that’s the way it’s supposed to—“
“I know. But in the slow way you play, you make a different kind of music that is really good.”
So I continued to play slowly, finding my own music in the same notes played at a very different tempo.
That’s what my father almost choked about in the title poem: he knew it was wrong. In fact, when he played that piece the right way, it took four-and-a-half minutes. When I play it it takes twenty-three. Same notes—but very different music.
I don’t write music. I wanted to but haven’t been able to unlock that key. However, the way I play is a creative re-creation.
And now our house has music in it too.
BooksAndAuthor.com: What was the last book you read?
Jonathan Gillman: “Future Primal” by Louis Herman. The author examines us moving forward by also looking backwards, that our future is partially contained in connecting to our past, particularly, for him, how we lived, survived, and sustained ourselves back at our most basic. It is an idea I had already been thinking about, which is why I read it: that we are still connected to our remote ancestors and primitive state, even as we do things no previous generation ever imagined possible.
BooksAndAuthor.com: What's next?
Jonathan Gillman: I always have lots of projects going. They tend to take a while to come to completion. Some at the top of my list:
A “dramatic” reading version of My Father, Humming, for two voices, the son and the wife—almost half the poems are already from her perspective. To adapt this for audiobook, or stage, or DVD, with piano accompaniment—some of the music played the “right” way, some of it played by me, “my” way. I have recently been working on “scoring” it.
A Year of ‘Looking In’, a book that follows ten actors through a year of being in Looking In Theatre, as their issues intertwine and overlap with those of the audiences they are performing for. The book is done but needs editing.
A children’s picture book, How The Creatures Came To Be. The text is written. Illustrations are being done by classes of students at our arts elementary school. I am excited to see what they will bring to it.
Letters to A Parent—How to Teach (or Think, or Live) Like An Artist, a work about teaching and education which is still very much in progress. It was inspired by 3 students—of the 28 who graduated in theater from our arts high school this year—telling us, “Coming here saved my life.” Hearing that was both chilling and humbling, and made me appreciate that when it does that teaching might be more of a sacred calling than just a job. In the book I explore what it is we do at our arts high school (where I am the head of the theater department), how we do it, and if that might be of value to others. It is written as a series of letters to the parent of one of those whose life we saved.