‘Shared history’ compels work
When Patrick Hicks was eight years old, he sat on the floor of his living room in Stillwater, Minn., and wrote a short story about World War II. Using a beat-up IBM typewriter his parents bought for him at a garage sale, the typeball would pivot before striking the paper, darkening with one sentence after another as Patrick The Kid shared a universal story with curiosity and ease.
This fervor never let up.
Next month, the U.K. celebrates Remembrance Sunday, when veterans march past the London War Memorial to pay their respects. In February, we honor Black History; in March, it’s Women’s History; and in May, we mind Asian American and Pacific Islanders.
To us, this is an improved awareness of the past resurfacing itself. But to local author and educator Hicks, it has become a life’s work.
“I was always a big reader,” he says. “My mom is an immigrant from Northern Ireland, so she gave me a lot of children’s books she grew up on. I read everything by Enid Blyton. How does this woman I’ve never met control my mind? I wanted to copy that.”
To this day, many of those worn stories from Stillwater are still here, packed into shelves in Room 111, where Hicks sits as the Writer-in-Residence at Augustana, a university he’s called home for over 20 years.
On a bottom shelf rests a few books on Winston Churchill, gifts from his Irish grandfather he no longer has use for, “but I’m not going to get rid of them.”
Writer Joan Didion once said that “character is style,” that who we are and what we think about is reflected in our success, and this is how we know Hicks. As a third grader, with an entire future of possibility and plans ahead of him, he instead thought about what happened before him, immersing himself in James Joyce’s “Ulysses” while his friends played sandlot baseball on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
And we are all better for it.
This month, Hicks launched his third novel, “Across the Lake,” a fictional tale based on the Holocaust about an all-female concentration camp: gender, violence, and survival, all recurring themes in his writing.
To Hicks, we are not immune from the historical subjects in his books today. He writes not only with concertedness and the same interest he had as a young boy, but to “cast a light on a part of our shared history”: If it happened then, it can happen now. If it happened to them, it can happen to us, and there is bravery in that “clarion call” Hicks bellows through his books.
“We’ve seen a substantial rise in fascism in our own country just in the past several years,” Hicks says. “That’s deeply worrying to me.”
Even though the characters in his books are made up, the experiences are not: a cloudy day in Auschwitz, a pregnant woman in Ravensbrück or the reek of the gas chambers in Majdanek all happened to someone a long time ago.
“I’ve spent 15 years writing about the Holocaust,” Hicks says. “I’ve visited 12 concentration camps, interviewed survivors. It’s taken such a toll. But I am really obsessive about my projects. Darkness just engulfs me, as it has to if I’m going to write authentically. To try to portray that monstrous darkness as anything other than that would be a crime against historical accuracy.”
To re-enact, he reads. “The Commandant of Auschwitz: An Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess” and “Hitler’s Furies” by Wendy Lower introduced him to his characters in the novels we read today.
“I become really close to them – the good ones,” Hicks says. “Eli Hessel, the main character in ‘In The Shadow of Dora,’ it saddened me when I had to say goodbye to him. He was such a good guy. My main character in ‘Across the Lake,’ Svea, bad things happen to her, and she’s such a good person.”
But if not for fictional characters Eli or Svea or even Hans in “The Commandant of Lubizec,” we might not know the truth.
“I don’t know exactly where the desire to write about the Holocaust came from, but sometime in the late ’70s, I saw this documentary on PBS showing the British footage of Bergen-Belsen: the bulldozers pushing the bodies into mass graves,” Hicks says. “I was just stunned at that monumental injustice, even at a young age like that, and the feeling has never left me.”
But sometimes, it must. Hicks says, “for his own mental stability,” he plans to take a break from writing about the Holocaust and is actually heads down on a book of nonfiction about his home state of Minnesota. There will still be history, but this time there will be humor, too. We can expect it later next year.
There’s also his devotion to poetry, a subtle departure from the haunts in Nazi Germany. Not one to stray from his first love, we read about history in his stanzas alongside love letters to Europe, but here the words are mostly light, not dark; mostly playful, not scary.
When I imagine how my parents met
in a Montreal bar, on a Wednesday in 1967,
I worry that it might not have happened –
that they might have turned from each other
to unconsummate me.
Nonexistance begins when
my father walks to the restroom
his stylish lambchops blinkering his sight
and my mother drops something on the floor,
lipstick perhaps. They never make eye contact,
and I am blinded,
unloved.
– an excerpt from “Lipstick Traces” by Patrick Hicks
Even though his office space at Augustana is no more than maybe 12x12, Hicks has two desks, two computers. On one he writes poetry, and on the other, he invents characters. I don’t know whether this is intentional, but the fiction-writing desktop is in the corner – in the dark and with his back to the door – and the other, the one on which he waxes poetry, sits right next to the light of the window, where students walk by and he gets a sure glimpse of the weather that day. In which space do you think it is easier for him to write?
In many ways, Hicks is two writers for us – a dual personality he must succumb to, two different places he must go – but he is connecting us all the same.
While his poetry can validate the universal experiences among all of us today – buckling in and tightening the car seat, riding on trains, traveling, and funerals – his fiction reminds us that, no matter how many generations have come before us, we haven’t changed as much as we might think. “There is still work to be done,” he writes in “Sitting on the Berlin Wall.”
He has a masterful responsibility as he encourages us to weep and remember, understand and participate. In the dark and in the light, from his courageous quests to your reading nook at home, Patrick Hicks is steadfast in teaching us and then showing us the way.
