Gary Stelzer's Blog

Homelessness in America has been a socially scandalous epidemic for some decades now.  And, of course, not just for the current generation of immigrants.  My spouse and I dined recently at a cheap joint a few blocks from our city home.  As we exited into the cold January night of the northern Midwest, we ran into one of her former co-workers who had just been laid off from his pressman's job at a regional newspaper.  We stood between our two cars in the dimly lit parking lot while the two of ...

I traveled to Central America during the dirty little wars of the 1980’s, when mercenaries (today they are called “private contractors”) were maiming and killing impoverished workers, farmers, and Indians to protect local dictators and their wealthiest cronies and families that held virtual all of the society’s assets.   One mid day I sat on a café veranda in a small city with several co-workers when I noticed that one of the women at my table was very studiously wiping the rim of her drinking glass with a handkerchief.  Marta (real person, fictional name) was from Mexico City, and was attending graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in Madison for her doctorate when she decided to travel with us.

“What are you doing, Marta?” I asked.  I was taken with the peculiarity of such a gesture.

“I am trying to not get sick,” she replied.

Being the medical officer for our little band of co-workers and visitors, I pointed out the futility of her efforts.   “You are just moving germs around the glass, Marta.  Plus our beverages and food will be hopelessly contaminated.”  We were also guests in workers’ homes, and not residing in multi-starred hotels with clean food and water provided for other tourists.  I had dispensed anti-biotic pills to my troupe, to be taken each day “preventively,” of undetermined effectiveness.

We both recalled having sat with a writer from Boston on the flight to San Jose, who informed us of her nearly dying at a local hospital from food poisoning on a previous trip to the region.

Marta had elaborated, “When I moved to Madison, I could not believe it.  Within a week, I was well.  In Mexico City, I was sick all the time.  All my life, my parents, my siblings, none of us really well a single day of our lives.”

Marta was pointing to vital societal differences between North America and Central America and Mexico.  At that time, US taxpayers were still adequately funding a very critical segment of public health for citizens to “be well (most) all the time.”   The municipal provisions and laws and money guaranteeing clean water, with its consistent and reliable separation from sewage, will always constitute one of the most important measures of a modern and healthy standard of living.  If coli-form water flows out of a residential or commercial faucet, no one can clean his own hands, or properly cleanse fresh fruits and vegetables.  For a very long while, that has been an assumed basic social provision in the United States.

On a Sunday some weeks ago, the New York Times published a long article about the defunding of this feature of our modern lives, and the resulting breakdown of public health.  Over forty large cities were sighted in the article, including New York, with profoundly antiquated water and sewer systems.  Public health officials have been tracking the flooding of sewer facilities during heavy rains, and the visits to emergency rooms for gastrointestinal illnesses by the city’s residents.   It turns out there is a surge in use of health facilities, coincident with the rains, occurring in NYC at least once a month.

With the breakdown of funding for infrastructure in America, I have been wondering if I will see other “Marta’s” making the futile gestures of trying to wipe away the source of illnesses in the era of a shredded social contract.

I traveled to Central America during the dirty little wars of the 1980's, when mercenaries (today they are called "private contractors") were maiming and killing impoverished workers, farmers, and Indians to protect local dictators and their wealthiest cronies and families that held virtual all of the society's assets.   One mid day I sat on a café veranda in a small city with several co-workers when I noticed that one of the women at my table was very studiously wiping the rim of her...

A book reviewer asked me yesterday if the title of my first novel had always been THE COST OF DREAMS.   I answered, "no."  I had called an earlier, much longer, and terribly flawed draft THE DISAPPEARED ONE.  A potent and intriguing enough title I think, and not at all a bad fit for the later manuscript.  But I made the change because I wanted to reach a little deeper into the suggestion of what the story, or several stories interwoven, might offer to the interested reader.  Rather than the s...

My publicist asked me recently, "Why do so many doctors turn to writing?"   Which gave me pause.   Until I saw that my life, my brain, had become so packed with "back stories," enough of them exceedingly dramatic and interesting, that I could almost do no other than struggle to deal with them, to assimilate them, in some productive and creative manner.  Otherwise, I think the "subtexts" of my existence were going to script themselves into my day-to-day living in some unhealthy and...

I worked as a doctor in a small city of the northern Midwest for almost thirty years.   As most of my former colleagues will attest, it’s a very interesting and very intense line of work.  I finished my first novel, titled THE COST OF DREAMS, about a year and a half before my retirement.   Anticipating that I would have a difficult first winter psychologically after I quit (and I certainly did), I wanted a job waiting for me off-stage, wary of just winging it after I walked out the door.   Almost no matter the reception the book receives, I am very happy to have the work.  It is also very interesting, but not so intense as my former job.

If I may quote Jane Smiley from 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE NOVEL, “What is difficult is not to write something new but to write something interesting and true.  As any piece becomes interesting and true, it becomes original.”

I attempted keeping to that little dictum as I assembled THE COST OF DREAMS, a tale about a family living in the downtrodden strata of humankind, about half of the planet’s inhabitants of whom are striving to survive on $2 a day.  Not infrequently, I would see such persons in my former job, from the USA and from around the world, much in need of healthcare attention, and little or no means of obtaining it.  The dignity with which so many strove for a decent life forever moved and impressed me.

We do not live in a just or healthy social order.  And believing as I do that social problems have social roots (as opposed to say religious roots or stemming exclusively from individual personal failings), I decided to tell tales in that context, as “interesting and true” as I am capable.

I want to do four more novels.  The next will be set in New Orleans at the time of Katrina, a human cataclysm of such immense historical importance and consequence, we are incapable of measuring it today.  By rights, the events of that summer should produce a few hundred “interesting and true” tales.  I will attempt to find the thread of one of them, peopled with persons and families striving with their measure of dignity for survival and a better life, with their federal onlookers flying over and standing by.

The third book will be set in Detroit, the epicenter of America’s industrial collapse.  Formerly, it was a city in which workers had the highest standard of living anywhere in the US.  This October, fifty thousand souls showed up at a housing agency, seeking assistance available for three thousand.

As to novels that will follow, I must keep my options open and remain attentive to the events in the human community.

I worked as a doctor in a small city of the northern Midwest for almost thirty years.   As most of my former colleagues will attest, it's a very interesting and very intense line of work.  I finished my first novel, titled THE COST OF DREAMS, about a year and a half before my retirement.   Anticipating that I would have a difficult first winter psychologically after I quit (and I certainly did), I wanted a job waiting for me off-stage, wary of just winging it after I walked out the door...