Anthony Bukoski: Nowhere Else But Here

short stories with local flavor

Tony Bennett

To see Anthony Bukoski in his University of Wisconsin-Superior office, you go up to the second floor of an old elementary-school building and walk to the end of the hall. There, almost like a secret, Bukoski sits amid piles of newspapers, books, and other detritus that has some sort of order he alone can decipher.

He shows off a recent Star-Tribune review of his newest collection of short stories, North of the Port, with pride. But not too much pride. Bukoski’s happy whenever he gets noticed, but he doesn’t live for accolades. He lives for life in Superior, Wisconsin.

“This is my hometown,” he says. “There’s no place I wanted to be more than UW-Superior. I can’t imagine myself being as happy at another school or in another city as I am here.”

It’s not just his job and his birthplace that so enamor Bukoski. There are plenty of finer details that catch him by the senses.

“I’m passionately in love with the landscape. The trees, the flowers, the bushes, the grasses. That’s a major draw — not only the sights of the place, but the historical significance that these sights carry with them. And also, the smells — the Aspen budding in the spring of the year.” He thinks for a second. “Sometimes you can smell the fish in the lake if the wind is right.”

It takes a man who is as electrified by his senses as Bukoski to be able to write the kind of short fiction he writes. His stories are written about and in Superior. The pieces in both his North of the Port and the new reissue of his 1986 debut Twelve Below Zero are populated by the kind of characters that Northlanders may encounter more often in the bar or on the street than in the annals of short fiction.

“I just want to celebrate the noble, strong, good people of northern Wisconsin.” He stops for a second, amends his words with a twinkling eye. “Which is not to say they’re not sinners and criminals. I point that out. But we do deserve attention up here in the north.”

To him, there is much worth celebrating in his own back yard, and a good portion of his body of work is dedicated to the glorification of the inglorious. Bukoski is interested in people who are flawed, dirty, weird, and beautiful all at once. It’s been his focus since his earliest work, Twelve Below Zero, which Holy Cow! Press has now re-released in an expanded and revised edition.

“I wanted to do it,” Bukoski says of revisiting his older material. “I did it because I felt that the stories might’ve been okay in 1986, but, this being a new century, I just felt that I could improve them — improve the sentence structure, add more to certain scenes.”

Bukoski has even replaced some of the stories completely. “We dropped some from the 1986 version, but in place of them, I’ve written four new stories. I’ve written four additional books [since 1986], plus a lot of articles, stories, and reviews. Through the process of growing and thinking and practicing and revising, I hope I’ve improved.”

Bukoski goes out of his way to solicit the opinions of others about his writing. “Well, I need help. I do need help, and I get it not so much from students – because I don’t like to push this stuff on them – but I get it from Barton Sutter and from others.”

Sutter, a well-regarded writer in his own right, has an office at UWS just down the hall from Bukoski’s. He clearly is thankful to have a peer like Sutter. “He’s got such a gracious and big heart. I rely on him so deeply.”

As a teacher at UWS, Bukoski finds that he is relied upon, as well – he’s got students who count on his abilities and insights in forging their own writerly identities. And Bukoski, who is nearing retirement, wonders how he will fare without them. “Who’s going to need me when I retire?” he wonders. “I have 90 to 100 students every semester, and you have a sense of being needed.”

Surely, when Bukoski retires, he will find little time to fret about being needed. “I want to write a novel,” he says. “I don’t have the patience and endurance and discipline, but I’m going to have to get it. I want to write a novel to celebrate in one continuous narrative the greatness of Superior. For all its ugliness, it’s my home.”

For the moment, though, Anthony Bukoski can say that he’s just where he wants to be, doing just what he wants to do. “I’m very satisfied. I live where I want to live and teach where I want teach and I write books. That’s all I want.”