Norbert Blei (born August 23, 1935) is an American writer. He has written 17 books of non-fiction, fiction, poetry and essays. In 1994, he established Cross+Roads Press, dedicated to the publication of first chapbooks by poets, short story writers, novelists and artists.
Blei was born in an ethnic (primarily Czechoslovakian) neighborhood of western Chicago, Illinois known as Little Village, in the 26th & Pulaski area. An only child, Blei and his parents moved to the near-western Chicago suburb of Cicero when he was in grade school.
Blei attended Illinois State University, studying English, and graduated in 1956. He taught high school English and subsequently worked at City News Bureau as a reporter. In 1969, Blei left Chicago and moved to Door County, Wisconsin, a rural vacation destination for Midwesterners that sits at the top of the Door Peninsula in the middle of Lake Michigan, 50 miles north of Green Bay. For four decades, he has worked in a converted chicken coop in Ellison Bay, Wisconsin.
Blei's first book was The Hour of the Sunshine Now: Short Stories by Norbert Blei, published in 1978.
Literary Themes
A sense of community, and threats to community, are the twin themes of Blei's writing, whether he is writing about urban Chicago or rural Wisconsin:
"Norb specializes in the fleeting look at the little people of the city, the aged newsstand operators, the small restaurant owners, Greek, Bohemian, Slovak, who still provide, in out-of-the-way neighborhoods, national dishes and national atmosphere. And he is determined to get these glimpses of a disappearing Chicago on paper before they are ploughed under to make way for new high-rise apartments, or succumb to the creeping wave of debris, human and material, so characteristic of most large cities these days." (Henry Shea, 1970)
"Thus a profound feeling of loss permeates all of Blei's work. Perhaps Blei's own sense of himself as an isolated, alienated writer—a consistent self-portrait, across geographies and through years of economic and literary success and failure, prominence and reduced visibility—derives from his sense of doomed place, or, more properly, doomed community in place. Whether author imposes his vision on place (others in Cicero and Door County have found more to cheer about over the past thirty years), or place imposes itself on author, the result is an author celebrating the forgotten, the beat and defeated: others and himself." (David Pichaske, 2000)
Works
Story collections
- The Hour of the Sunshine Now: Short Stories by Norbert Blei (1978)
- The Ghost of Sandburg's Phizzog (1986)
Novels
- The Second Novel: Becoming a Writer (1978)
- Adventures in an American's Literature (1982)
Non-fiction
- Door Way: The People in the Landscape (1981)
- Door Steps (1983)
- Door to Door (1985)
- Neighborhood (1987)
- Meditations on a Small Lake (1987)
- Chi-Town (1990)
- Chronicles of a Rural Journalist in America (1990)
- Winter Book (2002)
Poetry
- Paint Me a Picture/Make Me a Poem (1987)
Articles
- A Review of The Insanity of Empire: A Book of Poems Against the Iraq War, by Robert Bly
- Lowell B. Comie: An Interview, published in After Hours: A Journal of Chicago Writing and Art (2003)
- A Review of My Racine by David Kherdian, published in Wisconsin Academy Review (1996)
Collections & Anthologies
- Wisconsin's Rustic Roads: A Road Less Travelled; Photographs by Bob Rashid, Text By Ben Logan, George Vukelich, Jean Feraca, Norbert Blei and Bill Stokes (1995)
- Rooted: Seven Midwest Writers of Place, by David Pichaske, University of Iowa Press (2006)
- Selected Anthologies
Recordings
- The Quiet Time, Door County in Winter: Readings by Norb Blei/Music by Jim Spector (1997)
- Readings from Door Way (1996)
The Internet
- Blei was an early adopter of the Internet as a means to distribute his own work and call attention to other writers. His Poetry Dispatch is a weekly enewsletter that features a short selection of poems by a single, noteworthy poet, while Notes from the Underground is a more irregular emailed missive that features brief essays on a wide variety of current topics, literary and otherwise.
Cross+Roads Press
In the early 1990s, Blei started Cross+Roads Press to offer established and beginning writers an opportunity to be published in chapbook form. To date, works by almost 40 writers have been published, including Mariann Ritzer, Pedro Villarreal, DyAnne Korda, Donna Balfe, Emily Rose, Phil Bryant, Michael Koehler, Jackie Langetieg, Paul Schroeder, Tom Montag, Don Skiles, Albert DeGenova, Charles Rossiter and Dave Etter.
The Clearing
For over 30 years, Blei was writer-in-residence at The Clearing, a folk arts school founded in 1935 by landscape architect Jens Jensen. The Clearing self-describes itself in this manner: "The Mission of The Clearing is to provide diverse educational experiences in the folk school tradition, in a setting of quiet forests, meadows and water...a place where adults who share an interest in nature, arts or humanities can learn, reflect and wonder...in keeping with the goals of Jens Jensen...who loved it as a special place where one could feel kinship with the earth and reassess one's life." Blei's annual June writing classes drew developing writers from across the country. Since 2007, Blei has independently conducted his annual writing classes.
Visual arts
Blei has always had a close affinity with painting as a watercolor artist, but a trip to Berlin in the then-West Germany in the early 1980s provoked an especially fertile time, as he created an entire series of works based on the experience. The "Die Mauer" paintings focused on the Berlin Wall and were exhibited in Santa Fe, among other locations.
Controversy
Reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson's proposals for Aspen, Colorado during his candidacy for sheriff in 1970, Blei fomented local controversy, and even rage, when he outlined a new vision for Door County, Wisconsin in an article in the area's weekly newspaper, the Door Reminder (later reprinted in Chronicles of a Rural Journalist). Titled 'Shut the Damn Door,' and first published in 1992, the area's residents were sharply divided on the proposal, as recounted in an essay by Blei's publisher at Ellis Press, David Pichaske: "Blei outlined a Master Plan for the Future of Door County loosely based on the 'Industrial Tourism' chapter of Ed Abbey's Desert Solitaire. Blei suggests that county officials freeze all building, property sales, and residential, commercial and public planning in the County; turn the entire County over to Nature Conservancy; close the new bridge at Sturgeon Bay and make an outdoor walking mall of it, with artsy-craftsy shops, a Ferris wheel, and Chicago style food vendors; admit tourists freely across the old bridge May through October, subject to a tax of $50 per vehicle per week and $25 per person per day, but from November through April by visa only; tear up all highways and back roads and return them to their natural state of dirt, gravel, good Door County earth; place a moratorium on new road construction in the County; encourage vandalism of commercial signs while instituting a $3,000 fine for anyone caught erecting new advertisements or newspaper mail boxes; tear up 'ugly metal road signs' and either replace them with wooden ones or leave the roads nameless. 'Take any dirt road and get lost,' Blei concludes. 'You may discover the real value of this place. You may discover yourself.'"
Current Writing Projects
As of March 2009, Blei is reportedly working on a number of writing projects for publication in late 2009, including the fourth book in his series of non-fiction Door County profiles, and a new novel, his first since 1982.
One of Blei's most eclectic, and yet global projects is his ongoing collaboration with the pseudonymous Monsieur K, located in France, who in the space of a half dozen years has created an assortment of web sites for posting of writings by those artists judged to abide by the spirit of 'free jazz.' Blei regularly provides Monsieur K with commentary on significant artistic events for the Metropolis site (http://www.m-etropolis.com/wordpress/en/, e.g. the death of Marcel Marceau), poetry and other material for the Basho's Road site (most recently a haiku translated into Russian and originally posted at http://www.wowwi.orc.ru/), and a wide variety of artistic profiles and critiques for Poetry Dispatch & Other Notes from the Underground (an April 2009 posting on the topic of "Wyeth & Peterson: some thoughts on the painter and his setting, in memory of Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009)—Maine & Pennsylvania, in praise of Charles Peterson—Door County, Wisconsin" (http://poetrydispatch.wordpress.com/). Cumulatively, his writings on these various sites have recently reached a total of almost 100,000 unique visits.
Broadcast Interviews
- Michael Feldman Show (8.2.08), Wisconsin Public Radio
- Larry Meiler Show (9.17.08), Wisconsin Public Radio
- Door Pod Show Podcasts
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