A Brief Autobiography of Mark Brazaitis

I was born in East Cleveland, Ohio, in 1966. I think I wanted to be a writer as soon as I understood what my father, a journalist, was doing. He used to type stories on a manual typewriter in the den. My sister and I were warned not to disturb him when he was writing; therefore, the act of writing took on, for me, an air of vital importance. Writing was a serious undertaking. It also sounded good—I loved the music of my father’s fingers working the keys.

My first “success” as a writer occurred when I was in fourth grade. I wrote a story called “Tommy the Talking Tomato,” and my teacher read it aloud to the class. It was a thrill to have an audience.

I thought I would follow my father and become a journalist. For a while, I did. In college, I was the sports editor of The Harvard Crimson. I had summer internships at the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Detroit Free Press. After college, I worked briefly as a stringer for The Washington Post. What I discovered was that what I most liked about working for newspapers wasn’t finding the story—going to events, interviewing sources—but writing it. So I turned to fiction writing.

I’ve always been a big reader. In junior high and high school, I read widely and deeply—Tolstoy, Turgenev, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Bowles. So I had a sense of what good writing was. This, however, didn’t mean I could imitate it. The year after I graduated from college, I wrote a novel. It is, thankfully, buried deep in a trunk somewhere in my basement.

I joined the Peace Corps in 1990 and served for three years in Guatemala. I worked with farmers to help improve their corn and bean seed and post-harvest storage methods; I also taught English in the junior high school in the small town where I lived. Stepping outside of my country and culture, I saw myself—and the world—as I’d never seen them before. I also had to operate in a new language (Spanish and, occasionally, Pokomchi, the local Maya language), and this helped me appreciate the importance of precise words. Saying “thing” all the time wasn’t going to help me get toilet paper at the local store.

In Guatemala, I saw the world as I never had, and naturally I wanted to write about it. Toward the end of my time as a Peace Corps volunteer, I began to write the stories that would eventually appear in my first book, The River of Lost Voices: Stories from Guatemala. I was worried that once I left Guatemala, I wouldn’t be able to recreate the world I was living in. But I found that when I returned to the States, I could close my eyes and be back on my doorstep in Santa Cruz Verapaz.

The River of Lost Voices was inspired by people I met and stories I heard in Guatemala. All the stories are fictional, but each of them contains a kernel of truth. For example, “José del Río,,” the opening story, begins, “I was born dead and I’ve never been allowed to forget it.” Down the street from my house lived a family with a son who was, so his sisters proclaimed, born dead. I was fascinated by the implications of this, and so I explored it in fiction.

My novel, Steal My Heart, is also set in Guatemala, as are most of the stories in my second short-story collection, An American Affair, which was won the 2004 George Garrett Fiction Award from Texas Review Press.

My story in the recent Notre Dame Review, “This Man, This Woman, This Child, This Town,” owes a great deal to my experience in Guatemala, even though it is set in the States. I wouldn’t have been able to understand either Martin or Katarina without having understood, or at least tried to understand, the men and women I met in Guatemala. Both  Martin and Katarina come from cultures I don’t consider my own. Martin is a native of a small town (and is African-American), and although I’m of Lithuanian origin, I wasn’t born in Lithuania as Katarina was. But they are the characters who appeared when I imagined a school and a dust-clouded road. They are the characters whose stories I needed to tell.