BY ANGELO VELOTTA
Gazette Newspapers
ASHTABULA – Dr. Roger Craik has been piecing words together like a jigsaw puzzle for quite some time – in published collections since 2002, with “I Simply Stared,” “Rhinoceros in Clumber Park” followed in 2003, “The Darkening Green” in 2004, “Down Stranger Roads” in 2014, “In Other Days” in 2022.
Chapbooks have also been released, including “Those Years” in 2007 and “Of England Still” in 2009.
A native of England and resident of Ashtabula, Craik has also had his works appear in journals, including The Formalist, Fulcrum, The Literary Review, The Atlanta Review, The London Grip, The London Magazine, Subtropical, New Letters, The Tupelo Quarterly and Nimrod International.
This latter saw Craik earning second place in the Pablo Neruda award for a selection of his works from his upcoming work. “Alightings.”
“1991 was the year I came to America from Turkey,” he said. “When I took the plane out of Turkey, it was days after the end of the first Gulf War. I came to New Haven (Connecticut) and took the only airline I thought would be operating – the national airline.”
From Izmir, Turkey to Istanbul; off to Brussels, and then to JFK, and a Yale limo to New Haven.
“It was the longest day of my life,” Craik said. “What happened next would be what happened next.”
Within three weeks, the dean at Kent State University at Ashtabula, John Mahan, offered him a teaching position as a visiting assistant professor, because Mahan thought it would be a good idea to have his students learn from someone from a different culture.
Craik was fresh off teaching literature at Aegean University in Turkey for the past four-and-a-half years and had taught part time before that at the University of Southampton in England.
He would teach for 25 years at Kent State, mostly freshman composition.
“I really liked it, teaching,” Craik said. “The students were worthy. Many were coming to university insecure and doubtful of themselves.”
Kent had an exchange program with University of Leicester in England, so Craik taught “a lovely half-year” there in the spring of 1999.
“They didn’t expect a native,” Craik said.
They also didn’t expect Craik specifically, because his father had taught in the same English department and his mother had been a student there.
A Fulbright Scholarship led to Craik teaching in Bulgaria in 2005 at the University of Sofia, teaching 20th Century literature and creative writing.
“That was glorious,” he said.
Another Fulbright scholarship gave him the opportunity to teach the same two subjects in Romania between 2013 and 2014, right on the border of Hungary, at Oradea.
“Extraordinarily enjoyable there,” Craik said.
Craik’s roots are steeped in education, writing and literature.
“My father, Thomas, was very creative. Born in a pub. My grandparents had moved out of the tailoring business. He went to Cambridge, and was a world-famous editor of Shakespeare. He also wrote a book on Chaucer and on medieval plays,” Craik said.
Craik’s father also taught him chess, which Roger still plays online. He has also worked as a freelance writer on the game.
“It’s a marvelous game that anyone of any age can play. I take to it. Theorists say chess is a mathematical game, but I’m hopeless at math. (For me), it’s whatever else chess is,” Craik said.
“He taught me perfectly. He would produce a piece, say a bishop, and show me how it moved. Then he would have me do it,” he said.
They would repeat this process, piece-by-piece, including with the knight, which is Craik’s personal favorite.
“When you see the board as a whole, it all fits together,” he said. “My mother, Wendy, wrote four books, principally on Jane Austen.”
Both of his parents very beautifully copied out and illustrated “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” a children’s story by Robert Browning. The book was released in 2013, and holds a place in Craik’s heart.
“My parents wanted me to go to university, because they thought it would make me happier,” he said. “When I was 18, I wanted to mow bowling greens in the very early mornings, go to the pub for lunch and then spend the afternoon looking at art or trying to write. I still feel that way sometimes.”
Greens he may not have been cut, but Craik has written yards of material throughout his life.
“I’ve always considered a pencil is a marvelous thing in its manufacture. How can graphite be placed in a tube of wood without being broken? I know how it’s done, but I still wonder at exactly how it’s done,” Craik said, adding that he values the power of wonder.
“Thomas Mann once said ‘Wonder is the biggest emotion of humankind,’” he added.
Wonder fills the pages of the works from Craik and graphite plays a big role in them as well. Craik employs a unique strategy when drafting his poems.
Right-handed Craik uses his left hand to take a block of soft graphite lead and freely doodles all over a page (often blue), while he listens to lines he has recorded on a pocket recorder to help prompt his next lines.
Numbered drafts of the poems are kept and collated as lines may be plucked from various drafts along the way.
Currently, Craik is working on two projects: “Alightings,” which is set to be his next poetry collection, and “Six Prospects of Amsterdam,” which was released in Romania in 2014 and now will be set to music by Dutch composer and pianist Marc Pauwels.
“Alightings” is the idea of things both going down and going up. It appeals to Craik because it contains two opposite meanings. The collection is completed, but not yet published.
“I have a poem in praise of coffee in ‘Alightings,’” Craik said. “Coffee is a great delight. It’s a marvelous and magical thing. I was brought up on tea – Brooke Bond tea.”
Craik has lived and travelled around the world, including in Yemen.
“I went in the summer of 1989 to give three lectures at the University of Sanaa in North Yemen. Yemen used to be split in two countries. All of the women were in burkas and I could only see their eyes, if that,” Craik recalled.
His lectures were on poetry and were well-received.
“I remember there was a call to prayer five times a day. I didn’t know whether to keep talking or stop. I looked at my host and his eyes told me to carry on,” Craik said. “You had to get a police escort to leave the city the day before (traveling).”
Craik has encountered and lived things on a bit of a worldwide scale, yet he holds onto the things closest to the heart as well for inspiration. “I Simply Stared,” “The Darkening Green,” “In Other Days” and “Rhinoceros in Clumber Park” only feature his mother’s watercolor art.
The latter collection has an intriguing story behind the cover’s art.
“My mother would occasionally share with me her paintings and we had a place for lunch in Clumber Park,” Craik said. “Then I had a friend of mine, a painter, paint a lime green rhinoceros to add a mischievous touch of fantasy to my mother’s painting.”
Kent State art professor Harry Izenour added the lime green palette to a woodcut done by German artist Albrecht Dürer.
“I liked to honor her while she was alive and now I do it when I can to honor her,” Craik said.
He’s picked up other things along the way that sit on his grandfather’s desk, the same desk Craik writes at now.
From a cube of amber from North Yemen to an old cribbage board, old furniture, bureaus, music cabinets and Persian rugs all adorn Craik’s home in Ashtabula.
In talking about his greatest astonishments, Craik says, “(That) I’m in America at all. I never get jaded of living here. When I look at where life’s taken me: Yemen, Tibet, streets I remember in Dubai…”
Wherever life takes him next, surely a cup of coffee will be there on his grandfather’s desk next to a stack of blue pages with their perfect chaos of doodled graphite.
