PRO CONNECT
BIOGRAPHY FOR ALAN ROBERT PROCTOR
Mr. Proctor’s poetry, fiction, and/or creative non-fiction have appeared in New Letters, Chautauqua, I-70 Review, Kansas City Voices, The Rockhurst Review, and Hanging Loose among other journals. He was twice a Reader’s Digest national poetry finalist, and a winner in the Whispering Prairie Press 2012 Rex Rogers Formal Poetry Contest. He is anthologized in The Whirlybird Anthology of Kansas City Writers and Writers Digest’s “Red Heart Black Heart Valentine’s Day Collection”. His novel, Adirondack Summer, was published as an e-book in 2013. A memoir, The Sweden File: Memoir of an American Expatriate, which he co-authored with his brother Bruce Proctor, was published in 2015 by Westphalia Press, and selected as a 2015 “literary star” by the Kansas City Star – one of only 12 memoirs chosen. Alan is a poetry editor for Kansas City Voices and a former humor columnist, tree surgeon, musician and college administrator. He is a board member of The Writers Place based in Kansas City. Reach him by email at: alanrobertproctor@gmail.com or visit: alanrobertproctor.wordpress.com.
“An inviting exchange of stories and ideas across two continents and half a tumultuous decade.”
– Kirkus Reviews
A conscientious objector flees enlistment in Vietnam by making a new life in Sweden in this posthumous autobiographical collection.
Bruce Proctor’s memoir, compiled and edited by his younger brother, poet and novelist Alan Robert Proctor (Adirondack Summer, 2013, etc.), revisits the late 1960s: the horrors of total war in Vietnam, the unpredictable tides of the American counterculture, and the feeling of being young in a mad world. “Not fear of death, but fear of not being able to live while taking part in killing” is what drives Bruce to renounce his citizenship and leave the country when the National Guard is called up in 1968. “I was born to be a Swede,” Bruce declares on arrival in the Scandinavian country, and he’s besotted by the ease of life and the clear summer light. But the nights grow long, work is hard to find, and whiskey is too easily available. He works in the warehouse of a chemical plant, then as a lumber hand, then by driving a taxi. He goes back to school to earn a master’s degree but eventually sours on academia. Finally, in 1972, he and his wife decamp for Canada. The letters and journal entries here read as a kind of collage of the period: writers and addressees switch off, stories of sailing and camping sit alongside reflections on the horrors of war, the uselessness of the American opposition, newspaper clippings, photographs, and Alan’s own poems. “He could be humorous, pragmatic, philosophical, obtuse, and mystical all in one paragraph,” the editor writes of his brother, who died in 2011, and all those qualities are evident here. Editor Proctor has obviously put great patience and care into selecting these fragments, and the time was well-spent: readers are never lost, always engaged, and often charmed by the liveliness of Bruce’s prose (and of Alan’s verse scattered throughout the text). “It is not unusual for a Swede not to speak if he has nothing to say and perhaps it is this quality which gives the impression of depth,” Bruce writes at one point. Neither brother holds his tongue in this collection, and readers are richer for it.
An inviting exchange of stories and ideas across two continents and half a tumultuous decade.
Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63-391195-6
Page count: 254pp
Publisher: Westphalia Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
The Sweden File: MEMOIR OF AN AMERICAN EXPATRIATE: 101 Literary Stars of 2015-Kansas City Star, 2015
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