I am delighted to have had the chance to write this piece, which spotlights a favorite writer of mine--Gary Presley, an essayist and polio survivor who writes with grace, insight, and good humor.
The article is here.
"Action" magazine purchased all rights to the story, but gave me permission to run the text on my blog, so here it is in full:
Essayist Gary Presley has just published a memoir about (among other things) living with post-polio syndrome.
By Rebecca Kellogg
Gary Presley was 17 when he was diagnosed with polio after being inoculated with the Salk vaccine in 1959. Unaware of the future, he took the last steps of his life wearing his favorite cowboy boots.
In the ensuing years, Presley faced his own limitations and the limitations of the way the world works. He has dealt with post- polio syndrome, worked in the insurance industry, and married. Mining his experiences for meaning, Presley has crafted rich essays and the recently published memoir Seven Wheelchairs: A Life Beyond Polio (University of Iowa Press). He has concluded that “all of us are riding out this life together, and we’re an interesting mix of every human characteristic spread out of a great gray sliding scale upon which ‘disability’ is but one marking point.”
Strength Through Typing
As a young man Presley took college correspondence courses and typed papers on a typewriter. As he recounts in his memoir, once he finished each assignment he often typed additional pages to help strengthen his hands and coordinate his limited arm movement. He eventually got to the point where he could and did type for two or three hours at a time. Presley produced hundreds of pages of journal entries and, using only the first three fingers of each hand, reached speeds of 40 to 50 words per minute, a speed he still maintains today.
Presley first submitted his work for a broader audience in the mid90s when the Joplin (Missouri) Globe announced an essay contest on the theme of “the future” in celebration of its centennial. The winning essay was to be placed in a time capsule.
“I was intrigued—ego and all that—imagining that someone might know my name after a century burned away, a mark on the world, so to speak, and so I entered,” said Presley. “It happened that I’d read in Time or Newsweek or some popular magazine about an experiment done in particle physics regarding a certain type of quark, which in laypersons’ terms ‘knew’ what was going to happen to it before it happened. I wrote an essay called ‘Letter from the Future,’ a short piece which used that idea—how civilization might evolve—that the future would not only know the past but could predict the future beforehand.”
Presley’s essay won the adult division of the Globe’s contest. Since then his work has appeared in the Cup of Comfort series, salon.com, Notre Dame magazine, and other venues.
“Cooking for Dogs”
“I like humor, but I really like stuff that reflects a more introspective view of the world,” Presley said. “I wrote an essay called ‘Cooking for Dogs,’ about the link between what was a ‘wolf’ and what is now ‘dog,’ and we who make them companions. I also wrote one called ‘A Rifle of My Own,’ which is about developing a reverence of life and secondarily about developing an understanding of my father’s unspoken appreciation of the fragility of life—and generally, I suppose, about the understanding that some things must die so that other things can live, but that doesn’t make killing a good thing.”
Presley’s essays commonly use everyday objects to launch thoughtful musings about the broader world. The moments that spark his essays can be arresting in and of themselves. In “Ants for Breakfast” which appears on salon.com, Presley recalls a morning when ants invaded his cereal box and he deliberately ate a few with his shredded wheat. From that point he explores multiple views of acceptable and unacceptable food sources through a series of memories and observant asides.
Presley attributes the depth and nuances of his writing in part to the writing process itself.
“In an odd way, I don’t know how to think about things without writing, at least things in a particular sense, in depth, in a manner I can relate to other people,” Presley said. “I know I like green tea, and I love dogs, and I prefer garbanzo beans over other types of beans, but I cannot tell anyone exactly why until I begin to write and think about the idea in particular. I don’t think I have a stable world-view—perhaps I have an ever-evolving world view is a better way of identifying it.”
Joy-Seeking Makeup
Presley’s writing often explores themes of struggle, despair, and redemption, using symbolism, which Presley claims not to reach for intentionally.
“I didn’t set out to write symbolically,” Presley said. “Whatever symbols there are are a revelation, a quick word-sketch, of how I interpret the world, how I want to show it to the reader, how I reflect it in my soul.”
He writes of driving past Styrofoam cups that have become a symbol when they are stuck through the holes of a chain link fence to form the shape of a cross.
In various places he writes of others who would cast him in their own religious theater. He writes of asking if God wanted him in a wheelchair, and not finding a satisfactory answer.
The memoir Seven Wheelchairs is Presley’s first foray into book-length work. His background as a writer of essays is clear in the form of the chapters—many of which read as stand-alone stories. Indeed, a few of the chapters began life as essays that have appeared in other publications. Gathered together and given an over-arching narrative, they tell the story of one man’s life, sharing his sadness, his anger, and his joys.
Though Presley’s book and essays examine closely life with its potential for sadness, the overall tone of his work is generally positive.
“I suppose somewhere along the way, somewhere too deep, too late in my journey, I decided to seek joy,” Presley said. “Not in a hedonistic way, of course, although there is joy to be found in physical things such as a plate of homemade spaghetti, but also curiosity about the world. It might be a matter of will. Or it might be a simple matter of inheriting my mother’s joy-seeking genetic make-up.”
Rebecca Kellogg is a freelance writer and editor based out of
California. Read more of her work at rkellogg.blogspot.com.
P.S. Gary's own web site is here if you'd like to read a sampling of his work: http://www.garypresley.com/
