It was a bit of a zig and then a zag (not to be confused with a wig and a wam), as I bounced from New Orleans up to Nashville to see Randy Newman and then 300 miles back down south to give a reading near Auburn University.
There, I stayed with Ron Riekki, a Ph.D. writing instructor at Auburn who says he never read much of anything until joining the Navy in 1987 after graduating from high school in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
His journey into literature — Riekki just published his first novel, “The U.P.,” with Ghost Road Press of Denver — began in a poignant, humorous fashion that might startle his fellow academics.
Transfixed by the power and thrill of writing while crafting shipboard letters to family and friends back in Negaunee, Riekki decided that if he was going to be a writer, he better find out what lay between the covers of books.
And thus launched this experiment at the military base library on the Diego Garcia atoll in the Indian Ocean.
“I didn’t know what to read because I’d never read before,” said Riekki, the day after organizing a salon for me and two other writers — Chantel Acevedo and Anna Schachner — at the Gnu’s Room bookstore near campus.
“So I’d close my eyes, reach out, grab a book and read it.”
His first two grabs produced technical books on submarines, but because he was committed to the experiment, Riekki read them.
“There was a lot of books on subs, a whole wall of porn and only about two dozen literature titles,” he said. “When I got to the literature section, I decided I wasn’t going to close my eyes anymore and selected “Letter From A Birmingham Jail,” by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.”
The book changed his life, not so much in regard to social activism but the wonders of learning.
“Dr. King taught me how to read,” said Riekki. “I owe him everything.”
In the sensitive work that Riekki did on Diego Garcia, reading on the job was prohibited. Again, he applied a resourcefulness often exhibited by folks dying of thirst.
“The next book I read was ‘1984’ — I couldn’t bring it to work, but I couldn’t put it down … so I’d tear out one page at a time, take it to work and read it … they never caught me.”
Rafael Alvarez can be reached at [email protected].
