Garret Keizer was listening to a prison group talk about his quarter-century-old first novel, “God of Beer,” when he felt gobsmacked.
“It was quite humbling to have some of these young men quote passages to me that I couldn’t even remember writing,” he recently recalled with a laugh.
Keizer could be forgiven. The 73-year-old Vermont author has published 10 books, including eight nonfiction titles inspired by his past work as a teacher, preacher and Harper’s magazine contributor seen in a Stephen Colbert show feature.
Keizer recounts that latter star turn and other career highlights in a new essay collection, “Starting from Paterson.” He’s set to introduce it June 16 in Hardwick as part of a state tour that continues July 6 in Essex, July 30 in Lyndonville and Aug. 26 in Norwich.
“I hope I’ve grown a little less strident and a little more willing to question what I assert,” Keizer said in an interview. “Although it’s only fair to say that, as of late, certain beliefs I have had about the fundamental decency of most human beings in general and most Americans in particular have been shaken.”
That can be a challenge for a man The New York Times has summed up as “an irascible idealist.”
“I cringe at the news, and then, every so often, I hear something that makes me think we’re not lost,” he said. “When the alternatives come down between hope and despair, I might as well choose hope. I’d rather go down with that than take myself down with the other.”
Keizer pointed to his essay titled “Let Us Now Parse Famous Men.” In it, he recalls meeting the late global health pioneer Paul Farmer, who left him with the words, “Don’t lose hope!”
Keizer’s essay goes on to reveal a different thought — “What’s ‘The Colbert Report’?” — he had upon receiving an invitation in 2010 to appear on the satirical television show.
Keizer learned the host would portray a conservative pundit who didn’t understand the premise of the writer’s then-latest book “The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want,” a meditation on who and what the world hears.
“Noise can help us understand some of our bigger issues, the reason being that many of those issues — war, hunger, racism, sexism, climate change — have come about through a contempt for whatever we regard as weak, small, quiet,” Keizer had written.
Colbert, in character, countered that his private jet could inspire the “little people” to reach for the sky.
“My noise is just very loud hope,” the host said.
Keizer’s new 210-page hardcover also explores his New Jersey birthplace and northern migration, “mercy, music, labor and love,” according to a jacket blurb, and his encounters with everyone from local supermarket clerks to songwriter Leonard Cohen and chicken magnate Colonel Sanders.
Keizer’s career sprouted four decades ago when he settled in the Northeast Kingdom town of Sutton, population 913, to teach English at Lake Region Union High School in nearby Orleans. Nominated for a state education award, he had to write an essay. It didn’t win him the honor. But it spurred the late Vermont novelist Howard Frank Mosher to push Keizer to pen his 1988 memoir “No Place But Here: A Teacher’s Vocation in a Rural Community.”
Keizer initially worked double-duty as a weekend Episcopal lay vicar, an experience he chronicled in 1991’s “A Dresser of Sycamore Trees: The Finding of a Ministry.” Moving on to Harper’s magazine, he followed up with such books as 2002’s “The Enigma of Anger: Essays on a Sometimes Deadly Sin,” 2004’s “Help: The Original Human Dilemma” and 2012’s “Privacy.”
“The essential humanitarian question is not how we defeat hunger or cure disease or curb the tide of genocidal nationalism,” he wrote in “Help.” “Rather, it is how we wrestle with our sense of futility in the face of those disasters.”
Keizer was successful enough to score that 2010 Colbert interview and a subsequent bump in book sales. Then his family lost its health insurance just before the 2013 rollout of the federal Affordable Care Act, sending him back to the nearby high school to work as a one-year substitute. The job gave him medical coverage — and grist for another book, 2014’s “Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher.”
“We inculcate in our children the sensibilities of raccoons, a fascination with shiny objects and an appetite for garbage, and then carp about ‘the texting generation’ as if 13- and 14-year-olds who couldn’t boil an egg are capable of creating a culture,” he wrote in it. “They grow on what we feed them.”
Keizer’s latest book was born when EastOver Press editor Walter M. Robinson, an alumnus of Bennington College’s Writing Seminars, inquired about potential material. The author responded by sharing two decades of essays both unseen or first shared in such magazines as Harper’s and the Virginia Quarterly Review.
“I always walk around with a little notepad in my pocket,” he told VTDigger, “even if I sometimes misplace and can’t find it.”
Rereading his work, Keizer was reminded of his late writing friend James Hayford, who gave him a published anthology of his own poems.
“It contains all of the penciled-in revisions he wanted to make,” Keizer said.
Keizer understands the pull to ruminate over the past.
“I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t question at least one thing with ‘I could have done that better, I should have kept my mouth shut, I should have been more ready to listen,’” he said. “Of course, when you write things down, you invite that kind of second-guessing.”
Then again, Keizer remembers a lecture by the late Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel.
“He told a parable about a prophet who goes into the middle of a city and denounces its wickedness day after day after day. Finally, a little boy says, ‘Old man, don’t you realize these people will never listen to you?’ And the prophet says, ‘Son, I keep crying so that I don’t start listening to them.’”
