English lecturer’s passion for storytelling leads to own book

September 23, 2008

A collection of short stories from University of Wisconsin-Whitewater’s English Lecturer Ben Drevlow’s very first book, “Bend with the Knees and Other Love Advice from My Father,” contains many narratives that entertain and express his passion for storytelling.

“The stories written in the book represent essentially the reasons why I started writing in the first place,” Drevlow said. “The core of “Bend with the Knees,” although to varying degrees fiction, represents my exploration of the defining moments of my life in story form.”

The book is a collection of connected short stories that revolves around a fictional telling of the author’s experiences growing up on a farm in Northern Wisconsin. The short stories detail Drevlow’s trials as a child in dealing with the suicide of his older brother and his house burning down three times, along with a number of other strange and not all together adaptive fixations, neuroses and obsessions of the fictional author.

Written in a semi-autobiographical style, Drevlow explores the boundaries between the often-blurred line of fact and fiction. He explains he’s always been intrigued by this particular style of writing in the works of authors like Tim O’Brien (“The Things They Carried”) and Sherman Alexie (“The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven”).

“This embodies what storytelling has always been about for me – the stretching and manipulation of real events to fit into an engaging and powerful narrative,” Drevlow added. “I have never felt entirely comfortable writing strictly non-fiction, nor have I felt comfortable writing completely from creative invention. To me the stories I tell in “Bend with the Knees”-for all their elements of fiction-are much closer to the truth of my experiences as I grew up than any memoir or non-fiction essay I could have written.”

Drevlow hopes readers will understand and appreciate the stories for what they are – powerful and engaging stories that convey the truth about family and identity.

“I would like to think that a reader would come away with the sense of my great pains to portray-for better and worse-an honest and unsentimental depiction of a young man coping.”

“Bend with the Knees and Other Love Advice from My Father” was chosen by Ron Rindo as the 2006 winner of the Many Voices Project, and comes out October 1 from New Rivers Press.

Author Dean Bakopoulos of “Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon” wrote of Drevlow’s book, “Out of the vast and often dark Northwood’s, here comes a distinctive and witty new voice that captures all of the surreal yearning and soaring earnestness of the Upper Midwest. Benjamin Drevlow’s characters might spend a lot of time in the shadows of the past but the authors undeniably big heart shines brightly through every story and scent.”

Drevlow is currently writing another collection of short stories to be sent out for publication later this year.

For more information about “Bend with the Knees and Other Love Advice from My Father” contact Drevlow at drevlowb@uww.edu.