GAMBIER – “If you’re a writer, nothing is over until it’s written down,” the introduction to P.F. Kluge’s latest collection of works, "Keepers: Home and Away," begins. “Otherwise there’s no encounter, no adventure, no love, defeat or victory.”
From the first article in this collection of Kluge’s personal favorites, the reader is invited into immersive journeys of the mind and senses.
In a recent interview with the Mount Vernon News, Kluge remarked that places appeal to him, and there is not a landscape he paints with his words that is not as real as life by the second sentence.
“I’ve learned that one is not done,” he said. “It’s only the beginning. You’re in kindergarten. You keep going back to certain places. You learn from them, and you learn about yourself while in them.”
Those are the “keepers,” he explained. The places become a part of the person.
From the empty campus of Kenyon College on a winter day before the end of Christmas break, to dusk outside a South African casino in the late 1980s, Kluge does not so much describe a place as take the reader there.
After graduating from Kenyon in 1964, Kluge went to graduate school at the University of Chicago, then on to Saipan with the Peace Corps in 1967.
“Places that I go to — the ones that register are the ones I keep going back to again and again and again,” he said.
When the opportunity came to return to Gambier and Kenyon College in 1987, Kluge said he jumped at it.
“I like the idea of returning,” he said.
In the first essay of the book, “God, the Disc Jockey,” Kluge explores how music not only evokes memory but solidifies moments for recollection. In “Breakfast in Ohio,” he both delights in the intricacies of rural life and intimately exposes his vulnerability and considers the uncounted lives a person can only wonder at having not lived.
The recently-retired Kenyon College writer-in-residence noted that his legacy lives not only in his words but in the words of his students.
It is rewarding to see what his students go on to create, Kluge said. When they return for a visit, or in moments such as the recent tribute they gave him in a Zoom meeting, he gets to hear how he affected them.
“And the memories are good,” he said.
"I’m not a household word, but I’m not an unknown writer either — I’m somewhere in between,” Kluge said. “And I hope to hold some readers for a while.”
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