Rick Kogan interview

November 21, 10:03 PMChicago Literary Scene ExaminerRobert Duffer

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In his radio show, "Sunday Papers with Rick Kogan", (aired on WGN and broadcast in 38 states and Canada) and his weekly Sidewalks feature (Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine), Rick Kogan gives you a sense of a legendary newspaperman caught between two times. A legacy of his newspaperman father, Herman, and his “literary fixture” mother, Marilew, Kogan stained his fingers in the presence and under the mentorship of family friends like Chicago icons Studs Terkel and Mike Royko. He’s spent over forty years in print and on the air shaping a new voice of Chicago, a storyteller’s voice wrung from tavern revelations and chiseled by a curiosity for who we are, as Chicagoans and as people.

You don’t read Kogan as much as listen to him, as if in front of a fireplace on the eve of the unknown. His smoker’s voice crackles with wit and warmth, his world filled with nostalgia and wonder, yet it is belied by the cynicism endemic to anyone who makes a career out of distilling the truth from the nonsense. Which is why what he’s telling you is so personal, so intimate. Despite it all, there’s this, Kogan seems to say, before undressing the cultural history of faded murals or introducing you to a curious clockmaker or a gigantic, vandalized cat. Kogan favors the present tense, passive voice, and though there isn’t a drip of literary pretension in his writing he can’t help himself to sometimes wax an image poetic or to color a character beautiful. Makes sense for a man who, if he would be king, would decree a poet on every street corner.

1. In your tavern ballad, A Chicago Tavern, you write without judgment about Billy Goat owner Sam Sianis's ongoing dialogue with the ghost of Royko. As a reader there's no doubt that you believe it, whether it's tavern mystique or actual ghosts. What ghosts do you interact with? What do you talk about?

RK: I do not believe in ghosts though I do believe that Sam does and I respect that. He is not one given to fantasy or frivolousness and so when he tells me, as he did again last week, that he had a nice chat with Mike (Royko) one night when he was closing up the joint I am comforted (and even a bit hopeful)

2. We have a a President-elect author and a governor quoting Richard Wright's Bigger Thomas (hmm...I just realized that Bigger was destined for jail, too). Whatever the intersection is between literature and politics, it's an auspicious time for the American language. As Mayor Rick Kogan of Chicago, what should Chicagoans expect in your term(s)?

RK: I would have poets on every street corner.

3. Why don't your readers get to see your fiction? It's presumptuous, I know, but I'm a writer. You've been publishing since you were 16! If you don't write fiction, never have, never will, then why not?

RK: All of my efforts at fiction, with the exception of a very, very, very short “novel” I “wrote” when I was seven—actually dictated to my grandmother, Teresa Maud Cavanagh, during a month I was laid up with some strange kidney infection, and which she later typed and bound—and titled “Davy Crockett and the Indian Scout” and a short story set in a Northwest Side tavern and published long ago in a San Francisco magazine (I can no longer recall the title of the story or the name of the magazine) have deservedly found their way into the trash. I have been fooling around recently with a kid’s book and a novel but am not confident either will escape the chains of my own insecurities and rewriting
 
I have 739 additional questions but I'll stick to the format and stop here. OK, one more, and you'll have to pardon my indelicacy: when can Chicagoans expect your biography of Studs?

RK: There’s not going to be any Studs biography coming from my hands. Though there are a number of people trying to put together book proposals based on the four or five minutes they once spent with Studs I think he captured his own life in his own way in his own books and that is more than good enough for me.