By Sara Gilbert Frederick, Special to The Free Press
The Free Press
MANKATO —
When Scott Welvaert shared one of his first short stories with a group of other writers at Minnesota State University in the mid-1990s, they had one piece of advice for him: Try poetry.
Welvaert had started college planning to study engineering but had turned to creative writing when he realized that his math skills weren’t as strong as they needed to be. He had written short stories in high school and thought that he had a knack for it — especially after telling a story that made his professor, Terry Davis, tear up. But his writing group didn’t necessarily agree.
“Basically, they told me that my story wasn’t very well crafted,” Welvaert said. “They told me to try writing poetry, because it would teach me how to use the language better and how to use imagery better. They said if you can write poetry well, then that will translate over to your fiction as well.”
Welvaert started writing poetry and found a passion for the form — but he couldn’t shake his desire to tell stories as well. So when he was accepted into MSU’s master of fine arts creative writing program, he combined the two and wrote a thesis that told the story of two AIDS patients on a journey to see the Pacific Ocean through a collection of poems.
That poetic story, “Pacific,” was published earlier this month by Minneapolis-based Sol Books.
Each poem in “Pacific” tells a small part of the story of David and Marti — young lovers with AIDS who have decided to drive west from Minnesota to the Pacific Ocean. There are poems that help explain who they both are and who they’re leaving behind, and others that describe their journey and their adventures along the way.
Although the book is arranged chronologically, Welvaert says it wasn’t written that way.
“It actually started with one of the last poems, with them in a hospital in Oregon,” he says. “After I wrote it, those two people just seemed interesting to me, so I started writing more poems. And then the story became more clear to me.”
Although the poems involve many images and ideas from his own life, he had never taken the journey his characters were embarking on. So he laid out a big map and started marking the places they would visit during their trip: Reliance, S.D., the Black Hills, Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, even Harrison Ford’s ranch near Jackson, Wyo.
“I’m a huge Harrison Ford fan,” Welvaert admits. “I knew he had a house near there, and I thought that he deserved a poem. Now one of my catch phrases when I tell people about the book is, ‘Harrison Ford is in it!’”
Welvaert finished the collection before he finished his MFA in 2001. He tried briefly to find a publisher for it, but then got busy with his full-time job in marketing and the children’s adventure novels that he started writing. But last year, he got a call from Blake Hoena, one of his classmates at MSU who was now working as the editorial director for Sol Books.
“Blake called and said that he was going to publish my book,” Welvaert says. “So I said, ‘OK.’”
Although Welvaert now spends most of his writing time working on novels for children, he still appreciates the freedom that poetry affords a storyteller. In prose, he explains, readers expect the author to fill in the gaps of a story — but in a collection of poetry, those gaps can stand on their own.
“The audience has to use their imagination to fill in the gaps,” he explains. “They’re telling the story to themselves, figuring out what happened and filling in the gaps instead of being told what they are by the author.”
