Interviews
- Interview
at the Grosse Pointe Times
January, 2010 - Interview
at the Cerise Press website
July 1, 2009 - Interview
in the Detroit Free Press
January 14, 2007 - Interview on WDET-FM 101.9
Detroit
December 3, 2006 - “Poetic Perseverance”
Metro Times, July 5, 2006 - “Drawn Together”
Signature, July/August 2006 - “Writer, activist creates bohemia”
Grosse Pointe News, June 22, 2006 - “GPAA names artist, poet in residence”
Grosse Pointe News, June 8, 2006 - Mariela Griffor: Marick Press’ Founder’s Remarkable
Life
thedetroiter.com, May 17, 2006 - “New press releases first 2 publications”
Grosse Pointe News, April 27, 2006 - “G.P. Artists Association to hold Poets Follies”
Grosse Pointe News, March, 2006 - “Starting the press”
Grosse Pointe Times, April 26, 2006 - “Poet versed in bridging the cultures”
The Detroit News, March 29, 2006 - “‘Poets Follies’ to be an adventure of
the creative kind”
Grosse Pointe News, November 10, 2005 - “Poets speak up”
Grosse Pointe News, April 14, 2005 - “‘Detroit Urban Woman Writer in Residence’
named”
Wayne State University Campus News, December 12, 2002 - “Open up the Furnace”
Metro Times, September 25-October 1, 2002 - “Sophomore copes with loss, builds new life in America”
Grosse Pointe South High School’s newspaper The Tower, January 30, 2002 - “Focus on Future Alumni”
Wayne State Media Review, Winter 2001 - Focus on Future Alumni
Wayne State Media Review, Winter 2001 - A poet’s story
Grosse Pointe News, December 6, 2001 - Foreign Affair
HOUR, October 2001 - Journalism student longs for homeland
The South End, November 16, 1999 - Coup survivor deals with new conflicts
The Blade: Toledo, Ohio, October 17, 1999 - Mariela and the Dictator
Metro Times, October 12-19, 1999
“Mariela and the dictator”
By Jack Lessenberry
Metro Times, October 13-19, 1999
“Today, justice was done,” Gonzalo Martinez, Mexico’s former ambassador to Chile, proclaimed last week, when a British court ruled the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet could be sent to Spain for trial on human rights charges. “Pinochet lived a long time, but history caught up with him,” Martinez intoned. Well, not quite yet. The sawdust general, nabbed by an international warrant and forced into London house arrest a year ago, still can appeal to Britain’s High Court. Even if he loses there, he cannot be extradited until the home secretary approves. Spanish courts have charged Pinochet with 34 counts of torture and conspiracy. Even conviction wouldn’t come close to making up for what this thug and his goons Ð encouraged, aided and supported by the United States of America Ð have done. Pinochet, with the help of our CIA, overthrew the legitimate, elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973. Brutal terror followed. Even according to Chilean government figures, 3,197 people were killed or “disappeared” right after that. The murder of U.S. journalist Charles Horman led to an Academy Award-winning 1982 movie, Missing. Last week, a newly declassified State Department document said, in part, “There is some circumstantial evidence to suggest U.S. intelligence may have played a role in Horman’s death.” Less certain is that the sky is blue. The CIA, of course, denies it. Mariela Griffor, who now lives in Grosse Pointe, knows better. She has a merry laugh and doesn’t look remotely close to her age, which is 38, unless you look into her eyes. She began studying journalism again this year, after a 14-year time-out, thanks to Pinochet. Few of her classmates know she is now happily married to a math professor, speaks four languages and has two children. Fewer know she had another life, once, and another husband, a poet who danced ballet and was also an engineer. They met in 1980, when they were students. He was giving a political speech at the university café, in jeans, naturally, and a black T-shirt. “I heard his voice first, then I saw his face, and it was done. I was in love with him from that very moment,” she confessed. “His name was Julio Carlos Santibanez Romero. He was a man who was a romantic and an idealist. He could be shy, and he could be talkative, and he was in a constant good mood, full of new ideas.” Pinochet then had been in power for nearly a decade; the left, as a coherent force, was long since destroyed. Santibanez’s cause was not Leninism, but the native peoples Ð what we used to call Indians. Nevertheless, he was jailed several times. Mariela went to Rio de Janeiro to start studying journalism. But she missed Julio so much she came home seven months later. “We decided on a marriage in August, and he found a nice little house close to the Andes Mountains.” He lived barely long enough to learn that he was going to be a father. On Sept. 17, 1985, a dozen years after the coup, at a time when Western papers were saying that Chile wasn’t such a bad place anymore, he disappeared. Three days later, his mutilated body was found. Less than a month later, Mariela was in her lawyer’s office, and the phone rang. DINA, Pinochet’s secret police, was coming to arrest her. They moved fast. “In less than 24 hours I was on the other side of the globe, in a small town in Sweden. Cold, dark and snowy. Me, with a baby in my stomach and not a word of Swedish.” Her Swedish is fluent now, as is her English. She married an American, though until this year she could not bear to think of living in her second husband’s country, especially since she is certain our CIA was involved in Julio’s murder. That’s not mere intuition; over the years, informers and others have dropped hints. Her goal is to prove it. Julio Santibanez never will be quite extinct. Mariela has his poems, and his daughter. “We decided if it was a girl, he would choose the name, and he chose Javiera, the first woman who participated in the independence of Chile.” Incidentally, even if Pinochet is sent to Spain, he won’t be charged in Santibanez’s death. You might think that’s because it happened so long after the coup. The opposite is true. Pinochet, British authorities ruled, can only be charged with crimes after 1988, though there is a chance that can be gotten around via a conspiracy charge. Now some say, why bother charging such an old man? Pinochet is 83 now. They say these things happened long ago, and Allende wasn’t much good anyway, and the country was in economic chaos, and the dictator restored sound fiscal policies. Let Mariela have the last word. “Back in Santiago, in a crematorium of the general cemetery in grave No. 194, Sector E-5, the rest of the man that loves life and believes in a better world cannot rest in peace.” The world owes it to him to see justice done. We in this country owe it to ourselves to demand the truth about what the CIA did, and for how long, and at whose order. And to look at this, and Vietnam, and Iran, and Cuba, and consider how much good spymaster social engineering has done us. And then to agree, simply: Never again. Read this article online at The Metro Times^ Back to Top
“Coup survivor deals with new conflicts”
The Blade: Toledo, Ohio, October 17, 1999
By Jack Lessenberry DETROIT — Most of Mariela Griffor’s classmates at Wayne State University barely noticed earlier this month when a British judge ruled the former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, should be sent to Spain to face trial on torture charges. Today, even among her fellow journalism students, few know about the CIA-backed 1973 coup that overthrew the elected leftist government of Salvadore Allende, and the terror that followed. To them it is, at best, ancient history. But most would be amazed to know their classmate Mariela had another life once, a life destroyed by the forces of the half-forgotten retired dictator, who came close to killing her as well. For years, she didn’t talk much about that life — and the young husband she lost — except with other survivors. She felt remembering was important, though. “It was contact with a ghost. It was not the kind of life I wanted.” Somewhat reluctantly, she agreed at last to tell her story. She can still close her eyes and see that day in 1980 when she, as a college student, fell in love, at first sight and forever, with a young poet who as also a singer and, professionally, an engineer. Julio Santibanez was giving a political speech in a university café, in jeans and a black T-shirt. He was 21; she, 20. “I heard his voice, first, then I saw his face, and it was done,” she said. Five years later, they would marry, and they would find a little house near the Andes Mountains. They were blissfully happy with each other, but things were getting steadily worse in their nation. “We did not see any future in a country like Chile for us, so we had to choose to change it,” she said. Secretly, for three years, her husband worked in the underground, as a member of the Patriotic Front Manuel Rodriguez. They had been married less than two months when Julio disappeared. She knew, of course. More than 3,000 Chileans had disappeared before him, never to be seen again, at least not alive. Three days later, his mutilated body, blown apart by a hand grenade, was found near a place where the army carried out exercises. He had, at least, had enough time — barely — to learn that he was going to be a father. “We decided that if it was a girl, he would choose the name, and he chose Javiera, the first woman who participated in the independence of Chile.” Though he never knew his daughter, Javiera became a teenager a few months ago. Four weeks after Mr. Santibanez’s murder, his stunned and grieving widow was in the office of a friend, a prominent human rights lawyer in Santiago, when the man got an urgent phone call from another lawyer working on his case. Agents of the DINA, Pinochet’s secret police, were in his office, on a mission to arrest Mariela. There was, literally, no time to spare. “In less than 24 hours I was on the other side of the globe in a small town in Sweden. Me, with a baby in my stomach and not a word of Swedish,” she remembers. October is spring in Chile; winter in Sweden. “Cold, dark, and snowy,” she said, looking far away. She was alone. “I never could say goodbye to my mother, father, and grandmother, who died of sadness while I was in exile, increasing the large number of refugees on this planet.” Mariela’s Swedish is fluent now, as is her English. Time passed. She built a new life and married, to her surprise, an American; a math professor who came to live in Sweden. What is even more surprising to her is that this year, at last, she consented, for the good of her husband’s career, to live in America. For as much as she blames Pinochet and his regime, she blames the United States more. It has long been known the CIA and the Nixon administration were heavily involved in supporting the generals’ coup in 1973. She thinks, from notes and hints and the confession of one former secret police officer, that the CIA continued to meddle in Chilean affairs, and was also involved in her husband’s murder. Yes, she is very happy Pinochet may finally face trial. “But the government truly responsible for these events was that of the United States. The U.S. policymakers decide…(because of) Russian military threats, that the social development in Chile is a threat. “They react by supporting financing, and carrying out the military overthrow of the system so many average people supported. Suddenly, everyday human being are converted into being opponents of the government and ‘criminals.’” Mariela Griffor looked at me. She is living in the United States; her second daughter’s father, her second husband, is American. “Now, after so many years of trying to figure out a way to deal with this reality, I have the following conflict: How do I teach my children to love the country that took so many from my country?”^ Back to Top
“Journalism student longs for homeland”
The South End, November 16, 1999
By Joseph Sharpe She’s been through it. She’s told the tale. She’s spoken of her home and life, her love and the ensuing instances that originated from one profound moment of terror and despair. Mariela Griffor speaks with a young angelic voice, humbly shy and modest — not as she would always have it — no, she can be as assertive and supervising as the next, but as she wills it. She is a Wayne State University student now, back in school after a 14-year break, and knows there is still much for her to learn and accomplish. The combination of her life’s experience and commitment to learn and endure demands attention. That’s her nature. When she met her first husband, Julio Carlos Santibanez Romero, she was listening to him speak politically at a university café gathering in Chile. They were students in 1980 when she first saw the fire in his eyes — the truth, and a future cause that would inevitably shape itself as not only her passion, but also a driving force behind her life. Living under the Augusto Pinochet government, her husband was an orator against the unjust, undemocratic, unequal and unscrupulous Chilean system. Some may have called him brave, some naïve — for under the new Chilean plan, disagreement meant death. Surely, Julio knew that, everyone did. He was an educated man, an engineer, a poet and a dancer. And how can one ignore the thousands of citizens who disappeared after the brutal overthrow of the elected government of Salvador Allende? Julio simply believed in what he knew — fairness, honesty and the desire to rid his fellow people of the scourge plaguing their country. As Julio’s participation in the underground movement continued, Mariela traveled to Rio de Janeiro to attend a Brazilian university. Journalism — to inform and communicate, was her dream — — to learn and transmit knowledge through words; to be the distributor of facts that one, or millions might find sacred, in necessity, to their way of life. Excitement, impatience and anxiety filled her heart as she went about fulfilling her purpose. Mariela had her education in Brazil, but felt her husband Julio and family calling for her far away in Chile. She went back — temporarily taking a break from school — so she might relax from the tempest of the world she loved. And she found it there, for a while. Some months passed and time had its way of flavoring life in Chile, especially with the brilliant ocean sunsets and the mountainous rises that painted exuberant memories in her mind. Mental pictures do not have words, just the intensity of molding the mood and the mind. She had her Julio, her love and her life. Sept. 17, 1985 came like every other day. The normality, however, did not last. Mariela and Julio agreed to meet, after work, but he never arrived. He was seen leaving the office earlier in the day but didn’t return. He was gone, missing. Three days later, she learned of his death — not the details, just the instance. Confiding in her friend, a lawyer, she escaped the DINA, Pinochet’s police squad, that pursued her, emigrating to Sweden. Her country, her family and her people were all left behind. The new Swedish society overwhelmed her. Its winter was brutal, as nine months of ice and freezing cold can be. But her lawyer’s sister lived there, and she knew there would be work and shelter waiting. Why not choose a closer country to Chile? Why not free America? She explains, ”The countries surrounding Chile were working together trapping people. Like Brazil, if I went back to school…they would have known where to find me.“ She did find work in Sweden. Having to feed her and Julio’s newborn baby, Javiera, painting became a way to earn extra money, as her teaching work barely covered the rent and food. After the initial culture shock and constant nagging memories about her homeland and Julio, she found a place there as a mother, an educator and, later, a wife — to her American second husband. It soon became another wonderful home — yet, all the while, she still never found the truth about her past in Chile. Sometime between 1986 and 1989, she recalls reading an article in a Swedish library. It was a Spanish paper that featured an ex-DINA member who was recently granted asylum. He told about the murders, the torture and the destruction of lives; because of his confessions, Mariela found the truth. Her husband had been nabbed by strong, totalitarian political forces and taken into the mountains, roughly an hour away from town. He did not drive himself, he did not walk; someone in the DINA took him to an old army training camp and blew him up with a grenade. ”I tried to call the French Consulate and find the (featured) man, himself, but once you are granted asylum and the truth is revealed, they give you another name and you disappear. I couldn’t find him.“ Because of the CIA involvement in the destruction of Salvador Allende, the apathy of Chile’s surrounding countries, and Pinochet’s brutal government, Mariela’s life was undeniably changed. This is the power of politics. Since ”politics“ might mean the institution of developing the structure and administration of a particular state, Mariela believes it is the human factor involved that calls for a new edifice of the term. ”I know that, here, not many participate (in politics) or vote and it is very surprising. Here you have everything you need to have a fair and just system — not only politics, but even the social aspects. My goal is to raise the consciousness of the community, here, about the political realities in our countries.“ Here is a 38-year-old woman who has been through the crushing grip of iron politics and knows how it becomes strong. When no one responds to despotism with obstinacy, the government will take advantage. In Chile, the loss of life was the final penalty for disobedience. Now that she escaped Chile’s political institution’s offer of fear, poverty-stricken servitude or death, she dreams of going back. With the tears brewing in her eyes — remembering faces, the faces that remind her of the agonizing passage of time and distance — she speaks of her future there. She would like to finish school in America and become the journalist she should’ve been 14 years ago. She is dedicated to her family in America, but still hopes to go back to see her people and be in the native country that is unlike any other place. With the mountains jutting through the sky and the ocean stretching out toward dreams, maybe, one day, Chile can be the place of her youth — a place without so much fear and death — a place without the heart pulled out from its body by the CIA and Pinochet. Maybe, one day, Chile can be Mariela’s home, again.^ Back to Top
“Student takes long road to WSU”
By Grace Aduroja
The South End, December 9, 1999 Mariela Griffor could not hide her emotion as she discussed the political unrest in her homeland of Chile. Following the award-winning documentary “Chile; Obstinate Memory,” Griffor gave a first hand account of life under the dictatorial rule of Gen. Augusto Pinochet at Manoogian Hall Wednesday. According to Griffor, twenty-six years ago, on Sept. 11, 1973, the Chilean military in collaboration with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) overthrew the elected Chilean government. This take over was a result of United States fear of communism and economic troubles from Chile. Griffor, who is now a journalism student at Wayne State University, was only 11-years-old when the unrest began after being sent home from school one day. Later that evening she and her family went to her grandmother’s house to burn all of their books. When Griffor asked her grandfather why they had to burn all of the books, he told her they did not want to be mistaken for Communists. After studying journalism for a short time in Brazil, Griffor returned to Chile and married Julio Santibanez, whom she met at the University of Chile. Santibanez actively protested Pinochet’s military government and in Sept. 1985 he “disappeared,” Griffor said. As a result of her husband’s “disappearance” Griffor was forced to go into exile in Sweden. In less than 24 hours Griffor and her young daughter were on a plane to Sweden. To Griffor, who did not speak the language and did not even know where Sweden was located, this was “like going to Mars,” she said. Years later Griffor read that Santibanez was killed at the hand of the Secret Police. While in Sweden, Griffor met and married her current husband. After 12 years in Sweden, Griffor and her family (which consists of her husband and two daughters) went back to Chile for 10 months. Afterwards they relocated to Michigan. Griffor, a member of the Journalism Institute for Minorities, found it hard to discuss the past. “[It] took many, many years to talk about it,” Griffor said. She still feels that the U.S. government should attempt to find out exactly what the CIA’s involvement was. Griffor compares the conflict in Chile to the Holocaust of Nazi Germany and feels that education is the only way to prevent something like this from happening again. In closing, she advised those in attendance not to forget what they had heard and seen.“Foreign Affair”
HOUR, October 2001
By Jack Lessenberry The Grosse Pointe neighbors who know Mariela Griffor as the mother of two energetically bright young daughters may think of her as an often merry, even mischievous mom — perky, with a delightful accent and a musical laugh. Although she takes classes herself at Wayne State University, to a casual observer her main focus seems to be making sure her daughters, Javiera, 15, and Elena, 10, have a wonderful childhood. That’s true, so far as it goes. The day after last Thanksgiving, for example, Mariela and her husband, Ed Griffor, a mathematician, got Elena ready — white gloves and all — for the neighborhood parade. They ended up marching with the other parents of Girl Scouts, helping to hold up a banner. Later, they went Christmas shopping. That night, while everybody else was getting ready for bed, Mariela went to her computer in her study on the second floor. She looked out at the built-in backyard swimming pool, and Matilda, her tiny bichon frise, scampering across the yard. Then she began to download recently declassified documents from the archives of the CIA. For most of two days she moved her mouse across the files, tendonitis painfully attacking her hand and arm, back hurting from sitting so long. Finally, she found what she was looking for. There it was, in a 1985 CIA report that mentioned the death of a student named Julio Santibanez Romero, “whose decomposed body was recently discovered in a Santiago suburb” in Chile. While the official story was that Julio, who was working in the underground against the dictatorship, had been blown up by a time bomb he was making, the CIA document added that “police officials at the site when the body was recovered saw no evidence to support such a conclusion.” Julio, it strongly implied, really had been murdered. Her Julio. The love of her life, the father of her oldest daughter. Murdered, she was certain, by agents of the dictatorship they were fighting. In her heart, she already knew it. But only then, reading the smudged, declassified cables, did she start to shake, and then cry. “Finally, on the day you least expected, something comes out and hits you straight in the face and confirms what you always knew,” she says. Her Julio had been murdered for opposing Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who overthrew the elected leftist government of Salvador Allende in a military coup in 1973. Mariela barely escaped her native land — that long, narrow nation down the west coast of South America — with her life. Washington, we now know, was strongly behind what happened. “Thanks to the coup, I grew up under a totalitarian regime created, nurtured, supported and guided by the CIA, Richard Nixon and, later, others running the U.S. government,” she says. For many years, that was cause enough for her to reject what’s now her adopted home, the United States of America. After Julio’s murder, Mariela — alone and pregnant — would flee for her life to a refugee camp in Sweden, where she would reinvent herself. Then her world changed again. Now, 15 years later, here she was, living and sleeping in the land she’d once spurned. She, Mariela Cecilia Ibanez Vera, now was married to an American in suburban Detroit. Her daughters, though they still chattered sometimes in Spanish and Swedish, were becoming more and more a part of their new country every day. Their new country, America. Mariela was born Sept. 29, 1961, to teenage parents whose marriage lasted only a few years. She grew up with loving grandparents in Santiago. She was there the day of the coup, shortly after her 12th birthday. She remembers “tanks with military police taking over the street. I was so afraid of these men — they looked hard and dangerous, like the German shepherds they held.” She remembers, as if it were a dream, police chasing a Jeep and shooting, and a man lying on the ground, taking his last breaths. She recalls her grandfather burning dangerous books. “But I did not understand until many years after.” She pauses, her reddish-brown hair in place, her expressive hands silent. “I am not sure how much I can remember. I am not sure how much I want to remember.” What she does recall perfectly was that day at the University of Santiago seven years later when she heard a young poet, in jeans and a black T-shirt, giving a political speech in a cafŽ. He was not only a poet, but also a singer, and an engineering student. “I heard his voice first, then I saw his face and it was done. I fell in love with him forever.” She was 19, he was 20. She was wavering between journalism and Spanish literature as a profession. What she really wanted was “to marry Julio and have four children” and write poetry. Mariela was less interested in politics than in nature. She had grown up largely in southern Chile, filled with the “smell of eucalyptus, the fishermen with ruddy cheeks, and the sea salt whitening their mustaches and hair.” She wanted to be a writer, to capture all that. But she felt politics was forced upon her. “Can people in the United States or Canada understand how it is to live under a tyrant? Maybe not. It is impossible to imagine that it can be so horrible,” she says, her face darkening. A friend named Adriana recruited her for a secret underground paramilitary organization, the Patriotic Front. “They taught me how to make bombs — homemade bombs, Molotov cocktails. I transported them from one place to another.” They gave her code names; first “Rebecca,” then “Isabel.” Mariela marveled that she didn’t blow herself up. She hated the strenuous physical training. She was barely 110 pounds, 5 feet 4 inches. Her commander used to “kick my butt to make me climb the ropes.” One day she read in the paper that he’d been captured and tortured and murdered, too. This was not the life she’d planned. Mariela wanted “to get my degree, have my babies and cultivate the kind of flowers that my grandmother taught me to grow.” Eventually, she dropped out and went to Brazil for a year to study journalism. But she got homesick, quit after six months, and came back. One day she learned she was pregnant. Julio was ecstatic. “He wanted to get married right away. I was more hesitant — but I loved him. He was my hero in body and soul. I wanted to have thousands of his children.” Days after she told him, he had to go for some secret military training in the mountains. That day, Sept. 15, he took her out to lunch, where they planned a big party a month later to celebrate their wedding. “He explained that he never would leave me alone, that he would be with me forever, and as he walked away, he blew me a kiss. That was the last time I saw him alive.” Julio Santibanez was killed three days later, although his body, dumped on a street in the suburbs, wasn’t found for quite some time. Mariela was in her lawyer Alfonzo’s office two weeks after the funeral, trying to make sense of life, when the phone rang. He talked briefly, and looked at the distraught young woman. Calmly, Alfonzo explained that she needed to make a decision — fast. Agents of the DINA, Pinochet’s dreaded secret police, were on a mission to arrest Mariela, who was two months pregnant She could go to the airport, right then, and get on a plane for France, or for Sweden, where he had a sister who could help her. There was no choice, really. “If not for yourself, do it for the baby,” he told her. Within 24 hours, on Oct. 26, 1985, Mariela was in Vaesteraas, Sweden, in a refugee camp, shivering in a borrowed fur coat. “Cold, dark and snowy. I knew no one, had no money, spoke not a word of English.” A little more than five months later, Javiera was born. Though Julio never got to see her, he had, in a few days before his death, chosen that name, if she was a girl. Mariela struggled to learn Swedish, and to start a new life “on the other side of the world.” Twice she tried to talk about her past, and found she could not. She says she “was lucky enough to block out for many years what happened to me. I refused to tell anyone from what I came.” She got work teaching Spanish, and would become a trained Montessori teacher. She had sporadic contact with agents of the Patriotic Front, who eventually failed in their long-planned attempt to assassinate Pinochet. Her contact with them gradually waned. One evening in 1989, she and a friend were in a coffee shop at the University of Uppsala and ran into Ed Griffor, who was immediately interested in Mariela. He spoke such perfect Swedish that she was startled to learn he was an American, from Grosse Pointe. The slender, scholarly Griffor, now 49, was one of the world’s dozen top-ranked theoretical mathematicians. After earning a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and teaching at Harvard University, he’d come to Sweden to study proof theory, his special interest. “I think I am very good for him; I help him grow up, maybe,” Mariela says. “And maybe he is good for me also.” Though Griffor had been a member of Students for Nixon at East Detroit High School in 1968, his politics had changed; he’d worked to help refugees from tyrannies in both East and West. When they decided to marry in 1991, it went without saying that never would they live in the States. Mariela even refused to speak English with him. But she didn’t want to live in Sweden forever, either. (She sometimes refers to herself as having been a “Swedish meatball.”) Eventually, Pinochet left power. Mariela was homesick, and Ed agreed to move to his wife’s homeland. So in 1997 the entire family went back to Chile, for the first time in a dozen years. What she discovered was strange. People seemed glad to see her — and yet not so glad, as if she were a reminder of something they’d rather forget. The nation had changed in a dozen years. Prices were very high, and professional opportunities of the sort Ed needed were essentially non-existent. Reluctantly, after 10 months, Mariela agreed to try life in Michigan, where her husband would be able to form both academic and business connections. Suddenly, one day just before they left, it struck her hard where she was going. “I did not want to move away from my homeland again, but my heart was heavy and I knew that there was no way out.” She sat in the grass, silently thinking. “I started looking for four-leaf clovers. I remembered I found one in Sweden many years ago. I put it in a plastic card and used it as my lucky charm for years.” Finally, she found one. And another, and another — seven in all. When her daughters came home and she told them, they began excitedly looking. They didn’t find any. The next day, Mariela found seven more. “Maybe they were just a bunch of genetically mutated clovers,” she says. “In any event, it was just the sign I needed to continue my voyage.” But for a long time, it seemed to be a wrong-way sign. They arrived in Detroit at the end of January 1998. Mariela suffered something like a nervous breakdown. “I missed my parents. I missed the mountains, the lakes, the blue sky — even the dumb cousins I grew up with.” She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome. The rest of the family began to adjust nicely. Soon, Javier and Elena — already fluent in Swedish and Spanish — were chattering away in English. Ed was getting involved in business for himself. But Mariela, who for the first time was having to talk to her husband in English, was severely depressed. “I felt like somebody had fooled me,” she would later write. “Nobody really taught me what has to be done in case something goes wrong and nothing turns out the way we wanted it to be.” She wondered if she had the energy to make herself over — again. Eventually, she decided that she had to. “Javiera used to say that she did not want to move anymore.” One day, as Mariela now puts it, she opened her eyes and realized “the big sun in the garden, the green of the trees and the blue of the lake are waiting for me, to make all of them my new home.” Timidly, Mariela visited Wayne State University to look into resuming her studies in journalism, even though money was tight. To her surprise, she found out there was something called Journalism Institute for Minorities, which offered full scholarships. When she applied, she didn’t think the director, Sandra Combs Birdiett, was impressed. “She seems to have been disappointed by older students and seemed not to like Latino women,” Mariela wrote to herself. This time, she was wrong. “I was very impressed, even though her English wasn’t as good as it is now,” Birdiett says. “She is an incredible woman — I was inclined to give her a chance.” Mariela became a star student. And she learned quickly that many Americans, even college students, have very little idea about what goes on elsewhere in the world. Most of her fellow students knew nothing about Pinochet; some had never even heard of Chile. But a professor who knew something about her country offered to help Mariela with the language, and encouraged her to write her own story. One day she sat down at the computer Ed had built for her, and typed the title From the Graves of Latin America. She dedicated it to Julio, adding a quote from one of her favorite authors, Czeslaw Milosz: And the heart doesn’t die when you think it should. “There are two reasons why I am writing this book,” Mariela explains in the work, still in progress, that she has since renamed Letters from Another America. “America, my home now, and the birthplace of my second husband, was largely responsible for killing my first husband, and many others, and scarring my life. People need to know this. It is better to set the record straight. We Chileans who have lost our loved ones need to have an answer. The United States owes it to itself and to its people. Americans may not pay attention, but they need to.” Most of the time, she no longer feels uncomfortable in this America, Mariela says. But she won’t give up her Chilean citizenship. And she knows that “even if God can forgive Pinochet and Nixon for what they did to all of us, I never will.” Her oldest daughter is in many ways evolving into a normal American girl, and plans on becoming a citizen soon. But she knows her mother’s history. Not long after the family moved, her sixth-grade teacher called home. They had been discussing Chile, and Javiera had volunteered that Pinochet had killed her father. Javiera doesn’t remember a time before Ed Griffor was in her life; she thinks of him only as her father. Yet, she knows she had another one. Sometimes, both Javiera and Ed think they feel his presence, a comfortable presence, a ghost that has always been with them. “Julio is not on this Earth anymore, but still is in my mind,” Mariela says. “And will be, every second of my existence, until the day I die.”^ Back to Top
“Focus on Future Alumni”
Wayne State Media Review, Winter 2001
Mariela Griffor traveled across the globe to reach WSU. Her determination to overcome obstacles in order to stay focused on dreams and goals is inspiring. The 35-year-old native of Chile is in her senior year of the journalism program and a member of Wayne’s Journalism Institute for Minorities. She has lived in Michigan with her husband and two daughters for about two years, traveling a long, difficult road to get here. She left Chile, two months pregnant, in 1985 after her husband was killed because of his opposition to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The young widow moved to Brazil where she briefly studied journalism before moving again, this time to Sweden. Mariela was eventually forced to relocate again while living in Sweden but not before meeting her current husband, Edward Griffor, a Michigan native. Edward was teaching math at Sweden’s Uppsala University when they met and the new family, now with a second child, moved to the Detroit area. Mariela has set a great many goals since leaving Chile. Her passion is writing and she is currently working on a book that deals with her life in Pinochet’s Chile. She hopes to write freelance pieces that will further explore her life and the foreign policy issues that have had such a profound effect on her. Her hope is to create awareness of governmental situations in areas like Chile. “Young people are so unaware about their future,” she says. “They don’t even know why they are voting and that they have the greatest influence.” In addition to an already busy schedule, Griffor has started working at a new entertainment magazine called City Net that provides Internet information for the world’s web surfers. A diverse writing career, indeed, for a well-traveled woman.^ Back to Top
“A poet’s story”
Grosse Pointe News, December 6, 2001
By Ben Burns Mariela Griffor remembers another 9/11 filled with terror that changed thousands of lives. It was the day in 1973 when Augusto Pinochet decided to take over the government of Chile by attacking the presidential palace with rockets. The elected President Salvador Allende Grossen died during the bombing. He was “officially” a suicide. More than 3,000 others died in the days after the coup, according to the 40-year-old Grosse Pointe Park resident. Griffor was 12 when the military dictatorship took over and the terror began. Seven years later while a student at the University of Santiago, she met a young poet, a year older than she, Julio Santibanez Romero, and fell in love. Santibanez was killed by the secret police in 1985 and Griffor was advised to flee before she was arrested. She was pregnant with her oldest daughter, Javiera. She wound up in a Swedish refugee camp. Four years later, she met and married Edward Griffor, a top theoretical mathematician who was from Grosse Pointe. The couple has a second daughter, Elena, and is host to a Youth for Understanding foreign exchange student from Germany, Cora Graneist . Mariela Griffor’s story was ably detailed in an October Hour Detroit Magazine article by Jack Lessenberry. Lessenberry is an instructor in the Wayne State journalism program where Griffor is a student. Griffor’s first book, “Sunspots,” is now in print. It is a collection of poetry that will be part of a trilogy titled “From the Graves of Latin America.” Lessenberry is quoted on the cover: “The result is words and thoughts that are both sweetly fragrant and which yet burn themselves like acid into our sensibilities and our souls. This is an amazing book.” Impressive praise from the former New York Times freelancer who was named the top columnist in an alternative newspaper a couple of years ago for his work in the Metro Times. A couple of weeks ago Griffor had a book signing for “Sunspots” at the Scarab Club in Detroit. There was Griffor, the suburban mom, passing out canapŽs, cheese bits and glasses of red and white wine. Everyone was having a nice time. Most folks, however, were concerned. The books had not shown up. The author was not. She had lived through a lot worse than a book signing without books. The Scarab Club was kind enough to schedule another signing from 6 to 9 p.m. Friday, Dec. 7. Griffor’s book is dedicated to Santibanez, beginning with this: “I would have liked to offer you innocent verses, full of joy that would resemble your laughter, verses that would have been embroidered with the petals of those Chilean roses that I love so much. That has not been possible.” Perhaps there is symbolism in the delayed date for Griffor’s book signing at the Scarab Club. That date should remind each of us of another day when terror struck America and changed our world — Dec. 7, 1941.^ Back to Top
“Sophomore copes with loss, builds new life in America”
Grosse Pointe South High School’s newspaper The Tower, January 30, 2002
By Shannon Adducci As the sun rises over the Andes and onto the city of Santiago, the majestic beauty of the Chilean terrain can be contrasted with the sound of gunshots and the rhythmic marching of soldiers as they parade through the streets. In the universities, students hold their signs high, shouting with pride before fleeing from the troops who descend on the campuses. Recounting her past experiences, Mariela Griffor, mother of Javiera Griffor ’04, speaks in her accented English of a time of military dictatorship in her native country of Chile. The dictatorship, which lasted from 1973-1990 and was led by General Augusto Pinochet, as well as the uprisings and rebellions that Mariela was forced to flee her homeland of Chile in October of 1985. Ultimately, what made her flee the country was the death of Julio Ibanez, Javiera’s father, who died between September 18 and 20, 1985. He was a member of the Patriotic Front, an organization that worked against Pinochet. “There were a lot of people affiliated with the organization so it didn’t take long for the government to find out about it and know where they worked,” said Mariela Griffor. “He was working underground and they exploded the area. It was definitely a surprise but they knew they were targets.” Julio Ibanez and Mariela Griffor were engaged to be married and Mariela was also two months pregnant with Javiera, she said. During that time, Mariela Griffor said she was a student who had transferred from the University of Santiago to the Pontificia University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to study journalism with freedom of speech and to avoid the political ordeals that encumbered her country. “At the time I was studying Spanish literature and I was writing but I was not completely sure if I wanted to go into journalism in Chile because it was very censored,” said Mariela Griffor. “Even the education at the universities was partial…and this is why I decided to go to Brazil to study journalism.” However, it was during a visit back to Chile when Javiera’s father was killed. At the urging of Chilean civil rights lawyer Alfonzo Insunza, Mariela Griffor said she decided to flee from Latin America to Sweden. “The person who helped me leave was not only a well known civil rights lawyer in Chile, but he was a friend to whom I owe everything to,” said Mariela Griffor. “He was the one who pushed me out of the country.” In Sweden, Mariela Griffor said she met her husband, Edward Griffor, when she was working as a Spanish teacher in the city of Uppsala. Javiera was 2 years old at the time, and when he and Mariela decided to get married, Edward also adopted Javiera. Because she had viewed her adopted father, Edward, as her father since she was young, Javiera did not learn of her father’s death until she was about 9 or 10 years old, she said. It was on a trip with her aunt that she was told of her real father and what had happened to him. “My mother wasn’t the one who told me, instead my aunt (father’s sister) took me to Stockholm for about a week and she told me then,” said Griffor. “I was confused because I had always believed that my (adopted) father was my real father.” Although she had heard of the dictatorship in Chile, Griffor said that she never knew her family was involved in the rebellion against it. “I was shocked,” said Griffor. “I knew that there was a dictatorship and that a lot of people had been killed but I never knew that he (Pinochet) had killed my father.” When speaking of her real father, Griffor said that she wishes she had met him before he was killed, especially because they have been said to have similarities. “My mother says that I look like him and that I have the same strong and stubborn personality as him,” said Griffor. “He used to write poetry and I started to write poetry when I found out what had happened. That’s what helped me to deal with it.” Mariela Griffor’s experiences in Chile prompted her to write a series of books about it, she said. She has just recently published a book of poetry called, “Sunspots,” which is the first book of the trilogy that also includes an autobiography and a collection of short stories. She held a book signing in December at the Scarab Club at the Detroit Cultural Center for “Sunspots.” “I started to write the autobiographical book that is called, “Letters from Another American,” but the book became too long,” said Mariela Griffor. “I had a lot of poetry in the book so I just decided to separate it…But they (all three books) are connected to each other on my experience of leaving Chile.” While Mariela Griffor said that she has a lot of material that she would like to publish, she feels that she has a moral obligation to publish the trilogy before releasing any others. In completing her last year of study in journalism at Wayne State University in Detroit, she said that she was given a lot of time to accomplish this. Although fleeing Chile in 1985, Mariela Griffor said she went back to Santiago in 1997. This time she took her family. Mariela, along with her husband, Javiera and other daughter Elena, went to live in a suburb of Santiago for a year. “She (her mother) wanted us to live there for a while and see what it was like,” said Griffor. Javiera and Elena were both born in Uppsala, Sweden. They lived there for almost nine years, before moving to Florida to live near relatives. Then, in the February of 1998, Griffor said she and her family moved to Grosse Pointe because her father had grown up in the area and missed the US. They have remained here since their arrival and are happy here and not planning to move again.^ Back to Top
“Open up the Furnace”
Metro Times, September 25-October 1, 2002
By Karl Jones It’s getting hot in here! So break out all your prose! Sorry. It’s just that the most overplayed song of the summer has something in common with a promising new Detroit magazine: heat. The Furnace, a literary journal, is gearing up for a Sept. 25 launch party, and “Issue 0” is full of the creative fire that keeps Detroit’s arts community alive, innovative and burning. “The furnace is kind of the fireplace, the hearth, in today’s world, as it provides warmth to the home,” says editor Kelli Kavanaugh. “A furnace can symbolize a place of origin, and we’d like the magazine to be a starting ground for new talent in Detroit. It also speaks to our city’s industrial heritage.” Last winter, Kavanaugh (who has published a book titled Detroit’s Michigan Central Station) and several friends began tossing around ideas for a new literary magazine. As things progressed, the team expanded to form a diverse editorial board whose members’ day gigs range from Detroit Public Schools teacher to artist to executive director of the Greater Corktown Development Corporation. “Many of our board members are part of the nonprofit community in Detroit, so we’re comfortable working with that system,” says Kavanaugh, recounting the genesis of Corktown Press, a nonprofit that the group incorporated to produce the Furnace. “As a nonprofit, we can attract a variety of funding sources for the projects we plan on attempting, from building renovations to dance classes, from the theater productions to Pilates.” Located in Corktown’s Bohemian National House, Corktown Press has ample room to realize its dreams. Although it’s been touch and go at times, the dream of launching a literary magazine is about to come true as the Furnace hits the streets. Most of the work in “Issue 0” carries a Detroit flavor. Zuriel Wolfgang Lott injects chilling technology under Detroit’s abandoned skin in his short story “Feedback.” Poet Mariela Griffor longs for a bridge between past and present (in English and Spanish) as she contemplates the now-crumbling landscape. One of the most interesting pieces, “Prototypical House for a Narrow Lot,” belongs to neither genre. It’s a blueprint and short manifesto by Architects Asylum, a collective of local architects seeking to revitalize Detroit’s neglected living spaces with its innovative designs. Articles on topics such as the Detroit Intermodal Freight Terminal, John K. King books and “hanging out in Hamtramck” also heat up the Furnace. So where can you get your hands on a copy? “Issue 0” will be available at the Furnace Premiere Party, Saturday, Sept. 28, at the Savoyard Club in the Buhl Building (535 Griswold at Congress). The party starts at 8 p.m., and a copy of the magazine comes with the ticket price. Advance tickets are $20 at Spectacles, 230 E. Grand River, and at Pure Detroit in the Fisher Building. Just don’t expect to bury your nose in its subtle orange-and-smoky-gray pages all night. Jen House, local comedian extraordinaire, will host the event, where you can get your food and drink on (courtesy of several local establishments) and enjoy music by the Immigrant Saga and DJs Mike T and Greg Mudge. Local fashion designers D.Koy, Liquid Silver and Scarlett’s Daughter will be there. Several local artists will also present their work. Obviously, the magazine has the backing of Detroit’s creative community. But Furnace organizers have seen similar magazines fold in the past. In fact, several editors are alumni of such publications. Still, in an environment where it’s difficult yet necessary to keep creativity alive, they’re hoping to fill a niche in this city — and fill it well. Are they expecting a “warm” response? “I think so, yes,” Kavanaugh says. “I also expect skepticism, because so many worthy magazines have had short runs here. Hopefully, longevity will be ours!” Read this article at The Metro Times^ Back to Top
“‘Detroit Urban Woman Writer in Residence’ named”
Wayne State University Campus News, December 12, 2002
By Amy Lewis The department of interdisciplinary studies in the College of Urban, Labor and Metropolitan Affairs (CULMA) and the International Women’s Writing Guild Detroit Chapter have named Mariela C. Griffor the 2003 Detroit Urban Woman Writer in Residence. The Detroit Urban Woman Writer in Residence (DUWWIR) contributes to community life at Wayne State University and the surrounding Detroit areas by discussing her scholarly pursuits, world experience and professional knowledge with students and local residents. These discussions often take place at Detroit-area public libraries, schools and classes and programs at Wayne State. Griffor, born in the Chilean city of Concepcion, attended elementary, middle and high school in the country’s capital city, Santiago, before beginning journalism courses at Catholic University Rio de Janeiro. In 1985, Griffor’s first husband disappeared and it was later discovered that the was murdered by the secret police of then dictator Augusto Pinochet, who forcibly took power in Chile in 1973 and held it until recently. Fearing for her life, Griffor and her daughter moved to Uppsala, Sweden, where they remained for 12 years. While there, she became a certified Montessori teacher and became one of the three founding members of the Glunten Montessori School. In this capacity she assisted in the development of methodologies and manuals for child training. While in Europe, Griffor also worked for Radio Latin America which provided her an opportunity to read her short stories on air. In 1991, Griffor married an American citizen and relocated to the United States. Since arriving in the U.S., she has been a contributing writer to several local publications. Recently, her first bilingual volume of poetry titled Sunspots and Other Poems was published, and her novel Naziness: A Collection of Short Stories is due for release soon. Griffor, a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Detroit Women Writers, plans to finish her journalism degree at Wayne State next semester. The DUW-WIR is the end product of a “Talking Walls Workshop” which took place during the Detroit 300 celebration. The Writer in Residence is chosen from candidates proposed by a nominations subcommittee, whose members have been named by the DUW-WIRP committee.^ Back to Top
“Poets speak up”
Grosse Pointe News, April 14, 2005
By Ben Burns Mariela Griffor of the Park leads a monthly affair at the Grosse Pointe Artist Association called “Fourth Friday Literature/Poetry Discussion” group. It is an opportunity for local poets and authors to show off their wares. Griffor, who was the 2004 Detroit Urban Woman Writer in Residence at Wayne State, is a walking, talking adventure tale herself, having been considered a rebel at one point in her native Chile under an oppressive, authoritarian ruler. You would never know that since she is warm, friendly and has a delightful, good humor. The artist’s association is at Maryland and Jefferson, and Eric Bocktael will introduce Daniel Padilla and Phyllis Reeve, poets, and Lolita Hernandez, fiction, on April 22. The session runs from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. and costs $5 at the door but includes refreshments. For more information, call (313) 821-1848. It is worth the $5 just to meet and chat with Griffor.^ Back to Top
“‘Poets Follies’ to be an adventure of the creative kind”
Grosse Pointe News, November 10, 2005
By Alex Suczek You expect creative artists to think outside the box. Even so, it is surprising and impressive to see the spirit of adventure that is evident in the Grosse Pointe Artists Association’s program for tomorrow evening, Friday, Nov. 11. The live presentation is billed as “Poets Follies,” but it coincides with the final day of the annual member art show, which is still on display. The result is the highly diversified presentation ranging from traditional artworks and prize winners from the annual show to authors reading selections from their poetry, plays and books. Topping it all off is a performance by a flamenco dancer and guitarist. What a combination. The best way to describe it is an “Anything Goes Gallery Show,” but a more thoughtful observation is to remember these are active, working artists of national stature. They are published and accepted at statewide and national shows and they market their art. They give us a window on the broad world of creativity, its directions, and the frontiers of style and mediums over a spectrum of art forms. There are parallels to be found in the way various art forms are developing and changing in our time. Perhaps the most readily discernible example is the use of new iconography in the different forms of graphics and literature. Painters create original effects with found objects and materials. Poets do too, with drastically brief and symbolic use of verbal imagery. Playwrights break away from the traditional staging formats. Musicians seek original, signature harmonies, tonal effects and patterns of development. All these artists appear to be extending the concepts of impressionism and nonobjectivity. Artists continually seek new forms and styles of expression. It is a mind-stretching experience to examine their output, develop a personal impression of its aesthetic character and look for meaning. The works on the wall of the GPAA headquarters, which represent the best of the member entries, are, of course, silent participants. Yet they project their messages of creativity eloquently to the viewer. The top-winning entry, “Mirror, Mirror” by George Booth, is one of the 37 pieces in the show that represent the best work of the association’s 268 members. The fact that his medium is digital photography puts it on the front line of graphic art development and raises a perennial question in the art world: How will artists find new and creative ways to manipulate this new medium and create original impressions? It is fascinating to retrace the process in all phases of art history, from charcoal drawings on a cave wall and paintings in oils to the use of found materials and now, electronics. Julie Strabel’s second-place winner represents another modern medium, collage, but one that has been in use long enough to have undergone considerable evolution. As a visual image, she has left it nameless, giving it an air of mystery, but Zena Carnaghi’s third-place winner has its own mystery as you study that collage and try to interpret the significance of its title: “Iroquois.” Against this background, will appear the program of lively arts arranged by Mariela Griffor, poet, author, journalist, community activist and the 2003 Wayne State University Urban Woman Writer in residence. These artists will present their creations by reciting, reading or otherwise performing them, adding a lively quality to the presentation, a suitable basis for calling it “Poets Follies.” It is also an exceptional opportunity to become acquainted with some fascinating personalities. Poet and painter Pablo “Steve” Davis went to work as an underage miner in Pennsylvania, felt an urge to be an artist and at the age of 16, hopped a freight train to help Diego Rivera paint his world-renowned murals in the Detroit Institute of Arts. He was wounded in the Spanish Civil War at the defense of Madrid. After World War II, he worked and lived with Pablo Picasso at Vallauris at the artist’s invitation. His works are in the collections of 17 major museums, including the Louvre and the DIA. He has produced thousands of artworks and has fought for his ideals as a labor and community activist. A state-of-the-art senior citizen apartment complex in southwest Detroit bears his name. The sentiments of a poem that he will read are hardly surprising. It’s titled “Martin Luther King.” It begins:“Cease from AngerMore introspective but no less adventurous, Dan Padilla has also been schooled in the wide world and even though he is years younger, he has already accumulated an impressive range of experience. He studied theater and art in London and explored the treasures in many of the world’s great museums, from the Uffizi in Florence to MOMA in New York City. He studied writing at an extended list of universities and workshops across America and now lives and works in a studio in Northville. A representative mood of his poetry is reflected in “Converse.”
Forsake your wrath
Forgive.
So make your strength
Unbreakable.”
“SometimesAnyone with nostalgia for local history will revel in quotes from Mike Dixon’s two books, “Life at the Flats” and “When Detroit Rode the Waves,” recalling the days when there was active public transportation on our waterways and when Harsens Island in the St. Clair River delta was a famous summer play-ground. Yet another world will open for listeners as playwright Mark Steel reads from his newly released “Grosse Pointe Inferno,” a sequel to “Grosse Pointe Pimp.” And pulses will quicken as Mary Laredo Herbeck and guitarist Djeto Juncaj add music and dance to the experience with a torrid flamenco performance. Their artistry was learned in Jerez de la Frontera, Spain. The Follies, in the GPAA gallery at Maryland and E. Jefferson, begins at 6:30 p.m. and can be expected to last for at least two hours. Admission is $5 and since the program is likely to attract a crowd, and the capacity is not large, eager attendees may be well advised to arrive on time or early. For more information call (313) 821-1848.
The poetry of conversation
Feels like a spring day
Even though it’s winter
The air between us
Swirls up thoughts of
Sunny days
Even if a storm
Is brooding.”
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“Poet versed in bridging the cultures”
The Detroit News, March 29, 2006
By Lisa Martino Mariela Griffor still clearly remembers a day in 1973 when she watched her grandfather burn volumes of poetry by Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda in fear that the Chilean government would suspect the family had Communist ties. Today, the founder of Marick Press creates the same types of books she watched smolder so many years ago. Griffor, 44, is a native of Chile, a poet, writer, wife, mother and Grosse Pointe Park resident who sees the written word as the tie that binds people and creates community across borders. Her press is releasing its first two volumes: “The Sleeping,” a collection of poems by Caroline Maun of Grosse Pointe Park, and “A Complex Bravery,” poems by Berkeley, Calif., poet Robert Lipton. Later in the year, it will release local writer Robert Fanning’s “The Seed Thieves” In its first year, the nonprofit Marick Press will focus on poetry and then move on to novellas, novels and short stories. Griffor is also in talks with Ilya Kaminsky, award-winning Russian writer and author of “Dancing in Odessa.” The goal is to publish four to six books each year. “I’m looking for a very eclectic mixture of writers…something unique…we’re looking for books that take risks,” she said. “Once in a while you can find a book that can change you, or change the world. If we are lucky enough, maybe one of these days we will get one of those books.” Griffor left Chile for Sweden in 1985 after her involvement with the Patriotic Front — a Communist guerrilla organization that sought to overthrow dictator Augusto Pinochet. During her time with the Patriotic Front she met Julio Santibanez, the father of her first child and the man who inspired her volume “Poems of Love for a Subversive Man.” Santibanez was murdered shortly before Griffor left Chile in fear for her life. The Wayne State University writer in residence for 2003 who worked as a journalist and Montessori teacher in Sweden never aspired to become a writer, having grown up in a family of “left-brained” engineers, but Griffor remembers her grandmother making her memorize poetry by Latin writers and recite it for visitors. “I think somehow that shaped my mind,” said Griffor, whose favorite writers include Neruda, Czeslaw Milosz and Rainer Maria Rilke. These days, when she’s not writing or reviewing manuscripts for Marick Press, she’s organizing Poets Follies, a monthly poetry reading and discussion group at the Grosse Pointe Artist Association Art Center. It introduces new writers and includes visual and musical artists. “I’m a writer, and I know how hard it is to get your work out there. I think local writers need to have their own space,” she said. Susan Macdonald, director of the art center, calls Griffor “very enthusiastic and very devoted to the literary arts.” Griffor will be named the art center’s poet in residence at the end of next month. “Because of her work, it has brought more of the community to our art center and it has also brought them back,” Macdonald said.^ Back to Top
“Starting the press”
Grosse Pointe Times, April 26, 2006
By K. Michelle Moran Grosse Pointe is miles from the center of the publishing world in New York, but that hasn’t stopped Mariela Griffor from starting a publishing company here. Griffor — a poet, journalist, activist and researcher who lives in Grosse Pointe Park — is the founder of the nonprofit literary publisher Marick Press, which will get an official launch with readings April 28 at the Grosse Pointe Artists Association Art Center and April 30 at the Detroit Institute of Arts. These events mark the publication of Marick’s first two books — the poetry collections “A Complex Bravery” by Robert Lipton of Berkeley, Calif., and “The Sleeping” by Wayne State University professor Caroline Maun, a Grosse Pointe Park resident. The launch couldn’t be more timely, since April is National Poetry Month. Rather than serve as a deterrent, it was the region’s distance from New York and other publishing hubs that spurred Griffor to start Marick. “We need presses in this area,” Griffor said. “Michigan is a fantastic place for writers, because there are so many writers, but there [are a lack of presses locally]…We wanted to [create] a place where writers could express themselves and get published.” Griffor stresses that Marick isn’t a vanity press. Marick fiction editor Peter Markus and poetry editor Ilya Kaminsky — both established writers themselves — are among the professionals who read incoming manuscripts to determine if Marick will publish them. “We are looking for writers of prose who pay close attention to the acoustical properties of the sentence, and poets whose poems understand that even the space between words makes a sound,” said Markus in a prepared statement. “In short, we are literary hunters on the hunt for the unsung utterance in writers both well and unknown. There is no shortage of very strong manuscripts in the world that deserve to be read by us, and it’s our hope at Marick Press to give a home to those books that find their way to us and give us no choice but to make room for them in our house.” Maun — who edited “The Collected Poems of Evelyn Scott” (National Poetry Foundation, 2005) — is such a writer. “The Sleeping” is the first book of poetry for Maun, an assistant professor of cultural literacies at WSU who was one of two recipients of the Academy of Scholars Junior Faculty Award. Griffor praised Maun’s “strong and clear voice.” Maun praised the editorial staff at the press for helping her put together a cohesive book, and she said Griffor is assembling a strong list of important authors — something crucial for any press. Although Griffor said Marick’s emphasis will be on Michigan writers, the publishing company is willing to print the work of writers from other parts of the country, as is the case with Lipton. Lipton’s work intrigued Griffor because “he’s very irreverent towards form, but at the same time he’s very clear in his thought.” Griffor, the GPAA’s recently named poet-in-residence, was WSU’s Detroit Urban Writer in Residence in 2003 and winner of the 2004 Pablo Neruda International Poetry Competition. Born in Concepcion, Chile, her life took a tragic turn when she was forced to flee her homeland in 1985 after her boyfriend, Communist activist Julio Santibanez, was assassinated. After living in Europe, she and her husband, Edward, moved to Grosse Pointe Park with their two daughters in 1998. She finished her journalism studies at WSU and has been published by many English and Spanish language newspapers. She directs popular Poets Follies programs at the GPAA Art Center. In September, Marick will publish three more poetry collections by local authors: “The Seed Thieves” by Robert Fanning, “White Holes” by James Hart III and “Solute” by Daniel Padilla. Next year, the press is slated to issue new books by Terry Blackhawk and Russell Thorburn. Griffor said Marick will probably publish four to six books per year. “I’m a writer myself, and I understand very well the struggle of getting your work out,” Griffor said. “I’m trying to create a space for those books that are underrepresented. Sometimes you find a book that can change your life and bring joy to you.” Marick Press authors Robert Lipton, Caroline Maun, Robert Fanning, James Hart III and Daniel Padilla will read during Poets Follies at 6:30 p.m. April 28 at the GPAA Art Center, 1005 Maryland, in Grosse Pointe Park. Admission is $5. Call (313) 821-1848 or send e-mail to gpaal@sbcglobal.net or mgriffor@marickpress.com for more information. A launch celebration for Marick Press will take place at 2 p.m. April 30 in the Detroit Institute of Arts lecture hall, 5200 Woodward, in Detroit’s Cultural Center. Lipton and Maun will read, and WSU Interdisciplinary Studies Chair Stuart Henry will give a lecture during the program, which is free with museum admission. Call (313) 833-7900 for more information. For more about Marick Press, visit www.marickpress.com or call (313) 407-9236.^ Back to Top
“G.P. Artists Association to hold Poets Follies”
Grosse Pointe News, March, 2006
Poets Follies, a reading, discussion and performance gathering of local poetry and prose authors and musicians, will be held from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. Friday, March 24, at the Grosse Pointe Artists Association Art Center, 1005 Maryland, Grosse Pointe Park. Featured at this month’s gathering will be readings by Mariela Griffor, Nancy Solak, and the Grosse Pointe Theatre Encore Players, as well as music and comedy by Sheila Lovely. Griffor, of Grosse Pointe Park and the facilitator of the Poets Follies, will read selections from her upcoming book, “Poems of Love for a Subversive Man,” scheduled for release in June by Tightrope Books. Last year, Solak and her husband Rich (retired Grosse Pointe Farms city manager) spent several months living in an apartment in Umbria, Italy. They learned about the region and made friends with the locals while living on a shoestring, without a car, and not knowing the language. She will read from her memoirs, which is currently a work in progress. Solak is a freelance writer and editor with more than 100 nonfiction articles published in local, regional and national publications. She is also a Writer’s Digest magazine short story award winner. The Grosse Pointe Theatre Encore Players will perform skits from “A Book of Love” and “What Does Love Mean to Me?” Lovely, of Grosse Pointe Park, returns for an encore performance of her cabaret-style songs and comedy routine, which pokes fun at growing up and coming of age as an Irish-American Baby Boomer. Admission to the Poets Follies is $5. For more information, call (313) 821-1848.^ Back to Top
“New press releases first 2 publications”
Grosse Pointe News, April 27, 2006
By Alex Suczek Having a new book publisher open for business in Grosse Pointe is impressive and surprising. That its mission should be to publish poetry and creative fiction is even more so. Yet an exploration of this esoteric and marginally profitable (if at all) business uncovers benefits that are meaningful and scarce in our society. The question of profit is easy to dispose of. The new Marick Press is a nonprofit corporation. There are other satisfactions that arise from writing, publishing, and reading verse and creative prose. Those satisfactions are varied and complex. Looking at how and why this new press has been established helps one to understand. But its editors and authors, and their published and about-to-be published books are the real sources of insight. The founder of Marick Press is a poet herself, as well as a journalist, linguist, teacher and literary researcher at Wayne State University and a fireball of enthusiasm. Mariela Griffor grew up in Chile and continued her education while working in Brazil, Sweden and the United States. Living in Grosse Pointe and working at Wayne State University, she became acutely aware of the urgent need for a local publisher operating outside the commercial mainstream. There are talented, creative people in Michigan who have to go outside the state to find a publisher. There are more all over the country looking for a congenial press anywhere. Griffor is determined to help fill this gap and give us our own spot on the publishing map. It was this commitment and her boundless energy that gave birth to the idea and won the support of important talents needed to bring it to life. The process began with a collaboration with Susan MacDonald, who supported joint presentations of art and poetry at the Grosse Pointe Artists Association Gallery. Billed as “Poets’ Follies,” the first event last winter generated high interest and inspired Griffor to move ahead. A chance encounter with Michigan writer Peter Markus quickly resulted in his willingness to take on the role of editor to find and edit publishable manuscripts. As a published author and poet, and an active lecturer and teacher of creative writing, he has attractive qualifications. He has taught writing widely in Michigan schools, such as MSU and U-M, as well as the Community School at Grosse Pointe South High School. He teaches every summer in New York at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop. It is the largest, non-degree granting school of creative writing in the United States. This puts him in touch with just the kind of writers a press like Marick looks for: independent, highly creative and idealistic scribes working in styles and formats that are not commercially viable for mainstream houses. They do have originality and creativity that make their work deserve attention. Newest addition to the staff as poetry editor is an especially illustrious figure. Ilya Kaminsky hails from Odessa in what used to be the Soviet Union. He came to the United States as a teenager when his family was granted political asylum. He brings strong influences of the Russian tradition of poetry, bridging differences between the two cultures in his own unique way. His first full-length book, “Dancing in Odessa,” published in 2004, won four major awards. That’s impressive recognition. In 2005, his book was named Best Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord Magazine. This year, he will begin teaching in the graduate writing program at San Diego State University. He currently lives in Berkeley, Calif. With Griffor’s vision and Markus’ skills, Kaminsky rounds off a trio of editors who bring prestigious talent to this new publishing house. Marick Press’ potential for achievement is considerable when you consider the quality of work they seek to publish. As in any effort where aesthetics are paramount, Kaminsky’s take on it emphasizes the uniquely personal nature of a poet’s work as reflected in his own aesthetic values. He describes his poems in Russian as very formal. They are constructed according to forms and patterns. But writing in English, he observes, has liberated him to simply put life on a page. While he expresses his own soul in his native Russian, English as his acquired second language allows him to take a clear look at himself from a distance. As with many poets’ works, to read his poetry is to be allowed privileged access to his innermost views of himself. He gives a particularly poignant example. While his family suffered from the holocaust, he chooses not to write about it. This is not to avoid the painful memories. He prefers to leave a joyful legacy. Along with daring style and originality, Markus is concerned with literary craftsmanship and alert to the devices used in artful storytelling. He values the sounds and the moments of silence in a phrase. He looks for writing with musical qualities. In exploring the rationale for writing poetry, Kaminsky is exceptionally articulate. Every poet has a personal reason. For Kaminsky it provides a form of spiritual satisfaction. Even so, he says, “It is no easy way to understand why we are here on this planet. There is a lot of internal struggle, a lot of choking with words.” He goes on to say that a poet must write whatever works for him. Then, poetry is a joyous gift. It is also an international language expressing such things as praise, joy, desire, humor and sadness that are universal human experiences, expressing them beautifully and with some degree of mystery. Having chosen manuscripts that meet sophisticated criteria like these, Marick Press’ editors are releasing their first two books of poetry at a launch celebration in the Detroit Institute of Arts Lecture Hall at 2 p.m. on Sunday, April 30. The books are different in tone, subject matter and style, yet both have met the editors’ standards. One, titled “The Sleeping,” is by Caroline Maun. She is a Grosse Pointe Park resident and WSU assistant professor of critical literacies. Her poetry explores meanings of the word “home” and arises from life experiences she was moved to document. One critic singled out her remarkable ability to recall private experiences and use them to conjure universal and sometimes startling images of the impact on her body of the lover, the doctor and the rapist. The poem that provided the title for the book, is a thought-provoking example. The second book, “A Complex Bravery,” is by Robert Lipton, who works as a poet and public health researcher in Berkeley Calif. Significantly for understanding his poetry, he is a longtime activist for peace and in efforts to promote an equitable settlement between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank. One of the book’s most highly praised poems, “Not Me in Nablus,” evokes powerful feelings on the unending conflict where he spent two periods of active observation to help promote peace and harmony. Keynoting the launch on Sunday will be a lecture by Stuart Henry, chairman of Interdisciplinary Studies at WSU. Authors Caroline Maun and Robert Lipton will give readings from their books. A book signing and reception will follow the program. Admission is free.The Sleeping
By Caroline Maun from her new book, “The Sleeping” I have been in the place of the volewho, still alive, sleeps within the wolf’s jaws.
I have spent a few hours in the hole
and struggled with men’s laws.
A caress that struck like a blow
stunned me as it broke
across my face. Blood, a flow
poured from my numb mouth as I choked.
If given a second chance I’d have said:
you’ve taken nothing from me of importance
even if you leave me dead.
And given a second chance
I’d shoot you where you stand.
Not as recompense
or even as reprimand
or because it would make more sense.
I would do it because I was robbed
of the possibility to act
as I fell on my arms and sobbed
and waited, and lacked.
Not Me in Nablus
By Robert Lipton from his new book “A Complex Bravery” I wasn’t the boy shot through the handas he walked along Sal-hedin street
idly brushing his fingers against the concrete market stalls.
His hand, not mine
would sometimes throw rocks at the tanks
smoking up the streets near the school.
I wasn’t the girl with the scraped knees
and circular rubber bullet bruises
cornered by a jeep as she returned home;
and how could I be my uncle
hung by his feet in Ariel
until blood bloated and blushed his head.
Nor am I the blasted body of a mother
cut in half by her bedroom door
as soldiers triggered a shaped charge.
The differences are obvious:
my hands are whole
and I use them to make Italian pastry chefs,
British pensioners, and French jugglers laugh
at my pantomime of soldiers hiding in tanks
shooting at my friends with shirts on their heads.
A hundred feet away a sniper
runs his laser across someone’s chest.
How could it be my chest?
It is not my heart and lungs blasted away
by a tumbling 25-caliber shell.
It is not my blood running out my mouth
and it is not my smile stuck to my face
like a paper donkey’s tail.
I am still telling this story
an insightful, and more to the point, living narrator
who lets you believe death
is for someone else
in some other place.
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Mariela Griffor: Marick Press’ Founder’s Remarkable Life
thedetroiter.com, May 17, 2006
By Heather McMacken “Poetry is so underrepresented, especially in the Detroit area. We don’t have ways to express ourselves, and, because the challenges we’re facing are global as well, it’s important for our writers to have a voice. Many people have given up on Detroit; they look at it with a very apocalyptic view. I have a very post-modern view of what Detroit will look like.” These are the words of Mariela Griffor, founder of the not-for-profit Marick Press, devoted to poetry and creative writing. Recently I had the pleasure of talking with Griffor over a cup of coffee at the Grab A Java, a lovely little coffeehouse in Grosse Pointe Park. That rainy evening, seated at a small round table, Griffor’s eyes danced merrily as she offered me a brief glimpse into her remarkable life. Griffor was born in the city of Concepcion in southern Chile, on September 29, 1961. Her family eventually moved to Santiago, the capital of Chile, where she attended the university there. In 1984, she moved to Brazil for a year to study journalism at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. On September 17, 1985, Griffor’s boyfriend, Julio Carlos Santibanez Romero, disappeared. He had been involved in the “Patriotic Front,” an organization fighting against the terrors of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Three days later, Romero’s body was found. About a month later, Griffor fled to Sweden in order to escape the DINA, Pinochet’s secret police. Her exile lasted twelve years. While in Sweden, she raised her daughter (whom she’d been pregnant with at the time of her escape from Chile), taught at a Montessori school, and married an American, current professor of Mathematics at Wayne State and the University of Michigan Edward Griffor. After the Pinochet government was concluded, Mariela and her husband returned to Chile for a brief time. But due to the shaky economy and her husband’s homesickness, they decided to move to the United States. In 1998, they and their two daughters settled in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan. Ms. Griffor is a columnist, poet, researcher, international community activist, and journalist. She co-founded The Detroit Institute for Creative Writers (DICW). She has been a Community Relations Developer at Bagley Housing Association, a non-profit organization working for affordable housing in Detroit. She was the winner of The Pablo Neruda International Poetry Competition of 2004. Griffor was the 2003 Detroit Woman Writer-in-Residence in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Wayne State University. She’s the recipient of the Certificate of Merit from the State of Michigan in recognition for exceptional achievement, outstanding leadership, and dedication to improving the quality of life in Michigan. Also, she is the author of a poetry book Sunspots and Other Poems, as well as Naziness: A Collection of Short Stories. What brought you to the Detroit area?My husband. He’s from here, Grosse Pointe. While we were living in Chile, he came to me and said “I really want to go home.” This was devastating to me. All those years in exile…I just wanted to stay in Chile. But it was difficult financially to stay, too. So, we came here in 1998. Do you like living here?
It was a shock, at first. When I came into the city, it seemed such a devastation. Such a devastated city. I cried. I had such a pain. I thought “Oh my God.” Detroit was a big, big shock. But — at this point — so much is happening here, that I would not go to any other place in the world. How can the city of Detroit be improved?
You know, everybody is so negative about Detroit. I’m not. I’m optimistic. And I’m not going to give up, either. My intention is not to change the people, but to change the mentality of the people. I want to do my part. I want to have a lot of fun, too. I think what we’re trying to do at Marick fulfills a need. Poetry makes the world a lot better. I don’t have any kind of politician’s agenda for the city of Detroit. I think if we all let our best part come out, our surroundings are going to flourish. So, you think that attitude is everything?
I think it’s about seeing the possibilities. If you are negative, down, and depressed, you won’t see the possibilities. But if you open your eyes and you are sensitive to what is going on — you can say “Oh wow! We can do so much together. We can have so much fun.” How has the city of Detroit inspired you?
I’m surprised always — all the time — by possibilities. If you have initiative, if you have a good group of friends, you can do so much! And you don’t need that much to start with. So, I’m very optimistic about what can happen here. With what organizations are you involved?
I’m a member of the Detroit Working Writers. I’m a member of the Grosse Pointe Artists Association. I’m their first poet-in-residence, and director of the Poets Follies writing group. I’m involved with many other activities and groups… I’ve found my place here, you know? I’ve found my place. I’m pretty much at peace with myself. What happens at the Poets Follies?
Interdisciplinary artistic adventure. There’re a lot of musicians and painters. We hold the meeting in the gallery. We read poetry, sing, drink Sangria. It’s all at once! Why did you decide to found Marick Press?
I started Marick Press just because I got tired of going to New York all the time. Every time I wanted to meet with agents, publishers, and editors for my writing…I had to go to New York! And that cost me a lot of money. So I thought to myself, if a press doesn’t exist around here, I have to create one. Plus, I wanted to get more involved in my community. So, that is what moved me to start Marick Press. How did the press begin?
In 2001, I started the press, under a different name. I published a few people in my writers’ group. We put out a couple of books. It wasn’t all that serious. We didn’t have a lot of funding. So, I saved my money for a couple of years. In August 2005, I changed the company’s name to Marick Press and registered it as a non-profit organization. Marick Press released its first two books on April 30, 2006: The Sleeping, a book of poetry by Caroline Maun, and A Complex Bravery, a poetry book by Robert Lipton. How would you describe these first two books?
These are two very good manuscripts. Caroline’s book is very honest. Very feminine. It will be easy for women to relate to it. Just recently, it’s been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. I wish that she would win! And Robert — ah! He is one of my favorite guys now. His book I really like. It’s a really heavy book. A lot of politics. Have you received many donations yet?
At this point, the only donation I’ve gotten was $35! Donations are a necessary part of a non-profit organization. Donations are necessary for survival. Is your press planning any specific fundraising in the future?
In August, we are going to have a fundraising campaign through Meet the Author events. We are doing this because in September we’re having our fall launch. Three books of poetry are coming out: Daniel Padilla’s Solute, James Hart III’s White Holes, and Robert Fanning’s The Seed Thieves. Also, we just added another book scheduled for publication: Alexander Suczek’s non-fiction book The Witness of Music; The History of Pro Musica in Detroit. How has the community responded to Marick Press?
Very well. We have a very good audience. This is a wonderful community. A lot of people are interested. For many years, writers couldn’t find anyone in this area who’d publish their works. So, they’d self-publish. But yes, a lot of submissions are coming in. It’s good…we promise to read every submission! What does the future hold for the press?
I have a new project I’m working on. It’s going to be called Marick Press Writers Series. Hopefully, this program will be held at the Grosse Pointe library. The intention is to have the Marick Press authors run the workshops and lectures. What is the overall goal, the main vision of Marick?
We are going to publish as many books as we can that have been overlooked, underrepresented in mainstream literature…those books that have been rejected by the big presses. So, what kind of writing is Marick looking for?
We are looking for very unique voices. We, at the press, have very unique taste. As far as poetry, I think people are tired of poetry right now. The same poetry is being published over and over…when people think of poetry they think “Oh God! I’m going to fall asleep! I’m not going to understand it!” I’m tired of that kind of poetry myself — it’s too abstract. What we’re looking for is a little bit closer to home, a little more realistic — but at the same time, with its own flavor, its own technique. You are multi-talented — a writer of many genres. You write poetry, columns, stories…how do you stay inspired?
Things come in their own form. Poems come to me as poems, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Who are your favorite, most influential writers?
My favorite poets are Pablo Neruda and Ceslaw Milosz. My favorite fiction writer is Coetzee. Are any writing projects of your own forthcoming?
I have been writing a memoir for a long time. I have an agent in California. I remember at one time she was very optimistic about the book. We almost sold it. Almost! Also, I have a poetry manuscript that is looking for a house…if somebody wants publish me, I am open! Call me! Is being an artist different in the U.S. than in Chile or Sweden?
In working with art, you have to find a balance between what you want to do and what you want to convey to the public. I guess it is different in that Chilean writers are so politicized, so shaped by politics. We cannot forget that in our writing. What is the current state of Chile?
It’s very different now. Chile went back to a socialistic government. And a woman is president of Chile now: Michelle Bachelet. Her father was one of the generals who was killed during the time of Pinochet. She herself suffered torture and incarceration under that administration. Chile is still a third-world country, though. Do you think you’ll ever return to Chile?
I don’t think I’m ever going to go back. My time there is over. I’ve been outside too long. I’ve had my whole adult life outside Chile.
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“GPAA names artist, poet in residence”
Grosse Pointe News, June 8, 2006
By Carrie Cunningham To acknowledge the achievements of area writers and artists and to improve and extend art and writing programs in the community, the Grosse Pointe Artists Association has named Mariela Griffor as its first poet-in-residence and Phaedra Robinson as its first artist-in-residence. “Our intention with both the artist-in-residence and the poet-in-residence programs is to bring the community and the working artist together in more intimate contact. This in turn allows a greater and freer exchange of ideas that is mutually beneficial,” said Susan Macdonald, director of the GPAA Art Center. Griffor, 44, of Grosse Pointe Park, has been a member of the GPAA for several years and is the director of the Poets Follies and writing classes offered at the GPAA Art Center. “Very simply, I want to see more people interested in reading poetry. True, it’s a very abstract art, and I think it’s because it’s so misunderstood. I want to bring it into the outside world and to see if people can connect,” Griffor said. Griffor is a native of Chile and originally pursued journalism studies at Catholic University Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. She fled Chile to Sweden in 1985 after the assassination of her fiancŽ and Communist activist, Julio Santibanez, and the threat of her own arrest. After having moved to the Detroit area with her husband, Edward, and two daughters, Javiera and Elena, in 1998, she completed her journalism studies at Wayne State University. She served as Detroit Urban Woman Writer in Residence at WSU in 2003 and is a co-founder of the Detroit Institute for Creative Writers at WSU. She was the winner of the Pablo Neruda International Poetry Competition in 2004, won first prize of ONG Reencuentro in 2003 and was the recipient to the Certificate of Merit from the state of Michigan in recognition of exceptional achievement, outstanding leadership and dedication to improving the quality of life in the state of Michigan. She is the owner and publisher of Marick Press, which will soon release its first two books and is a contributing columnist for City Net Magazine, the South End, Furnace Magazine, Puerto Norte y Sur, Wayne State Literary Review and several other English and Spanish language newspapers. Robinson, 31, of Detroit, is a visual artist, arts educator, writer, curator and arts activist, specializing in video, installation, sculpture and paint. As artist-in-residence of the GPAA, she has proposed a series of monthly workshops dedicated to collaborative mail art. “I want to have a once-a-month series of workshops where we’ll be creating art, sending it out and having the pieces altered and then mailed back. At the end, we’ll have an exhibition,” Robinson said. Robinson is originally from Providence, R.I., and grew up in New Jersey. She started her studies at Alfred University in Alfred, N.Y., and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the Center (now College) for Creative Studies in 1999. She is currently the curator for Juris Galleries at the historic Hecker-Smiley Mansion. She founded the Center for Creative eXchange, a Detroit-based arts organization dedicated to creative collaboration. She has been teaching at the College for Creative Studies for more than six years, serves on the executive board for Art on the Move and is a committee member for the Forum for Contemporary Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The artist-in-residence and poet-in-residence programs are funded by a donation from Carol and Frank Hennessey of Grosse Pointe Farms. A reception honoring Robinson and Griffor was held April 28, during the Poets Follies. Admission is $5. The GPAA Art Center is located at 1005 Maryland in Grosse Pointe Park. For more information, call the GPAA Art Center at (313) 821-1848 or visit grossepointeartcenter.com.^ Back to Top
“Writer, activist creates bohemia”
Grosse Pointe News, June 22, 2006
By Carrie Cunningham If the play and now movie “Rent” had been created in Detroit, then poet, publisher and teacher Mariela Griffor would be the story’s ring leader. “Rent” tells the trajectories of aspiring artists feeling, creating and struggling on the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the end of the 20th century. The characters discover their voices and decipher their personal journeys while simultaneously making them connect to a larger audience. They dig into their souls and impart meaning for humanity. On Friday, April 28, Griffor organized a cross section of Detroit artists at the Grosse Pointe Artists Association to introduce her new publishing company, Marick Press. The event was called Poet Follies. Like the protagonists in Rent, a singer and several poets performed their artwork with a display of emotion and creativity. They mined personal issues relevant both to the current era and times through the ages. Poets who performed included Daniel Padilla, Anca Vlasopolous, James Hart, Caroline Maun and Robert Lipton. Maun and Lipton each wrote a book published by Marick Press. The two new Marick press poets expressed themes related to the self and the intersection of the heart to politics. In the middle of the evening, Detroit folk singer Audra Kubat sang about the human condition with original songs. For Griffor, the establishment of Marick Press is the culmination of a life journey as an activist and writer. Born in Chile in 1961, she suffered under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet who killed and tortured thousands of Chileans and forced millions into exile. Griffor remembers when the coup by Pinochet took place in the early 1970s; she said she felt immediately that something was wrong. Her grandfather burned books by Pablo Neruda as he was worried that owning books by the leftist poet would usher in danger to his family, she said. For Griffor as well as for other Chileans, the event was a turning point; she and others were upset and frightened about Pinochet’s tyranny. Griffor began her life as an opponent to Pinochet early in her life as a member of the Leftist Revolutionary Movement. Shortly thereafter, she said, she heard Pinochet-opponent Julio Romero give a speech at a local university and fell in love with him at first sight. Griffor dated Romero for a few years and became pregnant. Tragically, he was murdered by the Pinochet regime for his protest against the dictator. Worried that she would be arrested, Griffor fled to Sweden where she met her current husband Edward Griffor. She gave birth to Javiera and had another daughter, Elena, with Griffor. A native of Grosse Pointe, Edward Griffor persuaded his wife to move. Griffor had started writing poetry in Sweden and said her work blossomed since she has lived in Michigan. Gaining perspective about her life in Chile, she has written enlightening poems about exile, activism and change, all collected in a book called Sunspot. Griffor said her rebellion in Chile and subsequent exile was painful. In Michigan, she suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Her therapy after years of turmoil helped her. “The brain knows when there is a secure moment (to heal),” she said. “It was a catharsis.” Once healed, she wrote poems about resilience, saying in a poem dubbed Detroit, “Let a feeling of goodness/ dip the city as if in a storm/ let your dreams flourish and /endure/ turn the holy fight into salutation!” Griffor says she started writing poetry from a deep need within. “You don’t choose to write poetry, it just comes out from you,” she said. An Urban Writer in Residence at Wayne State University from 2003-2004, Griffor said she discovered the significance of breaking down barriers in what she called a very segregated city. Simultaneously, she said she discovered that Detroit creative writers wanted a venue to publish their work. As a result, she created Marick Press. The publishing company caters mostly to Detroit poets and fiction writers, but also seeks to publish skilled writers nationally. “The press is really important to me. We don’t have ways to express ourselves,” she said. “The press offers an opportunity to people who have wonderful things to say.” Griffor said she loves her life in Michigan communing with poets and artists. Her union with her husband, a mathematician, is equally meaningful, she added. “He is a scientist and he has a lot of humanistic interests. It’s a good combination,” she said. Despite the happiness and safety she feels in Michigan, Griffor said she still cares about her homeland. Pinochet’s dictatorship ended in 1990, yet he has only been tried for money laundering and not his human rights abuses. This concerns Griffor; yet she said she feels hopeful about a new government led by socialist Michelle Bachelet. “There is an atmosphere of reconciliation,” Griffor said. “She’s working hard to unite everybody.”^ Back to Top
“Drawn Together”
Signature, July/August 2006
Written by David LivingstonePhotos by Daniel Lippitt “This is one I like a lot.” Painter David Mikesell lowers his work Fried Eggs from the front window of the Grosse Pointe Art Center, the Jefferson Avenue headquarters of the Grosse Pointe Artists Association (GPAA). The approximately 2-and-a-half-foot-by-4-foot abstract canvas shimmers in the bright noonday sun, with blue, orange and green swirls twisting wildly around yellow fried egg shapes. Photo Art center director Susan Macdonald stands in front of David Mikesell’s abstract painting. The walls of the Grosse Pointe Park center's spacious front gallery were adorned until June 3 with dozens of Mikesell’s dynamic works, some abstract flights of fancy, others representational cityscapes evocative of the artist's winter home in Mexico. The retired lawyer from the City of Grosse Pointe is keenly aware of the center's value. “This space is terrific for me, for my things,” he says. “I wouldn't be able to do a show like this by myself. This is a pretty unique opportunity here.” Mikesell's sentiments are echoed by a broad array of area artists who have gravitated to the unassuming storefront and the organization behind it. Painters, sculptors, photographers, ceramicists and poets united by their love of creativity also share a fervent desire to bounce ideas off one another and connect their art with the community. The GPAA gives them the home to do just that. The artists' enthusiasm is enough to keep art center director Susan Macdonald of Grosse Pointe Park busy, arranging an ambitious schedule of 12 monthly shows per year, as well as fundraisers, lectures, classes and community outreach initiatives. The frenetic pace doesn't bother Macdonald: “I have a hard time not working, not organizing,” she says. “I really enjoy the challenge, and the accomplishment of producing.” And produce she has. The current whirl of activities is the result of the GPAA's eight-decade history in the Pointes. For the bulk of its existence, the group was a loose association of local fine artists that maintained a low-key schedule of monthly meetings, occasional classes at the Grosse Pointe War Memorial and a single exhibition per year. Since the GPAA secured space of its own five years ago, with the cooperation and support of Grosse Pointe Park Mayor Palmer Heenan and the city administration, the pace of events has increased dramatically, along with the association's esprit de corps. “Since we've had the center, we have had a new cohesion among the members,” Macdonald says. “It seems to be a place where people gravitate to share experiences, and to talk about other shows that they've been in or have gone to see. As a result, it increases interest and creativity of people. It has brought a wonderful creative energy here.” Macdonald says she feels that as the Pointes' sole nonprofit organization dedicated to visual arts, GPAA has a unique role in fostering creativity within the broader community. The group has given its financial support and in-person assistance to art education within local elementary and high schools, providing jury services for Grosse Pointe North High School’s annual student show, and prize money for both North and South high schools. Among other projects, the center hosted a show for students from Defer Elementary, providing art supplies and exhibit space. A new program provides college students with real-world gallery experience, enabling them to show their work alongside that of professional artists. This year, the center opened its doors to the College for Creative Studies (CCS), and will select another college for a similar exhibit in 2007. It's all part of a drive to infuse GPAA’s members with new vigor and inspiration, as well as establish the center as a regional creative powerhouse on par with such organizations as the Scarab Club. Through artist- and poet-inresidence programs established in April, the art center team selected an exemplary artist (Detroit's Phaedra Robinson) and poet (Mariela Griffor of Grosse Pointe Park, see her profile on page 31) to create and lead community outreach programs, such as classes, lectures and workshops, for a year. GPAA membership is also open to non-artists and non-Grosse Pointe residents. “You don't even have to be an artist; if you're just interested in the arts and in supporting the arts, you're welcome,” Macdonald says. “I think it's important for people to know that there's no reason to be intimidated about coming to a gallery. Bring your children. Join us. Support us, so that we can support you. We're here as a community service, and we want people to come in and enjoy what they see, and contribute their thoughts and ideas.” Macdonald invites you to get to know a few of your artistic neighbors and familiar faces at the art center.
JON BELL
Photo Jon Bell is pictured here with his “Chair for a Visiting Child.” Architectural model maker Jon Bell has spent three decades creating intricate, pinpoint-accurate models of private residences, hospitals and even proposed casinos from within the quiet confines of the basement studio in his Grosse Pointe Park home. Despite his recognized craftsmanship, Bell didn't always consider himself an artist. “I still struggle with that,” the 59-year-old says modestly. “I always considered myself a designer.” So how did this reluctant artist wind up becoming president of the GPAA Board of Directors? “I felt that the organization could use some help, so I stepped in to do what I could, and they elected me president,” he says matter-of-factly. Apart from his creative abilities, Bell's can-do personality seems to have worked in his favor. “I just said, 'Let's just act like we're going to be around for a while.' We did, and it has worked so far.” Bell's work has expanded beyond the meticulous models to include other pieces that similarly combine form and function: for example, an Art Deco-inspired table clock hewn from a single block of wood; a freestanding birdhouse atop four spindly, irregular legs; and a whimsical “Chair for a Visiting Child” that measures 16 inches wide and 14 inches deep, while standing a mere 7 inches off the floor. These pieces incorporate flowing, sinuous lines and clean, uncluttered designs. Meanwhile, Bell says he's applied his analytical and problem-solving skills to furthering GPAA’s drive to raise its public profile and secure new volunteers. “There are a lot of retired people here who could bring a wide variety of skills to us,” he says. “I think that once I became president, the atmosphere changed some. I came to it with a positive attitude. But there is still that problem-solving aspect, which is the part of the process that I enjoy the most.”LINDA ALLEN
Photo Linda Allen shows off one of her assemblage pieces. Mixed media artist Linda Allen laughs easily and often, a trait that works to her advantage both in her artwork and her position as fine arts coordinator for the Michigan State Fair. If the pressures of creativity or managing a high-profile annual public art exhibit ever get to her, she doesn't let it show. While Allen, who lives in the City of Grosse Pointe with her husband, Frank, is serious about her art, she doesn't insist that it inspire only serious reactions. Combining an unlikely array of found objects, such as bottle caps and paper scraps, with more traditional artistic materials, Allen says her goal is to provoke “a little 'aha,' or something that makes you have to look, not just glance. The best compliment is when people can laugh about it, or get a story out of it.” Allen's work is full of surprises: Her nine-panel On The Road series of painting-collage combinations began from a series of auto crash test images, to which she added paint and images cut from advertisements; and her Medical Cures assemblage started as a department store bust, to which she added bottle caps, a mirror, a yo-yo, scissors, a keychain and other seemingly random items that combine into a subtle, symbolic narrative. Despite the thematic cohesion, Allen doesn't attribute her works' depth to any particular plan. “I'm more about spontaneity Ð I work intuitively,” Allen says. “I don't plan everything out. Sometimes it’s a fault, sometimes it's a blessing, but I'm open to happy mistakes. With everything I work on, I just go at it.” “Everything I see and read and hear makes me want to explore all sorts of different possibilities.”SARA DYKSTRA
Photo Sara Dykstra prefers painting in cool tones, such as whites and blues, to create images that are soft and soothing, such as this figure wrapped in sheets. Grosse Pointe Farms' Sara Dykstra, a soft-spoken, 26-year-old painter and muralist, is fascinated with light. “My interest is in a certain quality of light that you see at 5 o'clock in the morning,” she says, “when the sun is rising and everything is just draped in gold. The same happens just before the sun is setting, when it's low in the sky Ð you could take anything and make it look beautiful.” Dykstra can, anyway. Her oil canvases shine, their colors seemingly illuminated from within. The detailed features of her subjects, which range from landscapes to portraits and stills, are often obscured by the perfectly rendered glow of light captured in a single instant in time. She recently displayed a series of approximately 200 square mini-paintings at 4731 Gallery in Detroit, through which she documented the changing light throughout a single day. Her ability is the product of formal study at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and in France. Despite her training, she feels that spontaneity is among an artist's most valuable traits. “I think your best work comes about when you're not really thinking about what you're doing,” she says. “It's not contrived; it's just coming from you. That's when your real self comes into your work, and people can feel it.” Dykstra teaches painting in the CCS continuing education program, and hopes to pursue a master's degree in painting Ð but she has a job to do first. She recently was commissioned to create oil canvases for the Grosse Pointe Public Library depicting scenes in The Village and Patterson Park in which characters from children's literature are playing. Each will be numbered, matching a key that will teach children how to find the book about that character. Dykstra says she expects the project to take approximately a year. “I want my work to be accessible to anyone,” she says. “What I'm trying to do now is intermingle the conceptual element of my work with the representational, so that somebody can look at it and walk away with something Ð [and] not be confused. I'm trying to engage more people.”CHERIE LUCAS
Photo Cherie Lucas, showing one of her ceramic bowls painted with a blue diamond pattern on the inside, also displays vases, trays and other decorative pieces at Pewabic Pottery. Before she became a ceramicist, lifelong City of Grosse Pointe resident Cherie Lucas was busy at home, raising her three children. She and friends ran a commercial painting business during the day while the kids were in school. Lucas, 57, discovered both her livelihood and her artistic passion thanks to a suggestion from her daughter. “My daughter took pottery classes in high school, and raved about her teacher. She said, 'Mom, you really have to try this; you’d love it.' ” Lucas began taking classes at Detroit's legendary Pewabic Pottery Ð and never left. “I took my classes here, and I figured, why not work here?” she says. She took a position in the fabrication department, where wet clay is molded and processed into tiles. Seven years after her debut encounter with clays and kilns, Lucas' delicate porcelain trays, vases and cups are featured in Pewabic’s gallery, a California art gallery and the GPAA art center. Her thin, finely wrought creations feature a bluegreen glaze known as celadon. “It's a classic Chinese recipe that goes back for centuries,” she says. “This particular version has four ingredients, and you have to take oxygen out during firing, which gives you that blue-green color. People spend their whole careers trying to get the 'right' color, but I'm pretty happy with that one.” So, evidently, are others. “This lady from California was quite a coup Ð she came into the Pewabic gallery and asked 'How do I get in touch with this artist?' They just had to get me out of the back,” Lucas says. “She's had a gallery in L.A. for 25 years. That's the biggest confidence booster you could ask for.”COLT WEATHERSTON
Photo Colt Weatherston took this image of a friend at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Photographer Colt Weatherston has seen a side of the gallery business with which most artists are never involved. For 26 years, Weatherston's construction firm worked for the Detroit Institute of Arts as an independent contractor, constructing spaces for special exhibits and building the institute's Albert and Peggy de Salle Gallery of Photography. His recent retirement has enabled him, at 64, to pursue his passion: making the work that hangs on the walls, rather than the walls themselves. Weatherston's photography defies categorical description. Equally adept at portraits, landscapes and slice-of-life action shots, the genial artist from Grosse Pointe Farms says he doesn't specialize in one thing. “I have been fortunate to see a real diverse group of settings through my work and my travels,” he says, adding that he simply tries to capture moments. Such moments include a sweeping view of England's Corfe Castle ruins, presided over by ominous clouds; and a bright orange ribbon from artist Christo's Gates of New York project extending across Central Park. His Off The Wall photo features wall dancers from San Francisco, a group called Project Bandaloop, performing modern dance while dangling from cables attached to the roof of Detroit's Scarab Club. This arresting image won Weatherston an honorable mention at a GPAA exhibition. Weatherston works in traditional and digital formats, both color and black-and-white. For him, the photographer's eye is more important than tools or chosen medium. He credits his early employer George Bickelman, a commercial photographer, with influencing his thinking. “George had very good equipment, very good lighting setups, excellent cameras and lenses,” he says. “But he said not to be concerned about that. He said that photography was learning to see light, and I've never forgotten that.”MARIELA GRIFFOR
Photo Mariela Griffor is a co-founder of the Detroit Institute for Creative Writers at Wayne State University, where she also served as Detroit Urban Woman Writer in Residence in 2003. Marick Press will release three more poetry collections and a non-fiction book in September. Mariela Griffor is passionate about literature Ð especially poetry from authors who take risks and release words from deep within their souls, the 44-year-old Grosse Pointe Park resident says. She's a champion of these writers because she's one of them. A native of Chile, Griffor was forced to flee the regime of Augusto Pinochet after the murder of her fiance by agents of the dictator and threats against her own life. She spent 12 years in Sweden, where she met her husband, Edward Griffor, a native Detroiter and world-renowned mathematician. In 1998 the couple moved to Grosse Pointe Park, where they live with their two daughters. Griffor earned a bachelor's degree in journalism and a certificate in Montessori education, and is completing a master's degree in communications at Wayne State University. She uses creative writing as an outlet to share her experiences and emotions, and wrote a poetry collection, Letters from Another America. GPAA's first poet-in-residence, Griffor also won the 2004 Pablo Neruda International Poetry Competition. As resident poet, Griffor teaches writing classes and directs the GPAA's Poets Follies, a monthly gathering of poets, writers, actors and musicians who unite for an evening of eclectic artistic pursuits. But perhaps the most significant pursuit in her craft is the founding of Marick Press, a publishing house dedicated to poetry and creative writing by authors who are overlooked in mainstream literature. “There are few publishers in the area who will take on these writers,” she says. Marick released its first two books in April, one of which was The Sleeping, a book of poetry by Wayne State University assistant professor and Grosse Pointe Park resident Caroline Maun. Two of the poems are being nominated for the Pushcart Prize, a project that's given exposure to hundreds of small presses, and thousands of poets, essayists and writers of short stories. “It's such a pleasure to be able to bring the works of these authors to the public,” Griffor says of Marick Press. “I chose these authors myself. As publisher, I can shape the character of Marick Press. I do this because I love literature and I want to share it.” http://www.signaturemag.com/gp/content/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=88&Itemid=26^ Back to Top
“Poetic Perseverance”
Metro Times, July 5, 2006
By Vince Carducci A few weeks ago, on a particularly dark and stormy night, two dozen die-hard fans of the local poetry scene dodged downpours and lightning bolts to take in the monthly reading at Zeitgeist Gallery near Tiger Stadium. Among the readers was Chilean native Mariela Griffor, the Grosse Pointe Artists Association poet-in-residence for this year. A petite woman in her mid-forties, Griffor wore a simple yellow dress, denim jacket and turquoise-beaded necklace as she stood before a red table on the bare plywood stage reading aloud from her forthcoming book of poems, Love for a Subversive Man. By simply looking at her, you wouldn’t imagine that Griffor’s work is the result of a life experience as violent as the thunderstorms booming outside. The title of her new collection honors her first husband, a political activist assassinated by Augusto Pinochet’s secret police in 1985, and the poems within draw on her years in exile during the Chilean dictator’s brutal regime. “I don’t have any political agenda, not anymore,” Griffor says over the phone before the Zeitgeist reading. Instead, Griffor now looks to art as a way of confronting harsh realities. In addition to her poetry, Griffor is the founder of Marick Press, a nonprofit literary publisher that recently released its first two titles, The Sleeping by Wayne State University professor Caroline Maun and A Complex Bravery by Californian Robert Lipton. Maun’s book has already been nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize in poetry. “My goal is to find good literature, to find the best fiction and poetry from here and other areas, to find books that will change the way people think about things,” Griffor says. Detroit offers fertile ground for realizing that vision, she says, because there’s so much material to write about, from the economy to politics to race relations. Other Detroiters with books in the works at Marick include nationally known poet Robert Fanning, Daniel Padilla and James E. Hart III, curator of the Zeitgeist poetry series. Those books are due out in September with an event sponsored by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Although she eschews direct politics these days, Griffor has firsthand experience with the potential of the written word making a political impact. She has vivid memories of the bloody day of Sept. 11, 1973, when Pinochet staged a violent coup that resulted in Chilean President Salvador Allende’s death. “We were let go early from school and when I got home I found my grandfather and uncles were in the backyard burning all of the books in our library,” she says. The books were all by left-leaning poets like Chilean socialist Pablo Neruda and Federico Garc’a Lorca, who was assassinated by fascists in 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. “My grandmother made me memorize Neruda and Garc’a Lorca and perform them when relatives came to visit,” Griffor says. She was studying journalism in Brazil in the mid-’80s when word came from home that the father of her unborn child was missing. A few days later, the mutilated body of Julio Carlos Santibanez Romero, poet, engineer and civil rights campaigner, was found. A month later, Griffor learned she too was likely to be arrested by Pinochet’s police, who at the time were permitted to operate freely in Brazil. She fled the country within 24 hours. “Sweden and France were the only countries giving visas to Chileans then,” she says. Griffor lived in Sweden for the next 12 years where she gave birth to and raised her daughter. She became a Montessori teacher and in 1988 met her second husband, Edward Griffor, a Grosse Pointe native who was working in Sweden on a mathematics research grant. An MIT graduate, he currently teaches at Wayne State. When democracy was restored in Chile in the late ’90s, the Griffors, who now had a second daughter, went back, hoping to rebuild a life there. They lasted 10 months. The Chilean economy was very shaky and the unstable conditions of a South American republic were too different from the staid life they were accustomed to in Sweden. Plus, her American husband had been away from home for almost 20 years and yearned to come back Ñ so they came to the United States and settled in Grosse Pointe. Griffor finished her journalism degree at Wayne State and worked for a while as an affordable-housing advocate. Now, somewhat unexpectedly, Griffor has become one of the Motor City’s newest literary impresarios. “Writing for me is like breathing,” she says. “I’ve always written since I was small, but I never planned to be a writer or a poet.” She says of getting her work released by Marick Press, “It wasn’t a longtime dream of mine; it was just about fulfilling a need.” Be that as it may, the same determination that often inspires political action is usually necessary for success in the cultural arena, especially in a place like Detroit.Griffor: “We’re trying to build a community [in Detroit] and I feel people are really hungry for that. We’re not tycoons, we want to find the voices that are out there. Mainstream publishing doesn’t really have a lot to do with culture and that’s just not right.” http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=9364
5 QUESTIONS WITH ...
Chilean exile rises from ashes with poetry
She publishes, will teach in Detroit
January 14, 2007
BY JAVAN KIENZLE
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
The crucial childhood memory for Mariela Ibáñez Griffor is of
her grandfather burning books -- because if the soldiers found them, the family
would be in grave danger. Even 11-year-old Mariela's beloved books of poetry
had to go on the pyre.
It was Sept. 11, 1973, and Chile was gripped by a coup led by Gen. Augusto
Pinochet. The event would be followed over the years by the torture and death
of thousands, including the father of Mariela Ibáñez's unborn
child.
But Griffor, 45, will have the last word. She started Marick Press, which
publishes poetry and other creative work.
The young woman who fled Pinochet's secret police to exile in Sweden won the
international Pablo Neruda poetry competition in 2004 and is cofounder of
the Detroit Institute for Creative Writers (DICW) at Wayne State University.
Next, Griffor will be working toward a PhD in communications at WSU, where
she's teaching a writing and publishing workshop this fall.
She lives in Grosse Pointe Park with her daughters, Javiera, 20, and Elena,
15, and her husband, mathematician Edward Griffor.
QUESTION: You've have been quoted as saying you feel at home here. Why is
that?
ANSWER: Detroit has so much potential and so many gems. People talk bad about
Detroit, but I find the most positive parts.
Q: What can you tell us about Marick Press and DICW?
A: Marick is Detroit-based. We look for very unusual literature. DICW is ...
for writers committed to work in Detroit. Go to www.clas.wayne.edu/IS/ and
click on "Special Projects."
Q: When did you start writing poetry?
A: In college. But my grandmother made me memorize and recite poems as a child.
Q: How would you contrast Chile, Sweden and the United States?
A: Chile bears the trauma of having been known as a country with a dictatorship,
when once it was known for its literary gifts. Chileans will never forget,
or let other people forget what happened; and I'm one of them. Swedes are
very homogenous. I am so grateful for the Swedes who took me in and gave me
a place to stay and start a new life. Americans have the dream of being the
savior of the world. The dream takes over and hurts you because it goes out
of your hands. It's a strong dream -- Wonder Woman, Superman, superheroes.
They fight against evil. That is the appeal of being in America and being
an American.
Q: What would you like your grandchildren to know about you?
A: I am going to make sure they know every single detail about their history.
I have been writing so much that I am already annoying to my children. (Javiera
is a student at WSU and Elena at Grosse Pointe South High School.)
Contact JAVAN KIENZLE at 313-222-8764 or jkienzle@freepress.com
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