Lifelong Chicago native Robert Katzman, however, is one man who has made good on his promise to capture his good, bad and ugly life tales on paper. Last year the Jewish, 55-year-old owner of Magazine Memories, a vintage magazine and poster shop in Morton Grove, Illinois, published ‘Bob’s Newsstand – 1965-1985: I’m Not Dead Yet’, his first autobiographical volume in a proposed series of five, recently following it up with the second, ‘Escaping And Embracing The Cops of Chicago’. And a third installment, ‘Saul Bellow, Kosher Pickles and the Aluminum Fortress’ is already in the works.

The first two books are interesting, eminently readable works. Katzman unfurls his life in non-chronological order through a series of short stories, jumping around from decade to decade to family member to friend to foe to create a series of deeply human and engaging word sketches. The writer opened a newspaper vendor stand in 1965, aged 15, to pay for his tuition fees at the University of Chicago Laboratory School in Hyde Park, which he attended as an impoverished misfit student in a school full of wealthy kids.

The poignant, emotion-wrenching, sometimes poetic portraits of the ordinary people he meets whilst working as a vendor, his run-ins with Mafioso or corrupt city officials, or indeed with his physically, mentally and emotionally abusive mother, are occasionally reminiscent in their simple, speakeasy presentation of the work of the late Los Angeles writer Charles Bukowski, only without that alcoholic poet’s booze-fueled misanthropy and macho posturing.

Katzman is a self-taught writer, whose first piece of written work was a poem he wrote at the age of eight. Asked why he started writing, he says that he didn’t have a choice in the matter. “I believe a person is a born storyteller, no matter how long it takes that person to discover the truth about themselves.” He also notes that his own ability to write unguardedly about the events in his own life in his own literary voice took half a century to show up.

Judaism is extremely important to the man, and this aspect of his life saturates the books, his religion and pride in his heritage having helped shape his worldview and private moral and ethical code. When asked if he writes to exorcise old demons as catharsis and personal therapy, Katzman is very clear on this point. “Jews don’t have exorcisms. I write because I have no choice about it. It must be why God put me here. I can’t think of another reason.”

The writer’s first publication was in 1978 in the University of Chicago alumni magazine, which ran some early Lab School stories about how difficult it was for him to attend the institution and endure his classmates there. Asked about writers who were inspirational to him, Katzman is dismissive, stating that he writes from his heart and his motivational influences are not writers, and that his voice on the page is an honest one that comes from within him. Because of this unflinching candor, some of the grimmer stories were not easy to write. “The domestic abuse stories took two years to make it from my terrible memories to my hands to paper,” he ventures.

As can be imagined, writing about real people and times and places can be a minefield, running the risk of alienating, well, pretty much everybody if you’re not careful. Protecting the guilty and innocent alike is why the writer changes some, though not all, names and dates and other minor details in his stories, the only self-censorship Katzman imposes on himself. This can sometimes be painful reading for those near and dear to him.

“I don’t write for my family as an audience. I write for strangers. My family doesn’t discuss my books with me,” he offers. “My friends are in the books and can’t believe their lives are being recorded,“ he continues, adding he doesn’t reckon he’s lost any of them because of this. “People deserve to receive attention for the good things they’ve done. I am in a situation that allows me to do that. I only tell the truth, I don’t burnish anyone’s reality. The truth is good enough.”

The scribe’s wife Joyce, with whom he has had two children, and adopted a third, really likes the stories but won’t read anything involving sex, for understandable reasons. However, in general he has found that twice as many women as men buy his books. When asked about this, he says it’s “because I communicate very well with women. They tell me they find my stories very emotionally accessible and not in a definable masculine style. I write for people, not genders. I guess women like that in a writer. And a man.”

As well as short stories, each volume is sprinkled with photographs of some of the people captured in the pages. “Photos help bring reality to my vivid stories. They heighten the sense of time and place. Besides, I’m a photographer and my pictures make the books more interesting,” reveals the writer of this aspect of his artistic methodology. The back of each book also contains several of his poems. When asked why, he notes that people “never, ever buy poetry books, so this way people will get a little with each book and maybe they’ll read them” and that he has had very strong positive responses to the verse from readers.

When quizzed about why he publishes his own work under his own Fighting Words imprimatur, Katzman’s answer is very clear, simple and disarming: “I am self-published because my stories are worth reading, my life worth remembering.” The writer prints “as many as I can afford, about 200 to 400 at a time, with a little help from my friends. I have 1,050 in print.” He has sold over 600 books, singularly or in bunches. His books are currently in a couple of local Chicago bookstores but on no websites, (besides his own at www.fightingwordspubco.com, where mail order sales are picking up) having sold this number with no help from anybody from Magazine Memories, with word of mouth being a major factor in his sales figures.

Katzman has had this shop for 15 years now, and the place is one of seven of its kind left in America. He is “definitely ready” to stop standing behind a counter selling old magazines. “I never intended to do this for a living. Things just happen,” he muses philosophically. The writer has done a series of readings from his work all over Chicago, paid and otherwise, where “people are very rapt and want to know what comes next” and all he wants to do is “write and read my stories to people who want to hear them.” To this end an agent or a major publisher would be useful, he notes, and he is open to offers.

Health has always been an issue with Katzman during the course of his life, and he has had 29 operations, including brain and jaw surgery. But he is not bitter about this, and his philosophy remains simple and positive. “I have not had bad health. I have had many operations to remove things that would kill me otherwise, or to reconstruct me because of the earlier surgeries. I built all the wooden fixtures in my 5,000 sq ft store,” he reveals. “You can’t do that if you feel like crap. I’m fine. I want to live a very long time and meet my grandchildren, someday. I want to live long enough to see my stories made into terrific movies and plays.”

And to whom might these movies and plays appeal? The writer believes he speaks for “the angry common man, if he or she will let me.” He expands on this further: “Don’t take shit from anyone, even if it costs you. Resist, when you can, false ideas, prejudice and the arrogance of the wealthy, who often feel money can buy class. It can’t. Anyone can have it. It’s free, and can’t be acquired.” He believes that his books say that each and every one of us is worth fighting for. And with fighting words and spirit like that, Robert Katzman deserves to succeed.

36-year-old Graham got married in August 2005 to the beautiful Ellen Lee Marshall and moved to Illinois, USA from Falkirk in Scotland. People in his new homeland tell him all the time about their Celtic ancestors. He really couldn’t much care less, but thought the same patter coming from Dennis Hopper, whom he met on the set of Land of The Dead in Toronto (in which the writer got a brief cameo as ‘Undead Journalist’ in an Oscar-worthy performance), was cool. He was told by a teenage waitress in a pizza joint that he speaks very good English. She was right. America is the third country and second continent he has lived in/on. Graham does not suffer fools at all, does not believe in intelligent design, believes all religions should be banned as being a hindrance to future further human evolution, is an obsessed wordplayboy, is wrestling with a novel he has no clear template for, still listens to punk music occasionally though he is too old for it, and is an occasional wind-up merchant because, well, it keeps life interesting.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.