Kotlowitz to Wilmette students: Tell the story, don’t predict it

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Wilmette, 01/23/12 Novelist Alex Kotlowitz gives a talk about the process of writing his book "There Are No Children Here" at Wilmette Junior High Jan. 23. | Curtis Lehmkuhl~Sun-Times Media

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Updated: February 27, 2012 8:47AM

If the students who listened to author Alex Kotlowitz speak Monday at Wilmette Junior High School took anything away from the conversation, it might be summed up in one word: narrative.

Kotlowitz, the author of the award-winning “There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America,” was at the school to talk to eighth-graders who had read his 1991 story of life in Chicago’s Henry Horner Homes.

As he has done at WJHS since 2004, he talked about the road to “There Are No Children Here,” and about what he put into and took from telling the story of young brothers Lafeyette and Pharoah as they grew up in the poverty and violence of a late 1980s Chicago housing project.

“I tell people I’m a journalist,” Kotlowitz said. “But the truth of the matter is that I’m a storyteller. Stories help us give credence to our own history and allow us to take our own journeys.

“But I write stories that are fact.”

The Oak Park native, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and who has since written two more books, now teaches at Northwestern University. He is also the co-producer of “The Interrupters,” a critically acclaimed 2011 documentary about the professional “violence interrupters” of CeaseFire, made with “Hoop Dreams” director Steve James.

Touchy subject

Students saw a clip of the film, which will air Feb. 14 on PBS’s “Frontline,” and which revisits the issues of violence and poverty and how people choose to combat it. He told them that people are still unwilling to talk about either issue, both of which continue to draw his attention decades after “There Are No Children Here.”

Kotlowitz returned repeatedly to narrative as he spoke – both the importance of maintaining a single one in successful storytelling, and the danger of judging a human life by the single one you might know.

He didn’t know what he was getting into when he started work on the book, despite thinking he did, he told his listeners.

As he followed Lafeyette’s and Pharoah for two years, he realized he had to tell their entire story; not only the heartache of violence and losing friends to it, or the imprisoning conditions of bureaucratized poverty, but the joys of one little boy more interested in preparing for a spelling bee, than talking about gang fights.

“The challenge is to find empathy with the characters whose stories you are telling. It’s the centripetal force of storytelling,” Kotlowitz said.

He had to discipline himself as he wrote, keeping the story to that of the two brothers, despite equally compelling narratives about other people he met around them.

Hard to predict

Many of the stories he learned have had tough endings, either in death or in incarceration, he said.

But Kotlowitz also learned not to think he could understand or predict where someone’s life would go, simply because he knew part of their story, he said.

People he met while researching “There Are No Children Here” — some who he fully expected to die — went on to have full and productive lives.

People he met during the filming of “The Interrupters” were once hardened felons; they have turned their lives around and combat the violence that once consumed them, he said.

“I look out here and see 100 faces, and 100 different stories,” Kotlowitz said. “But just because you are from comfortable Wilmette I can’t say what kind of future you’re going to have.”

He still keeps in touch with Lafeyette and Pharoah, he said, but prefers to honor their privacy by saying little about their current life beyond acknowledging that they still have struggles.

Inquisitive kids

Teacher Stephanie Raue said after the visit that she was pleased with the questions her students had put to Kotlowitz. They asked him about how he kept his objectivity while writing, how he viewed his own role with Lafeyette and Pharoah, about justice and fairness, and whether he thought his presence affected events in the boys’ lives.

Raue said the book continues to be important reading for students, 20 years after publication. Last year, she said, members of her teaching team realized that anew when they saw how class members attending an anniversary celebration for “There Are no Children Here” reacted to seeing in real life some of the people they met in the book.

The book’s continuing relevance, along with Kotlowitz’s regretful acknowledgement that violence still imprisons people in poor Chicago neighborhoods (“It haunts me”) gained ironic resonance Monday.

Kotlowitz’s WJHS visit took place the same day that Chicago officials announced plans for a police crackdown on violence in two of the city’s most homicide-heavy districts.