GORDON, Robert Ellis 1954-

PERSONAL: Born May 25, 1954, in Boston, MA; son of Mark (in sales) and Joan (a teacher; maiden name, Strumph) Gordon. Education: Harvard College, B.A. (cum laude), 1977; Iowa Writers Workshop, M.F.A., 1979.

ADDRESSES: Home—P.O. Box 20129, Seattle, WA 98102.

CAREER: Novelist. Washington State Prison Writers Project, workshop director and writing teacher, 1989-96.

AWARDS, HONORS: James Michener Creative Writing fellow, 1983-84; Artist Trust grant, 1992; King County Arts Commission Publication Award for Fiction, 1993, for When Bobby Kennedy Was a Moving Man.

WRITINGS:

When Bobby Kennedy Was a Moving Man, Black Heron Press (Seattle, WA), 1993.

(With the inmates of the Washington Correction System) The Funhouse Mirror: Reflections on Prison, Washington State University Press (Pullman, WA), 2000.

Contributor of short stories to periodicals, including Fiction, Ploughshares, Other Voices, and Seattle Review.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Between Worlds, "a nonfiction account of my experiences teaching in the prisons."

SIDELIGHTS: In Robert Ellis Gordon's 1993 novel When Bobby Kennedy Was a Moving Man, Robert F. Kennedy is reincarnated as a moving man. Endowed by the gods who returned him to Earth with such magical powers as the ability to levitate furniture and the power to read people's thoughts, Kennedy defies the gods' orders and seeks out the gangster he believes murdered his brother, former U.S. President John F. Kennedy. Bobby is incarcerated, and is severely punished for sins he committed in his former life, as well as for the sins he has committed in his present life; ultimately, however, the gods forgive him and he is allowed to ascend to heaven. A contributor to Publishers Weekly praised Gordon's combination of "messianic novel and Kennedy tell-all," while in Kirkus Reviews a critic dubbed When Bobby Kennedy Was a Moving Man "the yarn to end all Kennedy yarns." In her review in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Madeline Crowley commented that the novel "dissects a human heart, shadowed by evil, rent by corruption and yet brilliantly lit by a heartfelt passion for social justice. As fiction, it plays fast and loose with facts, but it is scrupulous in its refusal to simplify the fine and the malign facets of Bobby Kennedy's character."

Gordon once told CA: "When I stumbled into prison teaching in 1988 (I was afraid of teaching in prison, but the job was offered and I needed the money), I discovered a second passion, right up there with writing. Clearly, my incarcerated students have problems with boundaries. Indeed, they have, on occasion, destroyed lives through their impulsiveness and rage. Still, when this same absence of inhibition is put in the service of story, the results can be penetrating, dazzling, profoundly moving in a way that 100 well-crafted stories in Atlantic Monthly will never be. My students teach me a lot about the literary perils of risk-aversion, about how to reach for the stories that matter. When I hear about critics or professors of literature proclaiming the death of literature, I think that these people are simply looking in the wrong places. Stories will live so long as the human race lives. We are a storytelling species, and that is all there is to it.

"I am a terribly slow writer, and I do not know what to do about that except to proceed, slowly, sentence by sentence, year by year. I pay as little attention as possible to the folks (there are so many of them!) who believe it is a writer's job to write about the world as they wish to see it. I can't even write about the world as I wish to see it. A writer's job, I believe, is to be as true to his or her own vision as possible; to bring all the craft (and then some) at his or her disposal to bear upon the vision, and to hope, over time, that the vision and the craft will evolve. Time, not current intellectual fashion, will determine if a story has staying power, if it is one that matters."

After nearly a decade of teaching writing to inmates in the Washington state prison system, Gordon had enough fodder for a new book, and The Funhouse Mirror: Reflections on Prison was published in 2000. The volume contains Gordon's powerful account of teaching behind prison walls, and is complete with stories and essays by six prisoners. When explaining why he teaches these students, Gordon writes in his book: "When we give voice to the voiceless; when we give souls to formerly anonymous convicts; when we can no longer deny their humanity, we have no choice but to lay claim to them. And if and when we do that—if and when we peer into the funhouse mirror and conclude that our criminals belong to us and that they're made of the same stuff as us—well then we will . . . begin, as a society, to grow up." Trish Ready, a critic for The Stranger.com, described The Funhouse Mirror as "a timely, beautifully crafted, persistent book in its efforts to uncover the Third World of America's ever-expanding prison system." Dick Lehr agreed in his review for the Houston Chronicle, noting that Gordon has an "edgy and introspective style" in this "unvarnished examination of a prison culture that is as distant to most of us as the dark side of the moon."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Houston Chronicle, April 29, 2001, Dick Lehr, "At the Steel Hotel, No Smiles in the Funhouse Mirrors," p. 21.

Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1993.

New York Times Book Review, November 28, 1993, p. 26.

Philadelphia Inquirer, January 9, 1994.

Publishers Weekly, August 30, 1993, p. 90; August 14, 2000, review of The Funhouse Mirror, p. 344.

ONLINE

The Stranger.com,http://www.thestranger.com/ (September 24, 2002), Trisha Ready, review of The Funhouse Mirror.*