Author Interview 2 Spotlight Author
Liberian Literary Magazine Promoting Liberian Literature, Arts and Culture
Author Interview 2 Spotlight Author
JACK KOLKMEYER
Liberian Literary Magazine conducted an interview with Jack Kolkmeyer, a poet, a lover of music and the finer things of life�.
LLM: First, we would like to thank you for granting this interview. Let us kick off this interview with you telling us a little about yourself …. Tell us a little about yourself
Having just turned 70, the various career paths of my life have always intertwined in the most mysterious of ways. I have had 4 distinct careers in my life: teaching, writing, broadcasting and city planning. Interestingly, they have all involved writing of very different styles and they have always merged in different ways. Currently retired, I now focus on writing poetry and screenplays, living in South Florida.
I attended Ohio University in beautiful Athens, Ohio / USA from 1964-68, totally immersed in the study of literature, languages and geography. Somehow for me, all those things went hand in hand although I never fully understood it until much later in my life.
Then there was Africa! I lived and worked in Liberia as a US Peace Corps Volunteer from 1969-72 and then again briefly in 1975, as a teacher and agriculture extension agent. My work was mostly in Lofa County among the Kpelle people but I also lived and worked for a year in Monrovia for the Department of Agriculture under Secretary Doc Sirleaf.
After Liberia, I went to graduate school at Indiana University to study urban and regional planning and community development.
That became my profession for 35 years, mostly in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with intermittent forays into teaching, professional music writing and broadcasting. So my love for literature, language and geography, really came full circle.
Why writing?
I have always been a writer in one form or another. To me, writing is being an artist or a documentarian or filmmaker. I literally have hundreds of journals form all points of my life, taking note of all the events and people that have always surrounded me.
I started writing when I was very young …. 16 or so … around 1962 when I had an English teacher who told me, quite bluntly, that I had a brain and a gift for writing and it was my obligation to use them. I’ ve published a number of poems, articles on music and musicians and various city planning topics but never any books until now with Higher Glyphics.
Mostly though, I have always been and wanted to be a poet. There is something about writing poetry that has always fascinated me. As a poet, you can be brief or epic, straight-forward or obtuse. The parameters of poetry always intrigued me.
But I have also loved writing as a teacher, as a broadcaster and as a city planner. Each of those disciplines requires
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