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Page address: https://web.mnsu.edu/news/read/?paper=topstories&id=1183990823Faculty member John Gaterud edits collection of prose, poetry 'from the road'
Blueroad Reader feaures local writers, illustrators
Mass Communications faculty member John Gaterud is editing and publishing the first of a series of Blueroad Readers -- stories, poetry and illustrations from the road.
2007-07-10
By Ron Gower [Special to The Free Press, Mankato, MN, 7/8/2007]
John Gaterud’s life has been a literal and a literary journey. Highways and back roads have been at the center of his life, both as a traveler and as the subject for his study and writing.
It’s not surprising, then, that Gaterud’s new semiannual magazine, his third independent publication, will be called The Blueroad Reader.
Gaterud’s wanderlust may be in part genetic: His father Bengt Axel Andersson Gaterud, came to America from Sweden at age 17. As a dockhand on a cruise liner, he traveled worldwide, and then in 1940 began working a series of odd jobs that took him to every state in the U.S. In June 2004, he made his 48th and 49th crossings of the Atlantic to visit family and friends in Sweden. He died Aug. 25 of last year.
If John was born to travel, he also drew literary incentive from Jack Kerouac, the “Beat” writer of the ‘60s whose “On the Road” became a spiritual and physical guidebook to a whole generation, including John.
When Gaterud graduated from high school in New Jersey, he had already decided to become a writer, so he immediately enrolled in college in Maine — in the forestry department. Jack Kerouac had written “Desolation Angels” while manning a fire tower, so this seemed, in teenage logic, the place to begin.
When it became evident that that wasn’t really where he’d learn to write, Gaterud took the next stage in the footsteps of Kerouac: He quit college and went on a road trip that lasted several years. His wanderjahr took him around the country, much of it in the ubiquitous Volkswagen bus that was a symbol of the ‘60s, and eventually led to a journalism degree at the University of Northern Colorado.
Gaterud says he simply loved to drive and loved the physical movement on the road.
“Traveling the ‘blue roads,’ the back roads and byways, led to chance encounters with people, places and cultures I never knew existed. Those blue roads are the roads that run through people’s lives.”
Gaterud’s latest publication, Blueroad Reader, is making its debut this month. The periodical, filled with essays and stories by a variety of writers, is in a sense a continuation of two other publications Gaterud has edited, although each had a unique character of its own.
Willow Avenue Review first appeared 25 years ago when Gaterud was living on the West Coast, finishing an MS degree at the University of Oregon. By that time he’d also worked on newspapers in New Jersey, Colorado and Oregon, and his experience and degrees qualified him for a position in the mass communications department at MSU in 1981.
The Review came with him and continued to serve as a forum for fiction, poetry and nonfiction for writers he’d come to know across the country, until 1983. In that year, Gaterud and Bruce Benidt, an MSU mass communications colleague, started a new independent publication, The Minnesota Times.
The Times was to cover Minnesota issues outside the Twin Cities metro area and was an open forum for commentary by regional writers. Its supporters included friends and well-known Minnesota writers such as John Rezmerski and Bill Holm. Paul Gruchow and Gaterud’s wife, Cindi, lent financial support.
At one point the Times had a circulation of 15,000. Gaterud quit his post at MSU for 2 1 ⁄ 2 years to work on the magazine. It was to be self-supporting, by subscription, but as Gaterud said, the “ vision was too big,” and eventually the Times went out of business.
Gaterud returned to MSU, earned his doctorate in 1991, and has taught in the mass communications department since.
However, his travels and fascination with the “ blue roads” has never ended. His dissertation, completed in 1996, retraced some of Sherwood Anderson’s Depression-era journalism through the South and Midwest, and was made up of road stories about his own trip. In addition, his holidays and summers have taken him around the country and to Canada, where he and Cindi have bought retirement property on an island in British Columbia.
Before really settling anywhere, though, Gaterud plans more trips, and feels it’s time for a third literary journey in The Blueroad Reader. Not surprisingly, Blueroad has taken some twists and detours along the way. What began as a magazine grew to book size and will be sold as a subscription series book; it will be an independent publication, supporting itself by subscription.
The Blueroad is itself an elegant example of book-making, as well as a vehicle for literature. Daughter Abbey Gaterud, who is a graduate student in the book-publishing program at Portland State University, has been a partner in designing the publication. She also will handle publicity and business for the periodical, which will feature striking woodcuts by Joel Moline.
This first volume, the “ Stardust and Fate” edition of the reader, will feature fiction, nonfiction and poetry and, not surprisingly, road stories. However, Gaterud says, “ Everything is in play... an eclectic mix of indigo dreams, insights, outbursts, elegies — burrowing deep, reaching far.”
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