Daily Sitka Sentinel

Fine Arts Teacher Shares Variety of Stories

By SHANNON HAUGLAND

Sentinel Staff Writer

Author Andres Carlstein was a little afraid to look up when he was reading one of his stories to a group of 240 middle schoolers at the Sitka Fine Arts Camp Monday.

It was a personal story about his dad, about love and about his new baby boy.

“I didn’t want to look too much at them, and see people’s reaction because it might make me react,” said Carlstein, a writing teacher at the camp.

Carlstein and many others from SFAC had just come back from the Orlando shooting vigil in Totem Square. After that emotional event it was tough to go on stage and look up to see a room full of kids looking back and listening intently, he said.

“I didn’t want to lose my ability to enunciate words – the last third I really had to concentrate,” he said. “All of a sudden, here I am, and I thought, ‘this is going to be a long read.’”

Carlstein, a published author, will conduct a reading for the public on Monday. The reading 6 p.m. at Old Harbor Books will be a bit different, since it’s a work of fiction. It’s titled “The Lindbergh Baby,” a short story recently selected for publication in “The Masters Review,” a journal of short stories by emerging writers.

He was surprised and pleased recently when an editor at the magazine told him the well-known writer Amy Hempel had selected his story for publication even before all of the finalists’ entries had been read.

“That’s a nice thing,” Carlstein said. “It was really an honor – I was quite flattered.”

Carlstein is the author of “Odyssey to Ushuaia: A Motorcycling Adventure from New York to Tierra del Fuego,” and teaches writing to pre-med and other grad school-bound students at the University of Iowa.

The short story he’ll read Monday is about a returning veteran from the first Gulf War, estranged from his son, who finds himself in full custody of the child and not ready for the responsibility. Through a really bad choice during the war, he has ruined his life and is trying to recover.

“He is thrust in a role of caretaker he is unprepared for, and tries to foist off the son on his mother,” Carlstein said. But his mother is having none of it, and tells the story about New York City at the time of the Lindbergh baby abduction to teach her son a lesson.

“She is the most compelling part of the story,” Carlstein said. 

The veteran in the story was in part inspired by his brother, who also served during the war, but didn’t have the same challenges.

Carlstein was born in 1974 in Norwood, Mass., the son of two Argentine immigrants, and raised with his four brothers and sisters in the upstate New York town of Endwell. 

His father, who died when he was 10, was a doctor, and Carlstein as a young man expected that he, too, would go into medicine. He received his undergraduate degree in letters, arts and sciences from Penn State University, focusing on pre-med classes as well as English and technical writing. 

He had been accepted into medical school when he decided to take a year off and ride a motorcycle down to Argentina. At the encouragement of a writing teacher before the trip, he submitted a proposal for a book that would be based on the adventure, and it was accepted by the Chicago Review Press.

“I realized I was becoming a doctor for my dad’s memory more than out of my own need, and I needed to be a writer,” he said.

After the nonfiction book was published in 2002 he turned to writing fiction.

“I love nonfiction; there were just truths I could only express through fiction,” he said.

After seven years of writing, working as a bartender and training in martial arts, Carlstein was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop as an Iowa Arts Fellow. He earned his master of fine arts degree in creative writing.

It was a valuable experience, he said.

“If you’re going to be a writer, you can get there without anything, and a lot of people have done it,” he said. “(An MFA) accelerates that process to get a lot of good quality readers who care and help you improve. ... It’s a shortcut that can get you there faster.”

He stayed in Iowa after graduating working as a TA coordinator. With his strong background in science as well as writing, he ended up developing courses for writing for undergraduate students studying science disciplines.

“The students seemed to respond – we knew we were on to something,” he said.

One course he developed, “Writing for Health and Human Physiology,” turned out to be a class that helped students get into medical school and other graduate health sciences programs. The classes became so popular that this fall they’ll be offered to 80 students per semester.

Carlstein was offered a job this fall as full-time lecturer in the University of Iowa Department of Health and Human Physiology with about 2,000 students studying to become doctors, dentists, physical therapists and pharmacists.

He also currently is developing an online course for the university in fiction, nonfiction and poetry writing. He’s also working on a novel, “The Red Gaucho,” which was shortlisted for the Faulkner Society’s 2013 Novel-in-Progress Award. The story is based on the real life of a boy who was abducted as a child in 1853. He grew up among the gauchos and wasn’t rediscovered by his family for 30 years.