Norbert Blei
| Norbert Blei | |
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| Born | August 23, 1935 Chicago, Illinois |
| Died | April 23, 2013 (aged 78) Sister Bay, Wisconsin |
| Occupation | essayist, novelist, poet, painter, journalist |
| Nationality | American |
| Notable works | CHI TOWN, Neighborhood, Door Way, Door Steps, Meditations on a Small Lake |
| Website | |
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Norbert Blei (August 23, 1935 – April 23, 2013) was an American writer of non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. In 1994, he established Cross+Roads Press, dedicated to the publication of first chapbooks by poets, short story writers, novelists and artists.
Blei was born in an ethnic (primarily Czechoslovakian) neighborhood of western Chicago, Illinois known as Little Village. An only child, Blei and his parents moved to the near-western Chicago suburb of Cicero when he was in grade school.
Blei attended Illinois State University, studying English, and graduated in 1956. He taught high school English and subsequently worked at City News Bureau as a reporter. In 1969, Blei left Chicago and moved to Door County, Wisconsin, a rural vacation destination for Midwesterners on the Door Peninsula in Lake Michigan. For four decades, he has worked in a converted chicken coop in Ellison Bay, Wisconsin.
Blei's first book was The Hour of the Sunshine Now: Short Stories by Norbert Blei, published in 1978.
Blei was an early adopter of the Internet as a means to distribute his own work and call attention to other writers. His Poetry Dispatch was a weekly enewsletter that featured a short selection of poems by a single, noteworthy poet, while Notes from the Underground was an irregular email that featured brief essays on current topics, literary and otherwise.
A sense of community and threats to community were the twin themes of Blei's writing, whether he is writing about urban Chicago or rural Wisconsin:
"Norb specializes in the fleeting look at the little people of the city, the aged newsstand operators, the small restaurant owners, Greek, Bohemian, Slovak, who still provide, in out-of-the-way neighborhoods, national dishes and national atmosphere. And he is determined to get these glimpses of a disappearing Chicago on paper before they are ploughed under to make way for new high-rise apartments, or succumb to the creeping wave of debris, human and material, so characteristic of most large cities these days." (Henry Shea, 1970)
"Thus a profound feeling of loss permeates all of Blei's work. Perhaps Blei's own sense of himself as an isolated, alienated writer—a consistent self-portrait, across geographies and through years of economic and literary success and failure, prominence and reduced visibility—derives from his sense of doomed place, or, more properly, doomed community in place. Whether author imposes his vision on place (others in Cicero and Door County have found more to cheer about over the past thirty years), or place imposes itself on author, the result is an author celebrating the forgotten, the beat and defeated: others and himself." (David Pichaske, 2000)
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