Blue-collar background informs Cedar Rapids native’s fiction

CEDAR RAPIDS — Unlike a lot of authors, Keith Pilapil Lesmeister didn’t set out to become a writer from an early age. Instead, the Cedar Rapids native was well into adulthood before he realized he had a knack for storytelling.

While in his late 20s and working in the admissions office at Luther College in Decorah, Lesmeister said he decided to record some of the “wild and outlandish” family stories he’d heard growing up in Cedar Rapids. He started to write down some of that family lore, while at the same time taking a few writing-related classes at Luther. It was a class on creative writing that helped light the spark for him.

“It felt very liberating, in the sense that, you know, instead of airing out all of my family's dirty laundry, I could … instead just make things up and call it fiction, which was far more liberating to me,” Lesmeister said.

Nearly two decades later, Lesmeister has turned that interest in fiction into a full-fledged career. He recently released his second collection of short stories, “Ask Me About the Money,” in addition to working full time as a writing and literature instructor at Northeast Iowa Community College.

“Short stories are what I love to read, and it's what I love to write, and that's why I do it,” he said.

He tries to read a short story every day, and while he doesn’t keep that same pace for writing stories, he’s “always working on one.”

About the collection

The stories included in “Ask Me About the Money” were written over the past 10 years or so. Almost all of them are set in the Upper Midwest, with many taking place specifically in Cedar Rapids or surrounding areas.

Many explore family relationships, class dynamics and racial issues. The opening story in the collection, “Fighting For Scraps,” illustrates some of these themes.

It centers on a strained relationship between an adult son and aging father, and the father’s desire to exact revenge for a minor financial misdeed committed against his family 40 years ago.

The son works at a plumbing supply warehouse, described vividly by Lesmeister: “The smell: metal and chemicals. If cancer could be bottled into a fragrance, this would be it.”

The characters are memorable, too, with the son making wry observations as his father dons a clown costume to sneak into an assisted living facility as part of his revenge plot: “I thought my dad would adopt a slightly friendlier persona, but he didn’t. He was a grouchy clown. People waved, and he flipped them off.”

Sources of inspiration

Lesmeister, 47, attributes some of the class-related themes in the collection — most of the characters have blue-collar types of jobs — to his “working class roots.” His background growing up in Cedar Rapids also inspires the setting for many of the stories.

Beyond that, Lesmeister said, he finds inspiration in a variety of places: a line of dialogue, an anecdote, a picture. He takes the oft-repeated advice to write about what you know and turns it upside-down.

“A lot of the stories in this collection were written from the opposite perspective, which is to write what you don't know, and to write what might be sort of your own worst-case scenario,” Lesmeister said.

At the time he was writing many of these stories, the happily married father of three was parenting young children.

“So my worst-case scenarios were like, what if I were estranged from them? What if I was riddled with addiction and estranged from my family? A lot of the stories in the collection came about from thinking about it in those terms.”

Identifying a theme

While the stories in “Ask Me About the Money” share certain themes, Lesmeister said he wrote them all separately “without any preconception or any preconceived idea” about turning them into a collection.

“I couldn't really figure out what the unifying theme of the work was until I sort of stepped back from it,” he said, comparing the process to the “Magic Eye” photos from the 1990s where the hidden image reveals itself after you start to look at it differently.

He had to “sit with it for a while and stare at the stories for a while before the theme of money sort of emerged.”

What’s next

Lesmeister, who still lives in Decorah, will be back in his hometown later this month to talk about his stories, their themes and more at Big Grove Brewery.

“I'm very excited to be returning,” Lesmeister said.

Swamp Fox Bookstore in Marion will be the featured bookseller for the event, which is set for 3 to 4 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 15, at Big Grove in Cedar Rapids.

He hopes that readers — whether in Cedar Rapids, the Upper Midwest or beyond — “get to know and meet and care for some of the characters who I care for,” and that it starts a larger conversation about “what it means to be alive, what it means to be human, what it means to live.”

And if readers do become attached to some of these characters? It’s always possible they will return in future stories.

“The characters in my stories are as real to me as anyone else — as real to me as people who I work with, live with, have coffee with,” Lesmeister said. “They're real people to me, so if I start to miss them, if I want to spend more time with them, then the way I do it is by writing another story that features them … .”