Xavier teacher publishes novel

Reviewer: ‘You’ll find yourself caught up’

MIDDLETOWN — While other novelists might occassionally employ a ghost writer, Portland resident John Popielaski stresses that his writing — both fiction and poetry — is entirely his own.

Popielaski’s first novel, “The Hollow Middle,” published in December by Unsolicited Press of Portland, is now available in paperback for $18 on Amazon as well as other booksellers.

Why the title? Popielaski’s answer is cryptic. “A lot of places are considered useless unless they are co-opted for commercial purposes,” he said.

Early print and online reviews have been favorable. The Seattle Review of Books notes “it’s rare that our attention is captured in just a few lines, but drop yourself anywhere into the first chapter of ‘The Hollow Middle,’ and you’ll find yourself caught up.”

Even so-called “cautionary” reviews of “The Hollow Middle” hold few reservations.

TLC Book Tours admits “... fewer words would have made a better, tighter book. For me. But then that might not have been Popielaski’s goal. Perhaps he always intended for readers to work hard to understand this character (Albert Lesiak) he obviously cares for.”

The plot is a backdrop for Lesiak’s ruminations. He’s a middle-aged English teacher who, with his wife, moved from Connecticut to a farm in Maine. They take in and support autistic twin boys, live a prosaic life, and raise them on a dwindling income.

But rather than plot, the richness of the novel is found in the character study of its protagonist. In fact, much of Popielaski’s prose in “The Hollow Middle” channels 18th-century British novelist Laurence Sterne and 20th-century satirist Evelyn Waugh.

Lesiak, Popielaski said, is a person who was raised “a sporadic Catholic. He (is) a sins-of-the-father sort of guy and believes in the restorative nature of confession as an act that has the strength to lift the burdens of the past from the shoulders of the present.”

Popielaski, 50, started teaching English at Xavier High School in 2000. At Xavier, he teaches classes in American and British Literature. His close friend and chairman of the English department, Kyle St. George, calls the book “excellent.{" Make no mistake, it is not popular fiction. It’s not intended to be. It is literature ... subtle, ironic and (humorously) self-deprecating.”

Previously, Popielaski taught school in Mississippi, and English at St. Thomas More in Queens, N.Y. Born in Port Jefferson Station, N.Y., he attended SUNY-Stony Brook and American University. Before becoming a teacher, he worked as a mover, tent erector, lobster man, and lackey to a tropical biologist, he said.

In 2005, Popielaski, then 37, told the Press that when he was a college student a vehicle mishap sent him to the hospital with a skull fracture. After that, he began writing poetry. To him, it was a wake-up call to poetry. “I liked the idea that with poetry you can start off with a single subject, explore it in some depth, and then move on,” he said .

If Popielaski’s prose often lapses into poetry, consider it a bonus. The author’s poems have appeared in such literary journals as The Hollins Critic, New South, Post Read and Redivider. The author of several poetry collections, his “Isn’t it Romantic?” won the Robert Phillips Chapbook Award from Texas Review Press.

Contributed photo John Popielaski, of Portland, author of “The Hollow Middle.”