In Joseph Fasano’s The Teacher, a tale for readers of all ages, the father Aldo and his son Solé embark on a journey across vast expanses to learn about love, grief, power, errors, hope, courage, and the examined life. On their way to face the greatest trial of their lives, father and son find themselves unexpectedly transformed.
Tiffany Troy: From your Rattle Prize-winning poem, “Mahler in New York” to your novel The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, there is the recurring motif of forces larger than the speaker compelling him on a journey. What inspired The Teacher, and how does it share resonances with your previous work as a poet, novelist, and educator?
Joseph Fasano: Although much of my previous writing deals with intergenerational ghosts, inherited pain and wisdom, I’d never expected to write something that deals so directly with these issues. It’s a book I never could have written before becoming a father.
TT: What was the process of writing the story? Did each “lesson” come sequentially, or did you piece it together subsequently? Are these stories that you would tell your son?
JF: For many years I have been working on a long, rather complex philosophical novel, full of experimental techniques and a deep dive into the pathologies of its protagonist. One evening, after a long day of work on that book, I took a long walk and suddenly had the overwhelming desire to write something very different, something as elemental, as clear, as seemingly ‘simple’ and ‘straightforward’ as possible. I felt crisp sentences and I saw clear images; I heard the humanly flawed but emotionally healthy voices of a father and a son. The story of The Teacher began to tell itself. I knew that I was writing for my own son, and for the unhealed child in me, and I hoped that I was writing for people of all ages, in a world in which we seem to have forgotten some of the essential questions, some of the deepest mysteries, which call out to be articulated in an almost childlike language, precisely because we are all children before their humbling immensity, and because they are not simple and straightforward at all.
TT: I admire the tension between the clear, simple prose and the philosophical truths being articulated, calling back on the Bible, myths and philosophical traditions and paradoxes. There are many familiar tropes and motifs and yet in some ways the stories could also be understood without the allusions? Can you talk about points of view? What prompted you to write in the alternating points of view and how does this allow you to build character/ the worlds that the main characters, Solé and his father, are traveling through and into?
JF: It was important to me to honor the perspectives of both the father and the child in this book. The father may have a wealth of experiential knowledge, education, and psychological insight, but juxtaposing this with the perspective of a child shows us, I hope, just how much we must also trust those childlike intuitions we all still carry within.
TT: What are some traditions that The Teacher is in dialogue with, whether as bildungsroman, fable, and the epic, or as something else?
JF: My intention was to write a story that could (almost) take place in any time and place, or at least be immediately comprehensible in any time. There are certainly aspects of the fable at work, as well as the meditation, the coming-of-age tale, and the parable.
TT: What do you hope readers take from the story, which at its heart also rails against tyranny and fascism, a theme that is carried across your work in poetry and in fiction?
JF: I can only hope that those who read this book find a story about what happens when we stop communing deeply with ourselves and others, and what might still happen when we learn, or relearn, what grace can do.
TT: If you have any advice you can give to your younger self (in terms of writing) what would it be?
JF: I think it would be something that the father says to his son in The Teacher: “Open your heart and listen.”
TT: What are you working on today?
JF: For many years I have been working on a novel about a philosopher, a book about madness and fate and the desire of the human spirit to break free from both. I’m also hard at work on a memoir about my journey from despair to faith, and I’m working on a volume of my New and Selected Poems, which will be published by BOA Editions next year. I seem to work on many things at once, allowing them to cross-fertilize with each other. Perhaps my most ambitious project is a book-length poem that takes the form of a dramatic monologue in the voice of a certain historical figure, whose identity I’ll keep secret until I can manage to get the poem right.
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers of the world?
JF: Only that I’m grateful that you believe in what words can do, especially during times when parts of the human spirit are at risk of being silenced. Once, in a dark night, I fell asleep with a question in my heart, and the great poet Rumi came to me and helped me. When I woke, I wrote down the little poem he’d given me:
In a dream I asked him
What can I do
if I can’t change it
And he pointed
to the graves
and whispered witness it
Joseph Fasano is a writer and educator. Fasano is the author of two novels: The Swallows of Lunetto (Maudlin House, 2022) and The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (Platypus Press, 2020), which was named one of the “20 Best Small Press Books of 2020.” His books of poetry are The Last Song of the World (BOA Editions, 2024); The Crossing (Cider Press Review, 2018), praised by Ilya Kaminsky for its “lush drive to live, even in the darkest moments”; Vincent (2015), which Rain Taxi Review hailed as a “major literary achievement”; Inheritance (2014), a James Laughlin Award nominee; Fugue for Other Hands (2013), which won the Cider Press Review Book Award and was nominated for the Poets’ Prize, “awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award.”
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press). She translated Catalina Vergara’s diamonds & rust (Toad Press International Chapbook Series). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Co-Editor of Matter.