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Stairway

"He was like a man who had served a term in prison or had been to Harvard College or had lived for a longtime with foreigners in South America."

    -- Carson McCullers on Jake Blount, in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

Call me Geoff — or Gef, my initials. 

I was born in Chicago, graduated from Harvard in 1963 and then worked in Caracas, Venezuela as a community developer (see Building a Stairway, below) before earning my PhD in sociology from Northwestern University.  

After a couple of marriages and divorces and teaching at the University of Puerto Rico, the U. of Illinois at Chicago, and finally the College of St. Benedict in Minnesota (among other places),  in 1978 I quit academia and the Midwest to reunite with Susana Torre, Argentina-born architect and feminist I had met in Havana a few years before, in New York City, and be a writer. There I supplemented the meager income from articles in The Nation, the Village Voice, In These Times and other lefty periodicals by part-time teaching and other jobs, and also began seriously writing fiction.

It was tough, especially at first, but I did manage to publish several books, lots of articles — some in big-name publications like The New York Times — and many short stories. 

Since 2006, Susana and I have been living in Carboneras, a small fishing village on the southeast coast of Spain, where she designed and we built our seaside home. His current projects include more works of fiction and, with Susana Torre, a history of architecture and urbanism in Latin America. 

For a list of publications and positions held, see Curriculum vitae.

For a historic photo of a very young Geoff Fox, see "Freedom Drivers."

And for another note, see "Madman on the Subway"

Building a Stairway

When I graduated from college, all I wanted to do was save the world and meet girls. And so I leapt at the opportunity to do both in a US community development organization called "ACCION en Venezuela" which sent youngAmericans and other foreigners to Venezuela to bring  "know-how" to poor urban communities and organize their inhabitants. That was 1963, and the prevailing idea among the corporate and government leaders backing the project was that underdevelopment was the fault of the poor themselves, and the cure was to change their culture. That we were foreigners, new to the tropics, the language and the customs, was considered an asset, because it meant we were uncorrupted.

But Barrio Sucre, the first shantytown I was sent to in Caracas, was already organized, and ignorance of the customs was no asset. In this narrow gulley in Petare, on the eastern edge of Caracas, some 300 houses of cardboard and mud-and-wattle (bahareque) perched precariously on the slopes. To build a stairway was a long-standing goal of a group bound by kinship, hometown origins, and a history of struggle that I caught only hints of. They themselves supplied the "know-how," including the ability to mobilize; I provided the use of my organization's jeep and contacts for getting donations of cement, sand, gravel and lumber. Together, we built the stairway one Saturday, swinging bucket after bucket of cement mix up to our shoulders, scrambling up the slope to dump it into the topmost frame laid out by their own master carpenter and staggering down to do it again. Afterward, we celebrated with a huge sancocho. 

When I went back a few years ago, the houses were brick and the stairway a part of the landscape, taken for granted by its many users. Most were strangers, but I saw one man who had worked at my side that day, and we hugged and smiled. Together, and with those other compañeros of long ago, we had saved a small part of the world. It had been a good place to start.

It took me a little longer to discover that meeting girls, while fun, was not enough -- I needed to find the right one, because saving the world, even one small part at a time, requires a lot of combined strength. After several false starts, I finally did. For the past 20 years my accomplice has been the architect Susana Torre, and we're still trying to save whatever portions of the world we can, by writing, design, teaching, and just trying to be decent persons. I'm still building that stairway.

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Ursinius Baer, known in our offices as "Bear" or "Oso," joined Geoffrey Fox Productions in December of 1996. He propped open the window of our bedroom on one dark and troubled night and clambered in, giving us quite a fright until we realized that he was guarding the house rather than attacking it. Since then he has assumed many critical duties, including bookkeeping and dunning creditors (at which he is very effective). He is an essential part of the team, making sure that projects stay on track and that deadlines are met. He has collaborated on every bit of writing from Geoffrey Fox Productions since joining the team, and often serves as team captain on particular nonfiction projects -- especially when they begin to lag behind deadlines.

Leo Arslan, or "Lion," joined Geoffrey Fox Productions at approximately the same time as Bear -- or more precisely, about five minutes later, sliding gracefully through the already opened window. Like Bear, he immediately assumed a position as protector of the household, though in quite a different style. Lion is more openly confrontational, and although he sometimes has to be restrained from taking offense where none was intended, his roar can be very effective in getting attention. While he does not have the same steady attention span as bear, he thinks quickly and frequently comes up with startling solutions to difficult problems. In recent years, he has specialized in assisting Geoffrey Fox Productions on fiction projects. On some short pieces, he has served as the project captain -- though everyone on the team is expected to collaborate on all projects.

(Mr. Glib has so far resisted all efforts to photograph him; we suspect that this is because he is simultaneously working under other names for other authors and does not want to risk discovery. In fact, we know that some authors turn over entire projects to Glib. (We just did a search for "Mr. Glib" on Google, and came up with lots of surprising gigs we didn't know he had. Try it.) Bear and Lion have argued that Glib should not be permitted to touch their prose at all, but Fox has overruled this position as too extreme. In our office, Glib is permitted only to retouch work that has already been created by one or a combination of the other three of us.)