Chile and Pinochet focus of new memoir from CT author and former Peace Corps Volunteer

Two things brought writer Tom Hazuka to Chile: Spanish and baseball.

Hazuka, a retired professor of English and writing at Central Connecticut State University, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Chile during the rule of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, whose decades-long dictatorship resulted in the death, internment and torture of tens of thousands of people.

Hazuka’s award-winning memoir, “If You Turn to Look Back,” details his time in the country during the Pinochet years and his return 25 years later following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Hazuka left Connecticut for Chile in 1978 to take a position as a coach teaching young children how to play baseball. He was a recent graduate of Fairfield University and said the initial draw to the country was learning the language.

“I already knew French. I was hoping to go to a country where Spanish is spoken. And so when Chile was mentioned I just really jumped at it,” Hazuka said.

“If You Turn to Look Back” begins the day following 9/11, when Hazuka received an emotional email from his friend Hugo, who had experienced Pinochet seize power in Chile in 1973.

The book details Hazuka’s return to Chile, boarding a flight carrying the same camera he’d used when he left in the 1970s. It was time, Hazuka wrote in his memoir, to meet old friends.

Hazuka discusses his 20-year search to reconnect with his memories of Chile and the Peace Corps during the Pinochet years. He also shares advice on what it takes to be a nonfiction writer.

What got you into writing? Did you always want to be a writer?

Hazuka: No, I wanted to be a center fielder for the Yankees. Then reality fairly quickly postponed . . . I mean, no, it didn’t postpone. That’s an absolute lie. It ruined that dream. I was cut from my college baseball team after. . . all right, I’ll admit it, one day. So you’re not going to be playing centerfielder for the Yankees. But I wrote poems and stuff for the college literary magazine. But what really made me start? I started to write a lot in the Peace Corps. I wrote a lot of songs and I wrote a bunch of poems. Not that much fiction at all. Maybe no fiction whatsoever.

But you had plenty of time, and so I would just work on stuff. And then when the first poem I sent out … got accepted and they gave me $15, I just said, this is the greatest gig ever. You write these little poems; they give you $15.

Hey, it was 1978 or ‘79. That’s probably worth $100 now.

But then the next time I wrote a poem that got payment was probably 10 or 12 years later. And I think it was only $10. So, you know, poetry didn’t become a lucrative thing. None of it has become a lucrative thing.

“If You Turn To Look Back” is a memoir of your time as a Peace Corps member in Chile and the political, social and economic changes you witnessed upon returning to the country 23-years later. How does your biography further inform these political changes for readers who have never witnessed war or know about the political turmoil in Latin America?

I hope it makes it very relatable, because I essentially knew nothing when I went there. I showed up [as] some naive 21-year-old.

When I found out that I was going to be coaching baseball or that I could apply for this job coaching baseball, I was quite astonished that the job existed, but I said, “Why not? I’ll try for it,” and I’ll never forget when the Peace Corps recruiters said “Oh, with your sports . . . background, this might be something that you’d be interested in.” And I’m thinking, “OK. If being a middling high school athlete in a few sports and one season of college soccer gives me a sports background, I’ll go along with it.” And I applied for the job and I got it. I try to take readers back through my perspective, learning this stuff very little by little and being very naive about most of it at the time. I know a whole lot more [today] than my 21-year-old self knew . . . I mean people were still disappearing [under Pinochet] all the time. I didn’t know it.

There’s a chapter in the middle of the book about a person who [I had] become e-mail close to, who I didn’t know in the Peace Corps, and she was doing a lot of this political stuff. She was kidnapped with a Chilean guy and didn’t know how long she was held. She was blindfolded and the stories that she told me made me realize that even after my time, you know, better part of three years, two and a half years in Chile, I was still naive in some ways because I thought, well, I know this stuff goes on, but I didn’t know the extent [to which it went on].

It’s just a harrowing story. In fact, I was in touch with her a while back after [the book] came out and I sent her a copy of the book. And she said, “Oh, thanks a lot for the book. I can’t read my section. It just brings it right back. It’s too scary.”

You mention memory and returning to the past numerous times throughout your book’s narrative. Why did you choose to switch between past and present memories in your chapters? Was this a stylistic choice as a writer?

It was an absolute stylistic choice because when I was there, I was consistently, constantly torn. You know, the old me and the new me, the former me and the present me. Both of them were there. Both selves realized both selves were there, and I was constantly looking at “OK, that used to be this way or this or this place has changed.” And my old self, I can kind of see my old self, you know, standing over there. And so yeah, that was an attempt to give the reader a sense of the way I felt, and I’m hoping that’s not a stretch because I think anybody who goes back to a place, wherever it is that used to be important to them, is going to feel that way — is going to be doing these comparisons between the past and the present.

Can you tell us more about your childhood at home during the Vietnam War and how it might have influenced or changed your views on peace?

As far as I know, it was the first TV war. It was every single night on the national news and there was always a bunch of footage. Often the footage would show, not the worst, because [they] wouldn’t show that on TV. But pretty bad stuff. And at the very least, just people scared and machine guns going off and that sort of thing. At [12-years-old], I knew I wasn’t getting drafted. At least at 12. But believe me, when I got to be 16, then I started to worry. And then wondering, like a bunch of people my age, “OK, what am I going to do?” And I talked about it in the book. Some people went to Canada, some people tried to be conscientious objectors. Some people went to Sweden, some people went to Vietnam, some people just rode it out and hoped not to get drafted. I mean, you have these different options. And I was thinking about them and then in sort of the charmed life of people my age when I was 17, the draft ended. And all of a sudden I didn’t have to worry about it.

I would talk about this to my students a lot. At Central Connecticut State they’d be especially maybe thinking, “USA! USA! Let’s go. You know, kick some butt.” That sort of thing. So, it’s really easy to have that attitude when you know you’re not going to get drafted. If you were maybe going to get drafted next week, maybe you would be able to have a bit of a different attitude. … Even at that time, I definitely felt lucky and I talked about that in the book, that I was just spared these decisions that people a few years older had. I knew I wasn’t going to get drafted, and I’m grateful for that.

What do you hope readers will take away from your journey?

I hope they decide to be open minded about things. Part of that is getting around and seeing things, but a bigger part of it is having an open mind and looking around where you are right now and noticing things and not just assuming that you are right, not just putting people in different categories like what happened in Chile. You don’t have to go to Chile to open up your mind and talk to people and just be aware.

As a published writer, what advice would you give aspiring writers who are working on their own projects right now?

If you love it, do it. And if you don’t love it, then find what you do love. It’s like people who take my creative writing classes sometimes [say,] “Oh, that sounds groovy. I’ll take it.” And sometimes they find out well for them, it is groovy. It’s something they really want to do, and they’re going to stick at it even if they have some other job. They’re just always going to be writers to some extent. And other people say from the class, they find out, “Wow, this is hard and I’m gonna just be a reader from now on. This writing is just hard stuff.” And so, you know, it runs the gamut.

For almost nobody it’s fun. It’s something that they feel like they [must do]. The cliche that you might have heard before is that writers, and it doesn’t apply to everybody, don’t necessarily like to write. They like to have written. You know, to get something done and then of course that will come out, that sort of thing. That’s just great. But it doesn’t apply to everybody. But if you like to write then write … It should bring you satisfaction. If you get satisfaction from it then I think you should do it. And if you don’t? And if it’s nothing but torture, then I think you should find something else that does give you satisfaction.

This interview has been edited and condensed. “If You Turn to Look Back” is available from Amazon or any bookstore. Signed books are available from Tom Hazuka at a discount of $15 postpaid. Email to hazukaj@ccsu.edu.