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The poet laureate of illiteracy has realized everyone's dream. He wrote a book.
"I'm an author!" Ruben Dozal Jr. said, waving a blue, 136-page paperback left to right and finally resting it on his barrel chest. "A few years ago, I didn't even know what the word 'author' meant. If only one person buys this book, that's all that matters."
At 11, the California-born Mexican-American was illiterate in English and Spanish and ended up dropping out of school and settling for hard, low-wage work. Today, he's the toast of rural Hollister, a poster boy for adult literacy programs, and more.
"He's a role model for us," said Daisy Sun, a Burmese immigrant learning English at the Vision Literacy center in Milpitas.
She and fellow student Marta Martinez sat across the table in stunned admiration as Dozal read from "My Dad's Thoughts: Bits and Pieces of Life" (Rosedog Books).
Dozal was sitting in their place in 1998, one of the estimated 30 million adults in the United States who cannot read, can sign only the simplest forms and cannot help with their children's education.
"We trot Ruben out every chance we get," said program director Pat Lawson-North.
And they are not the only ones.
With a high-pitched, mellifluous Latino accent, the 56-year-old Dozal has read at the annual National Latino Book Fair alongside noted Latino writers including Sandra Cisneros and Victor Villasenor. The Gilroy Writers Club welcomed him into their circle, and he was a finalist in the Maryland-based North American Open Poetry Contest in 2000.
The biggest surprise is not that he wrote a book, but that he did so by violating nearly every conceivable literary boundary.
His writings are short, sometimes only one paragraph. Most read like a mishmash of poetry, parable and prose, drama, personal letters, prayers and even greeting cards. When the need to write erupted out of him eight years ago, he simply did not know enough about writing genres to follow their formulas. Blissfully ignorant of orthodoxy, his feelings poured onto the page any which way. The reader is left scratching his head -- What did I just read? -- but loving the ride.
"I still don't know what to call his writings," says Page Jones, his first literacy tutor. She saw most of the writings in the book, from 1998 and 1999, in their rawest form, full of grammatical errors and misspellings. "You can't call it poetry. You can't call them stories or essays, either."
She and the other tutors decided to call them vignettes and to describe Dozal as a poet, because poetry has the fewest rules.
"Stories," Dozal said. "They're all just stories to me. They all come from my experiences, things I've lived through and seen with my own eyes."
As most illiterate people learn to do, Dozal cleverly hid his handicap for years from teachers, employers and even family members.
After a string of tragedies in his family, including the murder of a sister about a decade ago, the heartbroken Dozal wrote an error-filled but emotionally powerful letter to a granddaughter. The child showed it to her day-care teacher, who showed it to local literacy volunteers. They encouraged Dozal to enroll.
"Something inside me started coming out," he said, "and I just couldn't hold it in anymore."
He describes his transformation since then in the book:
"Since the bottle of my imprisonment was opened, I lost the fear of words and the pen of heat entered my frozen fingers. I cannot stop writing."
Recognizing his raw talent, Jones and other tutors let Dozal run like a wild stallion rather than turn him into a literary plow horse. By all accounts they succeeded.
"My Dad's Thoughts" was titled by his daughter Dee Dee Deffee, who inspired some of the vignettes and helped get the book published. Dozal delves into the hard life of a Mexican-American farmhand, husband and father, but he never seems to lose his perseverance or love of life and family. This book should appeal to any working-class everyman of any ethnicity or race and to the women who love them.
His current tutor, Kristeane Maas, says Dozal's strength as a writer is bringing the reader quickly to the heart of emotional truth without much detail.
"You're so very much in the moment," she said. "That's not easy for a writer to do. I've actually seen people cry when Ruben reads his work to them."
Like his writing style, the book's contents seem to have been thrown into the air to fall willy-nilly into place. There are no chapters to guide the reader. A story about fatherhood is followed by one about a truck stop, another about death and then by an encounter with a hungry boy who washes car windshields.
The book bears other signs of discount publishing. Rosedog printed only 30 advance copies. Yet Dozal says he doesn't care. This is only the beginning.
Dozal's tutors say he's book-savvy enough to be aware of his raw style and appeal as a former illiterate farmworker, which helps explain another side of him. Dozal resists coaching or editing that would alter his unique voice, and he doesn't read books. You heard that right.
The man who has just published one has never read a book in his life and doesn't plan to anytime soon.
People liken him to John Steinbeck all the time. He's been encouraged him to read Mark Twain, Mexico's Mariano Azuela and other champions of the underdog.
Maas has tried.
"If you want to write you have to read, to broaden your horizons by an infinity," she tells him.
But Dozal won't, even as he admits reading books might inspire him to write a novel.
"I don't want to compare my writings," he said. "I don't want people to think I got this style from them."
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