A grassroots project at DePaul publishes Chicago stories — the books are free for the asking and you might even be in one

CHICAGO — Big Shoulders Books are free. You can request one. They’ll send you one. You might even be in one. Big Shoulders Books, founded at DePaul University a decade ago, has been one of the more quietly ambitious projects in Midwest journalism, though, in practice, the work is not written by professional journalists and its architects are faculty in the English department. The goal, however, is elementally journalistic: to gather an oral record of contemporary Chicago. Its violence, war veterans, romances. And now, with its latest history, “Virus City,” a street-level, everyday accounting of the pandemic.

Somewhere, Studs Terkel is smiling.

As with most of the books from Big Shoulders — and much of the work of Terkel, the godfather of quotidian conversation arranged as a widescreen mural of daily life — the narration comes almost entirely through a cross section of little-known Chicagoans, written in their words. As with Terkel, their anecdotes gather into the specificity, insight and sometimes haunting afterthought that shapes the spine of a life. “We understand these are people who probably have never been interviewed in any media before, and this may be the only time someone records their words,” said Rebecca Johns-Trissler, director of DePaul’s graduate program in writing and publishing, and a co-editor of “Virus City.” “So we try to honor that and approach each person with a great respect.”

The nurse who, at the end of nine-hour shift overwhelmed by COVID patients, likes nothing more than to relax in front of the TV with her family, watching horror movies.

The Ashburn elementary school principal who walks you through her life, then recognizes that the pandemic pushed her school finally “into the world of technology.”

The North Side psychologist who admits Zoom calls with friends became a chore.

The Starbucks barista who spars with a customer refusing to wear a mask, who then “took a mask just to run over to the trash to throw it out.” Then gets another mask, to throw out.

Some of “Virus City” is unexpected, but much is not. And that is entirely the point — a draft of compelling everyday, assembled by amateurs. Big Shoulders, depending how you see it, is an elaborate exercise, a publishing experiment, a social justice initiative, or all three. Each book published is produced by graduate and undergraduate DePaul students who take a series of courses that represent stages of publishing. Book editing, book publishing, creative writing and social engagement, book marketing, etc. They have lessons on how to find subjects, classes on how to extract detail from an interview that forms a coherent narrative. Each book gets roughly the same treatment. “Virus City’ — which happened only after a book on incarceration was sidelined by the pandemic — took a year of planning, a year of assembling interviews, then six months of production.

Though they don’t typically work with the school’s journalism department, this new book’s 30-page centerpiece is a handful of photo essays by DePaul photojournalism students, documenting their single, isolated pandemic year. It was fitting. Big Shoulders began as “a way of putting internship-like experience in the classroom,” said Michele Morano, chair of the English department, but during a pandemic, that meant a lot of professional headaches. “Eventually they found better subjects than I could have hoped for, but first they had trouble finding anyone,” Johns-Trissler said. They put in calls to the Chicago Police Department, fire department, teacher’s union — not a single person got back to them. So, like many working journalists, they compiled a motherlode on social media. When the books were finally printed late this summer, at least two boxes full of copies arrived with jumbled pages, missing pages, misprints. Just like in the real book world.

“Virus City,” the seventh Big Shoulders book since 2013, is like its first, “How Long Will I Cry?: Voices of Youth Violence.” Miles Harvey — the Chicago-based author and DePaul professor who formed Big Shoulders with Morano and Chris Green, director of the school’s writing and publishing internships — said that for two years he sent students out to interview subjects for the book. “They would come back, type up a transcript, then go out and do another. I would have to explain, ‘Don’t ask someone to tell you about the day their brother was shot. Ask them about their neighborhood, then ask about their family ...’ Come to it naturally. One student talked to a gang member who didn’t say he was in a gang, but, from the conversation, was clearly in a gang. The student didn’t want to ask the obvious. So I explained, no, they had to go back out and simply ask.”

Terkel, he said, was a major catalyst.

“I knew him some,” Harvey said, “and he became this massive influence on how you should interact with the world as a writer. He saw every human being’s story as dramatic, and worthy of documentation, and poetic — and he somehow guided all this.”

The roots of Big Shoulders — which of course takes its name from “City of Big Shoulders,” poet Carl Sandburg famous line in his poem “Chicago” — go back to the beating death of 16-year-old Derrion Albert outside Christian Fenger Academy High School in Roseland. Video of the 2009 attack went viral, and as Harvey writes in the introduction to “How Long Will I Cry?” he was disturbed, shaken but “what was one white, middle-aged creative-writing professor supposed to do about it?” Over coffee, while talking to a friend, Hallie Gordon, artistic director of Steppenwolf for Young Adults, she mentioned wanting to make a documentary piece using the words of Chicago youth but had no one to do interviews. Harvey returned to his students. Two years later they had a play — “How Long Will I Cry?: Voices of Youth Violence” played at Steppenwolf in spring 2013 and toured Chicago libraries.

And so much extra material, they had a possible book, too.

That led to the idea to continue, building a small press around Chicago voices rarely heard. “And a weird business model of not, in a sense, standing on corners to sell books, but forcing people to come to us, then we will give it all away,” Harvey said. Which, Morano said, “was completely overly ambitious — who wanted to start a small publishing house, then at a moment when it felt like publishing itself was imploding?”

But fate, in a sense, opened its checkbook.

After a performance of “How Long Will I Cry?,” Harvey and Morano were approached by Chicagoans William and Irene Beck of the William and Irene Beck Charitable Trust. The publishing house idea was mentioned and the Becks offered to bankroll the entire initiative. It wasn’t a formal, written agreement, Harvey said. But a decade later, it’s still working. Every Big Shoulders book, so far, is in at least its second printing (and often far more). Each title gets a first printing of between 3,000 and 7,000 copies, costing about $12,000, depending on the size and content. (The photos in “Virus City” proved pricey.)

Initially Harvey and Co. pledged to make a book a year, but settled for quality over an assembly line. It’s been a small, clever catalog. “How Long Will I Cry?” led to “American Gun: A Poem by 100 Chicagoans,” a book-length communal poem about Chicago gun violence with contributions from many of its celebrated poets, including Ana Castillo and Ed Hirsch. Chris Green was the editor, and followed with “I Remember: Chicago Veterans of War,” which, instead of individual stories, mixes the memories of 50 veterans into a single (footnoted) narrative that reads, as Green says, “like one veteran remembering every war,” blurring places and people into a single tragedy. For “The Garcia Boy,” Harvey and his students compiled four drafts of a memoir left by Chicago writer Rafael Torch, who died of cancer in 2011 at 36. For “Write Your Heart Out,” Morano had a simple, powerful idea: Ask local teenagers to write about relationships.

And all you have to do get a copy of these books — which Big Shoulders ships for free and describes as an “ongoing experiment in generosity” (but does sometimes run out of stock) — is explain on an online form why you want a copy and how you plan to use it (bigshouldersbooks.com/book-order).

Requests come from students, from teachers, from the incarcerated, from gang members. They arrive from across the world — and Chicago. The reasons are endless:

They never read but they love Big Shoulders. They’re in prison and these books have given them a road map for how to act when they get out. One request, Harvey said, “was simply: ‘I’m a young woman in Indiana but these books make me feel empowered.”

The goal, Morano said, is to get books into hands of people who can’t or wouldn’t normally buy them. So far, their press has given away more than 100,000 copies.

They don’t plan to stop.

Harvey is thinking of an oral history of the Calumet River, but next up, coming in spring: “Chicago Mosaic: Immigration Stories Lost, Left or Kept.” It’s based around the tales of the tangible objects that Chicago transplants hold dear. Green, its editor, has received stories about dolls, photos, cell phones, cannons, swords. He’s still accepting stories. “It’s all been word-of-mouth for the most part. This whole thing is about word-of-mouth.”

Just as Studs would have liked.