Copyright Chicago Tribune
In Bill Hillmann’s new novel “White Flight” (Tortoise Books), you will encounter a story of substance and style, power and passion. Like much of Hillmann’s writing, it is autobiographical, real-life infused with creative imagination. It tells of a family in the 1990s moving from Rogers Park to La Grange and later Brookfield. It is peppered by excitement and trouble, focused on Joe Walsh (based on Hillmann), a sister suffering a gunshot wound, a brother back to his old bad ways after being released from prison, boxing success and derailed dreams of the Olympics, the power of love and dreams and the fragility of hope. If you are unfamiliar with Hillmann and his previous work — his first novel, 2014’s “The Old Neighborhood,” a 2015 non-fiction titled “Mozos: A Decade Running With the Bulls of Spain” or 2021’s “The Pueblos: My Quest To Run 101 Bull Runs In The Small Towns of Spain” — you have missed out on meeting one of the city’s most interesting and increasingly powerful writers, a man who once was on a path to nowhere, or worse. There was a time when he was a self-described “destructive monster… Alcoholism fueled my furious spirals into darkness. My family hospitalized me for mental illness, and I was jailed for almost killing a man in a fistfight.” He is now as respectable as respectable gets, an English and Communication professor at East-West University. He has a master of fine arts in writing earned from Columbia College in 2013 and in 2022 earned his doctorate in English at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, where he then taught for a few years. He has been back for a couple of years and says of East-West, “It has to be one of the most diverse student bodies in the country, with so many countries represented and so many races. I can see myself in so many of these young people.” I have known Hillmann for more than a dozen years, meeting after his danger-filled times. He was born in 1982 and became a Golden Gloves boxing champion as a teenager. But he became aimless until a novel changed his life. That book was Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” that famous 1926 novel about American and British expatriates in Paris and their trip to the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain, to partake of the running of the bulls and see bullfights. And drink and drink and drink. Hillmann told me, “I did not know that literature could be about exciting stuff. I thought novels were about and written for rich people, not people who led exciting lives.” He devoured Hemingway’s other novels and stories. He started writing. His first story, “Scrap,” focused on a bar fight. He kept writing, he worked various construction jobs, and founded a monthly storytelling contest. He got married. He published “The Old Neighborhood,” set in the gang-riddled edges of the Edgewater neighborhood in which he grew up. Local writer and artist Dmitry Samarov reviewed it in the Tribune, “It’s about growing up in a place where all the choices seem bad. It’s about a world where problems are solved with fists and bullets rather than words or compromises.” Still, shadowed by Hemingway, Hillmann traveled to Spain to meet some bulls. He met, he ran, he was gored (making international headlines), he wrote “Mozos.” Of “Mozos,” Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer who was the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote, “Bill Hillmann is courageous, I’m grateful there have been many aficionados in the United States like Hemingway and Hillmann.” Wrote Esquire magazine, “Bill Hillmann is one of the few who can articulate the chaotic scramble of runners, the icy chill of being gored, and the healing power of nearly bleeding to death on a filthy street in Spain.” Hillmann’s marriage of 14 years had fallen apart and he moved to New Orleans. He also fell in love and married a young woman he met in Pamplona. “She loves me, she loves the bulls and her culture, and she is teaching me things,” he says. “She is beautiful, sweet, wise and so positive. She has that special magic that only people of Pamplona have. She is everything I ever dreamed of.” They have been living a long distance marriage for three years, as she continues college toward a business degree. But she is coming for a visit soon. He remains busy promoting “White Flight,” which had its launch party a few weeks ago at the Green Mill. He’s busy teaching five classes a week. As he has for a couple of years, he is organizing students for a storytelling event of his creation, telling me, “Storytelling is the greatest way for people to connect.” And he’s starting a new student competition this year: boxing. No plans yet for anything involving bulls.
