Author Wayne Karlin, professor emeritus of the College of Southern Maryland, says his experiences in the Vietnam War first inspired him to become a writer. The death of his wife of 44 years led to his most recent book, 'The Genizah.' Photo by Ron Carver

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Some people are fortunate to find their life’s work early. “I pretty much always thought that I was going to be a writer,” Maryland author Wayne Karlin said in an interview with the Beacon. “I was a reader — I love reading, and I love stories.”

Now 79 years old, retired college professor Wayne Karlin has published nine novels, three nonfiction books, poetry, short stories and articles in literary journals and newspapers.

His most recent novel, The Genizah, about Eastern Europe during World War II, was published in September. Karlin spoke about his book last month at a reading and discussion at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, moderated by Baltimore radio host Marc Steiner.

A Vietnam War veteran

While many of his roles and jobs contributed to his identity, Karlin’s service in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Vietnam War shaped much of who he is today, as well as the stories he shares with the world.

“That’s where I feel like I was born — in the war. It has defined a lot of the way I’ve written and lived my life,” Karlin said.

Although he had always known he would be a writer, only after the war — which he calls “a big mistake” — did he feel the need to write. Karlin felt “an obligation to the people who died, an obligation to [this] country,” he said.

Rather than write about the events directly, however, Karlin preferred to create situations and characters that conveyed what he experienced in the war.

“There was a need to write about the war in some way that personalized it and made it non-abstract. I could deal with it through stories. So, in a way [I was] putting it a step away from myself.”

Karlin is always conscious of the dilemma of crafting art based on traumatic events such as war. To draw readers without romanticizing anything, Karlin said he tries to be as honest as possible by creating “characters who are armed with regret.”

Persistence paid off

Like many first-time writers, Karlin had to endure many rejections from publishing companies.

In the early 1970s, after he returned from Vietnam and received his bachelor’s degree in humanities from the American College in Jerusalem and a master’s degree in Creative Writing from Goddard College, he was working as a journalist while submitting stories to magazines.

At that point, though, the war was ongoing, and no publications were accepting his pitches. “Nobody wanted to read that stuff,” he remembered.

So Karlin and a group of veterans writing about the war decided to form First Casualty Press. The name came from the Greek poet Aeschylus’ quote, “In war, truth is the first casualty.”

They published two anthologies, one of poetry and another of short stories, which gained attention.

Despite years of rejections, Karlin didn’t feel like he could stop writing. “That was the way I defined myself. I could not imagine not writing,” he said.

It wasn’t until 10 years later, in 1984, that Karlin published his first novel — and his life shifted. “It felt like the world changed,” he said.

Karlin took a position as a professor of writing at the College of Southern Maryland, where he taught for more than 30 years. All the while, he published short stories, articles and books.

Since then, he has won two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, five Maryland Individual Artist Awards, the Paterson Fiction Prize and the Juniper Prize for Fiction.

Grief inspired recent book

Karlin’s mastery of language failed him when he lost his wife in 2020. Karlin had been married to Ohnmar Thein Karlin for 44 years.

“Losing her really led into this last book,” he said. “The whole way that I had used words to deal with the world was failing me. It was just gone.”

Bereft, Karlin titled his most recent novel The Genizah, the word for a cache of sacred Hebrew books that had to be buried ceremoniously. “That’s the image of the genizah,” he said. “The words were kind of locked away.”

The plot of The Genizah imagines what would have happened if Karlin’s parents never left Poland before the Holocaust. All of his mother’s family perished.

“I know what their fate would have been,” Karlin said. “By creating a character that’s my mother and another character that’s my father, it personalizes it.

“It’s personal. It’s not abstract, it’s not history, it’s not just a statistical event,” Karlin explained.

Although novels are his favorite form of writing, Karlin has been writing more poetry lately.

“I’m attracted to the way of intensifying language, of getting something boiled down, being able to articulate its essence and its images,” Karlin said.

The Genizah and Karlin’s eight other novels are available on Amazon.com.