Photo by Patricia O’Blenes John Jeffire looks on as the Chippewa Valley wrestling team competes in a Division 1 state quarterfinal March 2 in Battle Creek. Jeffire’s book, “Motown Burning,” won the Mount Arrowsmith grand prize in 2005.

Local author wrestles with writing

By Brad D. Bates
C & G Staff Writer

John Jeffire is a lot like the holds he teaches his wrestlers at Clinton Township Chippewa Valley — complex.

Not only has he coached state champions at Chippewa Valley and national champions at Findlay University in Ohio, but he’s also an English teacher and a published author.

“I don’t know what people think of me,” Jeffire said with a laugh Feb. 27 after getting his team ready for it’s second trip to the state finals in his tenure.

“They probably look at me, and once they talk to me, say, ‘He’s not as big an idiot as I thought.’”

Jeffire, a Clinton Township resident, wasn’t always a wrestler poet. Before going to St. Lawrence University in New York to wrestle, he was a lot like many young men his age, focused on sports.

“I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Jeffire said.  “I went to college to wrestle. I didn’t know what poetry was. To me, it was about flowers and rhyming. When I read (Philip) Levine it was like, ‘Whoa, this is poetry,’ and, just like an athlete training, I wanted to learn as much as I could.”

Jeffire started to focus on writing becoming a part of his life after school and wrote poems and short stories, but he always felt there was something more he could do.

“Through many feeble attempts, I had tried to write longer stories,” he said. “I had written a lot of poetry and short stories, and with time constraints that’s all I could focus on, but I always felt I had a longer story to tell.”

Jeffire used the opportunity of an extended vacation in Hawaii for his 20th wedding anniversary to make good on his intentions and penned the beginnings of what would be his first book, “Motown Burning,” which won the grand prize at the Mount Arrowsmith Novel Writing Contest in 2005.

“On the ride over (to Hawaii), I wrote three chapters handwritten in a notebook,” Jeffire said. “I started to see the direction of where things were happening. It was a lot like training for wrestling. I saw a goal, how to get to that goal and was seeing if I was able to put in the effort to achieve that goal.”

“Motown Burning” is a tribute to many of the things that have made Jeffire who he is. It’s set in Detroit in the 1960s and ‘70s, which is when he was growing up in Dearborn.

Its central character is a young man, Aram Pehlivanian, who is given the choice between prison and Vietnam and chooses Vietnam.

“What I’m trying to show is the streets of Detroit weren’t much different from Vietnam,” Jeffire said. “It was a different kind of violence and a different kind of tension and anxiety, but it was two faces of the same situation.

“It’s a Motown  ‘Odyssey.’ It involves a journey and a waiting woman. A.P. is Odysseus, and instead of Ithaca, he’s got to get back to Detroit.”

Another central theme is Detroit music, which Jeffire knew from working with his father, the building coordinator at Olympia Stadium in charge of getting the facility ready for concerts.

“The protagonist, A.P., really understands the world through music,” Jeffire said. “All the Detroit artists from the 1960s and 1970s are throughout it. The foundation of the book is Detroit music.”

While it may be surprising to some that a wrestling coach is also an award-winning author, Jeffire believes the two endeavors go hand in hand.

“They’re both about self discovery,” Jeffire said. “In wrestling, when you go in that circle, there’s no one that can help you, and in writing, you sit down and you’ve got this inclination that this is where a story might be, and you have to perform.”

And it’s the same drive he used to excel in wrestling that he uses in writing.

“There is no off switch,” Jeffire said. “Wrestlers don’t need to eat. They can just go for eight to 10 hours at a time. They’re used to being inconvenienced, and they understand what it is to labor in anonymity.”

The connection hasn’t just led to wrestling influencing his writing; writing influences the way he relates wrestling to the young grapplers on his team.

“In writing, you have to be so aware of audience,” Jeffire said. “As a coach, you have to be aware of who your wrestlers are and how they learn.

“Going through the process of writing, you always are revising. You do the same thing in coaching. When you lose, you look at what you did and what you could have done different.”

Writing has shown his students that there should be more to life than sports.

“I’m always preaching to be a well-rounded individual,” Jeffire said. “I’ve had a number of kids buy the book and read it. Hopefully, it encourages them to do what I did and have that reaction, ‘Maybe I could do that.’

“And if they actually do read the book, hell yeah, that’s cool too!”

For more information on Jeffire and to purchase his book, visit johnjeffire.com. “Motown Burning” is also available at Rock-a-Billy’s music store in Utica.

You can reach Brad D. Bates at bbates@candgnews.com or at (586) 498-1029.