How It Sounds

Bill Hillmann: Writer & Storyteller

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By Donald G. Evans

As founder and maestro of the Windy City Story Slam, Bill Hillmann spends a lot of time listening. He hears first-timers croaking and squealing and fighting to find rhythm. He hears veterans pittering and pattering an expert pacing that hooks the audience. He hears criminals and cops, the rich and poor, White Sox and Cubs fans, the old and young. He hears sighs and moans and clucks that humor, intrigue, and enthrall.

Or not.

“It’s interesting to see how people do these different things naturally, and how the audience responds to them naturally,” says Bill. “When you’re up there, you have to grab the audience. It’s almost a little bit of conflict with the audience: you have to engage them.”

It’s that natural voice that Bill tries to capture in “What It Feels Like,” an excerpt from his novel-in-progress called Edgewater. But natural is not always neat. The story’s boy narrator relates the experience of his first playground home run in such a way that might raise the hackles of grammarians and stylists. Sentences run to paragraph length, punctuation is sparse, and the tense shifts between past and present.

“For me, being around these different storytellers is changing the way I view stories,” says Bill. “I’ve been noticing the tense shifts a lot; I’ve noticed why it works. There’s this sense of immediacy to it.”

The Windy City Story Slam is modeled after Marc Smith’s Poetry Slam at the Green Mill. Bill’s close friend Stephan Wozniak, wife Enid Maldonado, and Columbia College creative writing mentor Don De Grazia have all been conspirators in making a success of the event’s first year at Humboldt Park’s Quennect Four gallery. The Slam is notorious for its stamina (the open mic can go all night, and then some), its debauchery (you can’t go all night sober), and its diversity. Featured guests have included The Thin Man front man Kennedy Greenrod, Fred Burkhart, Don Hall, John McNally, Stephanie Kuehnert and Sergio Mayora; Irvine Welsh recently drew a crowd of 300.

Bill studies the master strokes of these accomplished guests and takes notes on the rest, as well. Bill’s style is probably a great grandson of Jack Kerouac, who wrote free association prose that borrowed its pacing from jazz music. Kerouac, for example, disdained the period, and would instead use dashes. Bill’s method deviates sharply, though, when it comes to craftsmanship: Kerouac did not believe in editing, while Bill tweaks and fusses to recreate the voices in his head.

“I really want to let the characters speak,” says Bill.

The seven-year-old narrator of “What It Feels Like” is hopped up on unrealistic dreams that seem, to him, not only possible but definite. There is music to his narration: the music of his neighborhood, his age, and his status among his friends. The narrator’s tiny rampaging voice captures the intensity and excitement of that uniquely selfish childhood state in which the whole world seems at stake at this very instance. The landscape the boy inhabits is vivid, authentic, and unique. Through the narrative structure, the reader is given access to the boy’s point of view, but also the larger world that is beyond his scope.

The Chicago Cubs provide the ultimate foil to dreams too big.

“I’ve always loved the Cubs; it’s just a beautiful, special team,” says Bill. “In ’89 (when the novel is set) I was obsessed with the Cubs, watched every game that summer. It was a neighborhood thing: everybody—EVERYbody—loved the Cubs. People had signs that said Cubs Parking Only; when we played baseball we always talked about who we wanted to be, Andre Dawson or Ryne Sandberg or Mark Grace.”

Bill, the youngest of six children, lived at Hollywood and Ashland, near the Edgewater Hospital (now Edgewater Medical Center) in St. Gregory’s Parish. Bill’s dad Pete, his brothers (Pete, John and David) and his uncles were all neighborhood tough guys. They rode around on their motorcycles and hot rods, ran with the stone greaser gangs, and one even got taken down with a felony conviction. Bill was determined to follow in their footsteps.

“I was trying to be the toughest guy in the neighborhood,” Bill says. “Part of the reason I became a troublemaker was overhearing my uncles and my dads telling stories. My Dad was one of the toughest guys on the North Side in his day but at the same time he’s real charismatic; he’ll go for an hour, and have everybody laughing the whole time and he’ll be laughing too. He loves to tell stories. He has a way of taking a terrible and violent story and making it hilarious.”

The Hillmann family moved to Brookfield, where Bill’s eagerness to fight began to land him in trouble. Brother Peter Hannon, at St. Joseph’s High School in Westchester, took Bill under his wing, and helped turn the 139-pound 16-year-old into a Gold Gloves competitor. Bill also started playing football, and in a few years earned the starting outside linebacker job at Elmhurst College. But Bill kept fighting—and when he hurt several guys at a campus party dustup, he not only got kicked off the football team but got sent to DuPage County Jail for 90 days on a simple battery conviction.

But the worse year of Bill’s life, 2002, was also the best year. During his nine-month trial, Bill continued his boxing regiment and won the Golden Gloves championship at 201 pounds. Around the same time, Bill took his dad’s advice and read Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which inspired him to start writing. He won third place in an Elmhurst College literary contest with the first story he’d ever written.

“I was 20 years old, and I had never read a whole book before,” Bill says. “After that, I started reading everything.”

Edgewater is loosely based on Bill's childhood, from around the ages of seven to 14. It's only natural that Bill would choose that time and that place for his first novel; it's the place he still considers home.

“There was so much life in that neighborhood, it left a big imprint on me,” Bill says. “I just got a deep love for Chicago, it’s the most beautiful place in the whole world. What Edgewater was to me back then, the incredible life in that neighborhood, I haven’t seen anyplace else, other than a few places in Mexico City.”

Bill’s namesake, the grandfather all the kids called Dah, used to take weekly walks around the neighborhood. Some of Bill’s most treasured memories were those simple times sharing the city with his grandfather, and those memories fueled his desire to recreate the world of his youth.

“We’d just walk down Ashland a few blocks south and cut over to Clark Street,” Bill recollects. “Man, it was so alive back then. There’d be different languages being spoken out of all these different shops. It was a crazy melting pot: Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, you name it. We’d go to the ice cream shop, pick up medication for my grandmother at the drug store, my grandfather would always buy us a toy, we’d stop and play at Melon Park. Living out in the suburbs, nothing there resembled my childhood. Maybe that makes it more important, more vibrant to me.”

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