How many among us can say that their father wrestled a real, live bear? Robert Ostrom can, and he threads both the real and imagined details of that event throughout The Bear Wrestler, his stunning fourth collection of poems. Telling great stories is a superpower Ostrom’s dad possesses—and has passed down to his son. In The Bear Wrestler (Saturnalia Books, 2025), Ostrom pays tribute to his dad, a complex man, and also examines their complicated relationship, the relationship between fact and fiction, story and truth—and what happens when the lines between the two are blurred. His poems capture childhood wonder and speak to adult realizations. They sing with history and myth, with pain and deep love, and, of course, with bears.
It was my great pleasure to speak with Ostrom via Zoom about the bears in his life, wrestling in all its forms, and the challenges and joys of writing about those you love.
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The Rumpus: I want to start with the bear wrestler, your father. In the first section, titled “Act of Preservation,” you write about coming back to visit your hometown. Your father had kept a model railway from your childhood intact. What else do you think your father wanted to preserve?
Robert Ostrom: My dad is in his mid-seventies now, and I notice in him a yearning for things to be as they were, or rather as he remembers them being. I think it can be hard for a parent—especially a controlling one—to lose their influence over the narrative. My dad was everything to me when I was growing up. He relishes an audience, and I was his number one fan. One thing he’d love to preserve—in me—is that version of himself.
Rumpus: What did you want to preserve in writing this book?
Ostrom: “Preserve” is such an evocative word. When I hear it, I think of my mom canning fruit and jams for the winter—keeping things alive, fresh, and nourishing. There’s a Greg Brown song where he says, “These canned goods I buy at the store ain’t got the summer in them anymore.” How fabulous that we’ve figured out how to preserve summer—not just as a memory, but as a taste and scent. When I write, I don’t set out to preserve anything. I feel more like a conduit for whatever obsessions, conscious or not, are inside of me. In life, however, I’m pretty obsessed with preserving my connection to the past, so I’m sure that seeps into my creative work.
Recently, I’ve been trying to get rid of some of my stuff—it’s overwhelming my family. But it’s so hard! Most of what I keep has emotional weight: letters, old T-shirts, little relics, everything—the tangible links to my past. Sometimes, my childhood feels like the story of a different person, and these objects create a bridge between who I am and where I came from. In a way, poetry does that too, whether the author intends to or not, but it’s less about sealing the past in amber and more about finding what’s universal. We’re drawn to poetry not because it’s a time capsule, but because to be human has never fundamentally changed.
Rumpus: You share a lot of hurt in this collection, but your love is in every word. You give your father grace, even in the parts of the book where I imagine that might have been difficult.
Ostrom: Oh, that’s really nice to hear. “Preserve” also means to protect, and there’s a part of me that wants to protect my parents. Writing about them can feel very helpful, but publishing work about them is a different story. It’s hard. While I wanted to write down his stories, I didn’t want to write a book about my dad. I really didn’t, and I resisted it. But, in the end, it’s not up to me.
I like that you used the word “grace.” That was my little sister Elisabeth’s middle name. She passed away two years ago from alcohol poisoning, just as I was finishing this book. I struggled with the fact that I hadn’t written much about her complicated relationship with our dad—especially how he was often a major enabler in her struggles with bulimia and alcoholism.
After her passing, every time I tried to revise a poem, it turned into a poem about her. I didn’t think it was a good idea to change the whole book, especially when I was overcome with grief, but her presence began to thread through the work in quieter ways. I also wanted to portray my dad more honestly in this collection, more complexly than I’ve done in the past. Giving him grace, even while acknowledging those difficult truths, felt right.
Rumpus: The first poem is in sections, and it opens with this: “At the center / of the story / stands a father.” Your dad is a formidable physical presence—big, tall, strong. He was a master storyteller. Now you’re the one telling the story. What have you learned about the art from your father, and what moved you to tell your stories through poetry?
Ostrom: Both my sister Melissa and I are storytellers because of our dad. His stories—often presented as truths—drew us into a fictionalized world. While believing those stories came with negative consequences, they also taught us to believe in the improbable, opening up possibilities that might not have seemed available to two kids growing up in the Rust Belt.
But why tell these stories through poetry? For one, poetry is the genre I work in. More importantly, I believe poetry has a unique ability to convey truth, even when it tells a lie. Poetry lives in a space where emotional and symbolic truths carry more weight than the literal. Maybe that makes it the appropriate medium for stories like these.
Rumpus: In that same first poem, you write about bringing your girlfriend to your hometown so she could meet your family and see where you spent your childhood. Then you address the reader, “But for other reasons too, which are the same reasons I brought you here.” What are those reasons?
Ostrom: I love when poems turn to the audience, it’s such a powerful gesture. It reminds me of that Keats fragment, “This living hand, now warm and capable of such earnest grasping,”which ends with, “I hold it towards you.” There’s something intimate and startling about addressing the reader directly, as though reaching through the page to connect with them.
In my last book, Sandhour, I tried to return to a more private, internal space to explore what happens when I push back against the immediate and internal critic—the voice that’s always imagining how a reader might respond. But with this book, the reader was more present in the room as I was writing. That moment in the poem is about creating a connection between the speaker’s world and the reader’s, making it clear they’re part of this book, too. It’s not just about my memories or experiences; it’s about inviting the reader to discover something of themselves here as well.
Rumpus: I felt this. It was as if you were saying, “My dad was a storyteller. Now I’m going to tell you stories. Some of them are his, and some are mine. Sit around the campfire with me.”
Ostrom: I love that you felt that way! The campfire in the forest—its heat, its shadows, the way it draws us closer to listen. I was thinking about the purpose stories serve, the line between fiction and lie, and how the forests in the stories we’re told as children plant forests inside each of us. Those forests grow wild, tangled, and vast, shaping the inner landscapes of who we are.
Rumpus: At times, your poems feel dream-like or prayer-like. I’m thinking of “Third Class Swim Test:” “The father doesn’t know how to swim, so he floats the distance.” And then the last line of “The Bear Wrestler,” also the last poem of the book, “The water is filled with stories and water is the truth and the bear wrestler doesn’t know how to swim.” Tell us about the swimming and floating.
Ostrom: I’m so happy you made that connection between those two poems.When my dad joined the Navy, he couldn’t swim, but he had to take a swim test. There was no time limit on the test, so, much to the frustration of those administering it, he floated—just floated—until he reached the end of the pool. In “Third Class Swim Test,” “telling” could stand in for “floating.” The telling of his story has taken his whole lifetime, a slow drift toward something—understanding, one would hope.
Rumpus: It also feels like you’re talking about survival when we don’t know how to navigate the waters of our circumstances.
Ostrom: Yeah, exactly. My dad grew up poor and suffered a great deal of trauma in his childhood. He was still a young man when he was in the Navy and probably a little desperate and very lost. That urge to float—to surrender to what might overwhelm us, hoping it’ll carry us forward—feels familiar.
Rumpus: I’m talking to you on Zoom, and I see bears all around you. Tell us about bears in your life.
Ostrom: Having written this book, I’ve thought a lot about bears, only to conclude that the bear is so many things to me. As a kid, and even now, bears show up in my dreams. As someone who’s done a lot of camping, I’ve had a few encounters with bears, including a grizzly in the Yukon while I was on a month-long outdoor leadership training course in college.
One of the great luxuries of being a poet is the freedom to go down rabbit holes. What began as a collection of my dad’s stories shifted when I started writing the bear wrestling story. Instead of following my dad, I followed the bear. It was fun, but I questioned whether it was silly to spend so much time writing about bears. Then, in early 2019, when my son was born and COVID was beginning to spread, writing about bears brought me both escape and relief. I decided to lean into it fully, exploring their mystical and ritualistic aspects, learning about channeling animals and inviting them into your dreams. One recommendation is to surround yourself with images of the animal, which, honestly, I was inadvertently already doing.
A few months into the pandemic, I was diagnosed with lymphoma. The news made me feel like I was falling, and I clung to anything that could steady me, thinking, “I’m going to do whatever I can to help myself feel better.” I’m lucky to have a strong support system, but I feel incredibly blessed to have poetry. That’s when I really let the bear guide me.
Rumpus: You masterfully tell the bear-wrestling story, revealing one little bit at a time until the end of the book when you give it all up. What a family legend! How was it to write about?
Ostrom: It was both difficult and fun to write. I approach the fight from different perspectives and hint at it throughout the book, but writing the actual story was tricky. I wanted to capture it the way it existed in me as a kid—fractured, full of contradictions, and larger than life.
I knew certain details: There was a handler and a ruse who wrestled the bear before my dad. He would always mention the bear’s breath and joke about getting it in a bear hug. I also knew the bear threw him onto a hot dog stand—that’s how he got his scar. But in my childhood imagination, the story played out on a trail in the forest. In reality, it happened at a fair in Gary, Indiana. I tried to create something that captured these contradictions while deliberately not reconciling them. I wanted to maintain those things that made the story captivating for me as a kid.
Rumpus: There’s a lot of myth in here, biblical references, Greek and Indigenous mythology, and reportage. In the section “A History of Bear Wrestling in the United States,” you pull directly from news clippings about bear wrestling and then go off on your own retelling. In some of your poems, the speaker is the bear. Does everyone have their own bear?
Ostrom: If we think of the bear as something deeply primal and untamed, a force within us that’s authentic, strong yet vulnerable, ferocious yet gentle, then yes, I’d say we each have our own bear. The bear could be the part of us that grapples with our fears, our desires, or the truths we don’t always want to face. We wrestle it, flee from it, or pull it close—and more often than not, we’re doing all of these at once.
Rumpus: You write with generosity and compassion for the things expected of men and boys, especially back in your father’s day. The bear can be dangerous but also protective. In “A Report on the Bear Wrestler,” you write about one of your childhood baseball games. Your father wasn’t happy with the way you were being treated and was ready to take on the whole crowd in your defense. He just stood up like a bear and growled.
You tell another story in the same poem, a story that will long stay with me, about your interaction with a man named Don Reinhoudt. Can you tell us about it?
Ostrom: Don Reinhoudt, the “World’s Strongest Man” in the late ’70s, was from my county and did a lot of youth outreach. When I was at a Salvation Army summer camp, he came to do a demonstration, a bunch of strongman stunts. After watching for a while, I couldn’t take it anymore. I raised my hand and called him out: “You’re a liar. You’re not the strongest man in the world.” He tried to explain that he’d won a tournament that gave him the title, but I wasn’t buying it. I shouted, “You’re a liar! My dad is the strongest man in the world!” As the kids started laughing at me, Don paused, smiled, and asked, “Wait, what’s your dad’s name?” When I told him, he nodded and said, “Oh, that’s right. I forgot. Bob Ostrom is the strongest man in the world.” I puffed up, thinking, “You better believe it.” It wasn’t until much later that I realized he had done me a kindness.
Rumpus: What a kindness! In “An Act of Preservation,” we learn your daughter doesn’t like the constellation Orion. You want to tell her, “He’s not hunting you.” If not her, who is the hunted, and who is doing the hunting?
Ostrom: The tension between hunter and hunted runs throughout the book. In that poem, there’s Orion, Ursa Major, and the crab. A few months after I found out I had cancer, we took a vacation to the Outer Banks with friends and our kids. It was still deep in the pandemic, so we all tested a few times and formed a bubble.
On our first night there, we went down to the beach. When you shined your flashlight on the sand, it lit up with ghost crabs. I remember thinking, “Oh hell no, I do not like these crabs.” After that trip, I started seeing crabs everywhere—like little omens. The swollen lymph node on my neck felt like a crab shell, and I began imagining my other tumors and abnormal cells as tiny crabs scuttling inside me. I ended up writing maybe 100 pages about crabs that never made it into the book.
In that poem, I’d like to leave it to the reader to decide who’s hunting and who’s the hunted. But at that time, I felt very much like I was the one being hunted.
Rumpus: It’s very powerful. How are you now?
Ostrom: Better than ever, thankfully. I’m incredibly fortunate to have a treatable lymphoma and a team of amazing doctors and nurses. I was also lucky enough to be part of a treatment study, and the cancer has been in remission for over a year now.
Rumpus: Let’s talk a bit about craft. Your line breaks are amazing. Do you have a way of approaching them?
Ostrom: I’d say my approach to line breaks is always shifting—not necessarily evolving but changing with each project. In previous work, I often placed restrictions on myself and my lines—sometimes formal ones, though not in a traditional sense. For this book, I allowed myself more freedom and forgiveness.
When it comes to line breaks, I think it’s some combination of sound, rhythm, intuition, symmetry, and sense. While they can pull the reader to the next line, I don’t think they have to. Line breaks can slow the pace, bring it to a full stop, jolt, disrupt, or surprise, all within the same poem.
Rumpus: You have several poems with the same title, like “Bear Wrestler” and “False Awakening.” What’s the thinking behind that?
Ostrom: When I was writing poems for this book, I didn’t have a clear sense of where it was heading, but I sometimes found myself working in sections—mini-projects, you could say. For instance, I decided to try to write poems for all the dreams I’d ever had about bears, which became the “False Awakening” poems. I love when books have threads that weave throughout, connecting different parts in subtle ways. When it came to arranging this book, some of these groups stayed together, while others were spread out to create a sense of continuity.
Rumpus: There is quite a bit of wrestling in this book, both literally and figuratively. It’s a wonderful process to watch. You wrestle beautifully.
Ostrom: Thank you. It’s the first time someone’s ever said that to me.
Rumpus: I’m sure you’re aware of the metaphor, but did it feel like you wrestled emotionally while writing the book?
Ostrom: Well, I’m a poet, so on some level, I guess I’m always wrestling emotionally. But honestly, writing this book was a joy. I loved working on it, and I felt a little bereft when it ended. Even yesterday, as I was going through old notes and folders to prepare for this interview, I sort of automatically started revising one of the poems. I stopped myself and thought, “Dude, you can’t do that anymore. The book is done.” But I don’t think it’s really over. I’m sure there are more bear poems to come.
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Author photograph courtesy of Robert Ostrom
