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Mark Krueger

Location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Arroyo Seco, New Mexico

Biography
Almost from the beginning I knew I was home. There was something about the pace, struggle, action, excitement, sadness, exuberance, and play that I liked. It was hard, gut wrenching, challenging work but I knew this was where I wanted to be. Forty years later I am still here. After working for eleven years in residential treatment with “troubled” boys and completing my degrees, I founded an education, research, and service center for child and youth care workers at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee where I still work as a professor. I was president of the US national association of child and youth care workers. These days I simply like to teach, write, and talk about the work. Child and youth care has given me an opportunity to write my stories, using what I have learned from literature, my experience, and my colleagues. The youth I work with now are youthful students who want to work with youth. Those who make it will be the ones who (as we used to say) have “fire in their bellies” for working with kids. There is something in their gut or center that tells them this is where they have to be. I am inspired by their stories.

How I came to be in this field
A friend told me about an opening for a night watchman at the residential treatment center where he worked. I applied thinking I would use it as an opportunity to get a masters in a human service area. I had studied economics as an undergrad and was looking for something else. I had worked in the summers at urban camps for kids and always enjoyed it. If I got the job, I thought I could take classes during the day, learn about child and youth care from the kids and workers, and study at night while the boys were sleeping. But after a short interview I was hired as a direct line worker and never looked back.

A favorite saying

There are things
We live among and to see them
Is to know ourselves.
Occurrence, a part
Of an infinite series,
The sad marvels;

– From the opening to George Oppen’s poem Of Being Numerous

A few thoughts about child and youth care

• Where else can you play and get paid for it

• No place to hide, you can not escape your self, or the other – that’s the beauty of it

• Grilled cheese lunch

• Never sleep downstream from a bed wetter in a tent

Last thing I read, watched, heard, which I would recommend to others
Albert Camus notebooks – thoughts and sketches from a sensitive man in search of place and self. So much of what he has to say is relevant to our work as advocates for youth, and the condition of the world today.

A favorite Child and Youth Care experience
A 13 year old boy who had worked for several months to be able to go “off grounds” into the community by himself came back in the car of someone he met on the street. When I told him he would have to be restricted for taking a ride from a stranger, he angrily said, “How the f¦was I supposed to know he was a stranger.”

Others include camping and a whole range of activities. Like I suggested above, I always enjoyed the play and work part of it.

A few thoughts for those starting out

• Be curious about self and other and the world around you

• The ones you like the least could be the most like you

• Roll up your sleeves and get in the thick of it

• Stay only as long as the fire is burning

• Stay in shape

• Show up every time you work

A recommended child and youth care reading link
Hall, T., Lashua, B. and Coffey, A. (2008). Sound and the everyday in qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 14, 6. pp. 1019-1039.

http://qix.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/14/6/1019

My favourite child and youth care-relevant link and why
www.cyc-net.org of course. These days I would also recommend a number of literary journals and the journal of Qualitative Inquiry where others write about phenomena in our work and life from different perspectives.

A writing of my own
Of the twelve books I have written, these are the ones that I often feel the best about in reflection:

Careless to caring for Troubled Youth (1983)
Floating (1987)
Nexus (1995)
Sketching Youth, Self, and Youth Work (2007)

Influences on my work
My youth; other youth, growing up in Milwaukee (Cream City) and Wisconsin (the lakes “up north”) Suzanne, the artist, and Jason, the computer scientist (of course). All the great folks I have met in this field and the writers I admire in other fields. My mother who taught me about the value of friendly persistence, my father who gave me an interesting, complex character to write about, and Daniel, my muse.

___

Image of a Boy

The photo arrived
in the mail with a note
that said we haven’t
seen you for a while

He looked tall
and handsome
in the shadow
of sacred Blue Lake

The deep purple
New Mexico sky
in the background

He came to me
again in a dream
naked in his infant
search for antiquity
on a Northern street

I reached out for him
but he slithered away
in the blue neon light
of a dark night