Jason Trask of Oxford is a teacher at Streaked Mountain School, an alternative education school that’s part of the Oxford Hills School District. Trask just had his novel, “I’m Not Muhammad,” published by a small publishing company. The book is about a man who is mistaken for a terrorist and undergoes “extraordinary rendition,” the government abduction and transfer of terrorism suspects to other countries for imprisonment and, potentially, torture. Trask said it’s his sixth novel, but the first to be published. In his own author bio, Trask writes that he teaches “in an alternative education program, working with high school students who have been traumatized by seeing through the system.”

Name: Jason Trask

Age: 56

Town: Norway

Job: Teacher, author

You said you work with children who have been traumatized. Has that experience enhanced the realism of your writing? What I meant by that is that the students I work with at the Streaked Mountain School are bright kids who have seen through the nicey-nice way that we present ourselves in this country. They see below the surface to the greed and the racism and the corruption and selfishness and addiction and the thirst for power and hypocrisy. I feel fortunate that I didn’t see as deeply as my students do when I was their age. Growing up is hard enough as it is. But growing up with a full awareness of the way things actually are makes life that much more difficult. Many of the alternative education students in this community — and all over the country — are among the most gifted students that we have. But because they don’t necessarily behave in socially acceptable ways, people miss out on how bright some of these kids are.

During my last three years in New York, I taught high school-aged inmates on Rikers Island. One of the things I now appreciate about the Rikers job is that it helped me not to judge the kids I work with up here. By comparison these kids seem completely innocent. They’re great kids who in some cases have grown up too fast. I don’t know whether working with these students has affected my writing or not. What I do know is that it’s affected every other aspect of my life, so I can only assume it’s affected my writing as well.

How long did you live in New York City? For 16 years. I moved there in 1978 when I was 24 from Germany with Demian, my oldest son. He was nearly two at the time. His mother is from Germany and I received custody of him. Demian and I sort of grew up together on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In 1982, Eliza Beghe and I got married. In 1988, we had a son whom we named Katahdin (we had hitchhiked up to Baxter State Park for our honeymoon). In 1990, we moved to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Then in 1994, we moved to Maine.

Why did you move back to Maine? Every summer since we met, Eliza and I had been coming to Maine for a month or so and staying at my parents’ cabin on Escutarsis Lake in Lowell, Maine. That’s up near Howland. Eliza grew up in New York City, and I remember the first time we came up here, she said, “Maine is another country.” But she really dug the place. As a kid, I never realized how beautiful it is up here. It just seemed like a boring place to me and I left Maine as soon as I could. Somehow by coming up here with Eliza, I was able to see Maine through different eyes and it began to grow on me.

Was it difficult to get a novel published? I’ve been trying to get a novel published since 1982 when I was 28. If I had known back then that it would take me another 28 years, I don’t know if I would have had the courage to keep writing. I’m sure that it seems ridiculous to most of my friends that I’ve kept writing all this time with nothing to show for it. And even now, though the thing has been published, it has yet to be properly distributed. Other than at a few indy bookstores, Amazon.com is still the only place for most people to purchase the book. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful to Red Wheelbarrow Books, but this is the first book they’ve ever published. If the truth be told, they’re as pathetic as I am. And yet, I’m very happy to get it out there. I much prefer that to having it sit on my hard drive with its five siblings. I suspect that at night when I’m sleeping, the other five novels complain to each other about how “I’m Not Muhammad” was the one that got the nod. I honestly think that three of the other novels are at least as good as INM, but this one is more topical — not that it’s helped it to sell.

How did you decide to write about extraordinary renditions? I got the idea for the novel on 9/11 when I was watching television and saw the Twin Towers collapse. I immediately imagined some guy using that as an excuse to leave his wife and go off and begin a new life. She would assume he had died in the crash. A little over four years ago, I began writing a novel of that sort and the thing morphed into the current novel. At some point in my writing, I experimented with making the main character an Arab-American. I had been following the news about the way Arab-Americans in this country were treated following 9/11. And I’d been reading everything I could find about extraordinary renditions, and suddenly everything fell into place.

Have any of your students read the book? No. I haven’t really talked to them about it. And besides, the thing would bore them to tears. I have a good idea of what they like to read, and this isn’t it.

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