Greetings from author Padma Venkatraman

As I look forward to the RI Center for the Book Meeting and being in the company of librarians and books in my all time favorite place in the world – a public library, I find myself thinking back to one of the most important discovery of my life, which I think I made when I was six years old and lived in India.

My youngest aunt, Sundari, who was visiting, had brought gifts for me and for my cousin Ramya, who is just four months younger than I am. I was certain my aunt hated me and loved my cousin, because cousin Ramya’s gift was a large, colorful board game and mine was just a book. Not even a brightly colored picture book, or at least a book with black and white illustrations, but instead a book filled with nothing but words.

I remember staring unhappily at the endless rows of print that stretched across the front page for many long minutes.

Then something magical happened. As I looked at them, those little words, those marks on paper, carried me into another place and time. I heard voices – clearer than any on the radio or a record player; I saw pictures – sharper and more real than any painting. And by the time I put the book away, I had met people as real to me as my friends and family were.

But that evening, I saw a beggar child who looked about my age. The child’s eyes reminded me of how privileged I was to be able to read; that in India, at least, education and books and libraries were accessible only to those with wealth.

Years later, I came to Virginia, to the College of William and Mary’s graduate school. There, I saw my first public library.

“How much do I have to pay to become a member?” I asked. To my astonishment, I was told I did not have to pay anything at all. All those shelves of books were open and accessible to me and to anyone who wanted to walk in through those doors. The amazing public library system became, in my mind, the most beautiful practical expressions of American ideals. To this day, I still believe that there are few better examples of the best of American culture.

So it is truly an honor for me to present the keynote address at the Rhode Island Center for the Book’s annual meeting. I love libraries just as my as Vidya, my protagonist in CLIMBING THE STAIRS, does. Public libraries have been my haven in times of homesickness; public librarians have been a source of support to me since I began climbing the stairs as a writer; and I hope very much that Rhode Island’s citizens (librarians and others) will bless me (inside and outside public libraries) as I keep Climbing the Stairs as a published author.

Padma Venkatraman (http://www.climbingthestairsbook.com/)

Padma

Last chance to nominate a title for the 2010 Reading Across RI selection

The Reading Across Rhode Island Nominating committee will do a lot of reading and meet a number of times this summer to discuss the Reading Across RI 2010 selection.

Nominate a title today! Deadline for nominations is June 20, 2009.

Did that happen to you? ~ Ron Carlson

One of the things a writer gets asked is: did that happen to you? Do you write from your own experiences? It’s a good question. We all know stories which seem absolutely made up and we all know stories that seem very close to life. I have never really been on a construction crew, like the three men in Five Skies, though I have done a lot of handiwork, and my father was a very fine engineer, and I’ve camped out plenty and cooked in those places, and I’ve fished in some remote spots, and I’ve spent some wonderful times in the out of doors. As a writer, you are required to write closely enough that you believe it. This is a responsibility and a pleasure. When people ask me if I write from my personal experiences, I answer: Yes, I do. I write from my personal experiences – whether I’ve had them or not. This sounds like a joke a first, and I’m sure to repeat it in Rhode Island this coming weekend, but it is not a joke. It is just one way of speaking about using the imagination in an empathetic way. As a writer, you send yourself on the journey. If you’re digging post holes for a fence, you take your time and dig in the red earth, sentence by sentence, even if there are rocks.

Scrip-scraps, Ron Carlson

Years ago, probably around 1991 or 92, I was at a family cabin in the mountains of Utah on a fresh cold morning in the summer and I had my notebook and I wrote a bit of dialogue between two men about something that had been tugging at me for some time. The two men would become Darwin and Arthur, when I would finally turn my full attention to the book more than ten years later. I had the one man ask the other: Did you ever build anything that lasted? Or was it all temporary? And the other man answers: Once in Aspen for a film we had enough time to put a deck on the directors house and that’s still there. The section was a kind of curiosity for me and I kept it in my note folder, along with all of the odd notes I keep. That folder is two inches thick and full of scrip-scraps of phrases, ideas, and the like. I could see from my dialogue that I wanted to write about work, the idea of work, but I didn’t know how to do it. I’d been writing stories and I saw the notion of work was bigger than might fit in a story. Then later I wrote the night three men are driving a truck in the snow and the book started to open up for me. ~ Ron Carlson

Introducing...Ron Carlson

I have been writing since my school days. My fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Thornton, allowed me to put on skits with my friends which I wrote under the heavy influence of monster movies, tarzan movies, and a sense of real wonder about the world. I continued writing in college at the University of Utah and I began to see that writing would be an adventure itself. By this I mean, I had thought that writing fiction would be a clear and organized endeavor. I didn’t know what I know now, after ten books, that writing fiction is about going into the unknown each time. We start with what we know and we write from there toward what we don’t know, into the dark, building each sentence carefully so we can believe it and find out – if we stay in the room – what our stories are. In Five Skies you can see me building a world in those first forty pages, process by process. I was so glad to see Ronnie finally get that tent up –with a little help. In the book I worked forward scene by scene, and then, maybe a dozen times, I stopped and made decisions about the direction I might go next. I wanted to make each step in the book a firm and credible step. More soon. April 30, 2009. Ron Carlson

LT Governor Elizabeth Roberts on Five Skies

As the Lieutenant Governor of The Ocean State, where each of us lives closely together and the ocean breezes and tides are part of our weather forecast, the Idaho setting of Five Skies fascinated me. I have long been a reader of books set in the wide open spaces of America. Willa Cather and O Pioneers set in the plains of Nebraska, Wallace Stegner and his Pulitzer Prize winning Angle of Repose, Larry McMurtrys Lonesome Dove these are three of my favorite books and I look for literature set in the west.

Five Skies, with its wide open, rugged setting, transports the reader to a different world. There are big skies, canyons, long distances to the closest town and to family. It is such a different world that surrounds the three men in this novel, isolating them and causing them to create their own family, father, son and grandson, on the canyon rim.

I look forward to the discussions on May 9, at the Reading Across Rhode Island May Breakfast."

"Five Skies" comes alive at Fidelity Investments

If you were to put seniors from Smithfield High School, “seniors” from the Smithfield Senior Center, Fidelity Investments specialists, and Reading across Rhode Island committee members in a room together, do you know what you would get? One of the best book discussions you could imagine!

Such a gathering took place at Fidelity Investments in Smithfield on March 26. The event offered a wonderful opportunity to discuss this year’s RARI selection, Five Skies by Ron Carlson, from numerous perspectives and to ask questions that either puzzled or intrigued individual readers.

A member of the RARI committee since 2003, I loved this luncheon and discussion as they exemplified the sharing of viewpoints and feelings that we have been encouraging for years!

A quick confession: I liked Five Skies, but I’m not sure I’d say I loved it. However, I left this gathering with a deeper appreciation of the subtlety and richness of the book.

Many thanks to Fidelity Investments and to Michelle Publicover, Fidelity’s assistant manager of Public Affairs, for making possible an excellent event.

Maxine Williams