Monday, May 4, 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.
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Due to family emergencies, I've missed out on my book group's discussion of Five Skies and won't be able to attend Saturday's breakfast either. I guess I want me chance to say a few words about your book and to thank the RI Center for the Book for choosing it.
My East Providence book group had just finished another excellent book, this year's Pulitzer Prize winner, Olive Kitteridge. I must say that reading these two books, so human and painful and true, in close proximity has been quite a gift.
As Olive delves into the layers and folds of a teacher's life and her connections in her small town, Five Skies carefully constructs the lives of three men and the geography of land and sky and redemption. Your silences, your spare dialogue, your descriptions of work and nature carried me to Idaho, to a world where a man's hands tell his life story.
I will remember its directness, its controlled simplicity, its scenic grace.
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