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

The Five Skies of Idaho

Confess. What do you think of when I say “Idaho?” Potatoes, right? Well, believe me when I say that, after reading Five Skies (the 2009 Reading Across Rhode Island selection) I know Idaho is a lot more than potatoes! And the author of Five Skies, Ron Carlson, is at his best when presenting what can only be described as the book’s fourth main character – the rugged mountains and canyon gorges of Idaho.

The New York Times describes it this way, “Most impressive, though, is Carlson's evocation of the Western landscape, especially its immensely variable sky. Every few pages there's a new image of this panorama, which shifts from ''a luminescent charcoal ceiling scalloped with glowing seams'' to an ''amorphous glaring canopy'' to an ''ebony quadrant of the sky'' where the ''ghosted flashes of an electrical storm'' are ''blooming like small stars.''

If you are looking for a way to travel to Idaho (without actually spending money on airfare) check out the following sites – and then tell me what you think about when someone says “Idaho?”

1. One of the most beautiful sites about Idaho is called simply Scenic Byways. Choose and click on a locale; then click on View slideshow, sit back and enjoy.
http://www.idahobyways.gov/byways/

2. Idaho – Adventures in Living also has some wonderful photos. Scroll about two-thirds of the way down and find the Snake River Canyon Area.
http://www.visitidaho.org/mapsimages/photo-search-results.aspx?keyword=Twin%20Falls#content

3. And finally, one of the Reading Across Rhode Island Committee members “just happened” to be visiting her brother in Idaho and brought back the following collection of photographs by Dave Cabitto of Meridian, Idaho.

Journey with us to the Five Skies of Idaho

The Reading Across Rhode Island selection for 2009 is Five Skies by Ron Carlson, and the folks at the Rhode Island Center for the Book at Providence Public Library invite you to join with us in exploring and discussing this wonderful book, its characters, its setting and its message.

Five Skies is about a developing friendship among three troubled men: Darwin Gallegos, forman of the group, has lost his wife to a tragic accident; Arthur Key, Hollywood stunt director recently lost his brother in a stunt gone bad, and Ronnie Panelli, a shiftless young man has been in and out of jail for much of his young life. These refugees from the painful past are drawn together one summer by a construction project in the Idaho Rockies – constructing a ramp to nowhere for a bizarre and ill-conceived motorcycle stunt.

Author Ron Carlson makes his first visit to Reading Across Rhode Island 2009 at the RARI Launch Conference, which will be held on Saturday, January 31st from 9:30am – 2:30pm at Bryant University, Smithfield RI. The cost per person is $25.00. The Registration Form is available online and must be submitted by January 22nd.

This conference is designed for librarians, members and leaders of book discussion groups, educators and readers across the state. Please join us in welcoming Ron Carlson and in beginning our state-wide discussion about Five Skies.

If you cannot attend the conference and would like to ask Ron a question, simply post your question on this blog and we will include his answers in a future post. Join the discussion!

Five Skies by Ron Carlson

Five Skies by Ron Carlson
Novelist Summary: Working together on a summer construction project high in the Rocky Mountains, drifter Arthur Key, shiftless Ronnie Panelli, and foreman Darwin Gallegos reveal details about their pasts and beliefs in cautious and profound ways.