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