| Saturday, April 28, 2007 10:20AM | | | | Per Petterson, Marilynne Robinson | Posted By: victoria redel
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| Tags: Robinson, Petterson | I went off to this conversation as an eager fan. I've read and reread and taught Robinson's Housekeeping umpteen times. I adore it and also adore--for entirely different reasons--the achievement of Gilead. Just last night I'd begun Petterson's Out Stealing Horses and was already under the spell of Petterson's immediacy with place and character. Without having gotten too far in his novel--I was struck by the elegaic tone in both novelists. I'm also, quite frankly, a sucker for opportunities to hear writers talk about process and their engagement with language and fiction. It isn't so much that I think I'm going to hear something new under the sun so much as hearing the particular way a writer reckons with the act of rendering imagination and language. The panel was well moderated by Radhika Jones (managing editor of the Paris Review) My expectations were satisfied entirely because both Petterson and Robinson were thoughtful and open in their discussion and there was plenty of overlap and difference in their approach.An initial difference concerned each of their expectations about "becoming a writer". Robinson had never planned on publishing--in fact, Housekeeping had been sent off to an agent without her knowledge. Petterson had set out determined to write--and says he would have been pretty miserable if it had not ever been achieved.
The importance of finding a controlling voice, a language of character,, is essential for both writers ( who both work in first person). Both spoke about letting character find the narrative, rather than any prior "idea" about plot. In Housekeeping the vision, Robinson said, is implied in Ruth's voice. I thought Petterson's description of finding the voice of his current novel (which alternates between a present and an earlier story) through looking at two separate pieces he'd written and experimenting and juxtaposing them was a wonderful demonstration of the kind of play and possibility that a novel can have in its inception. Robinson spoke about the minister's voice (Gilead) emerging out of reading she'd done on the midwest--reading that had not been done as preparation for a novel but for her pleasure and appetite for knowing. As someone who has reveled in the congestion of feeling, thinking and imagery in Robinson's work, I could have listened to Robinson speak for quite a bit longer about language and metaphor. The achievement, she said, is when metaphor and event arise out of one thing.
This was a conversation between two writers I would have longed for my students to have heard- not simply because each was eloquent and thoughtful about the act of writing but because the afternoon had all of the gravitas of two writers for whom their art emerges out of necessity and a deep commitment to language. Inevitably a talk like this one drives us write back to an author's work. Lucky for me I'm only sixty pages into Out Stealing Horses and can stretch out into a bit longer. | | |
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3 Comments | Add a Comment |
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| 5-3-07 11:56PM: david winn said...
yes - certainly in other events video in evidence...If anyone knows about how to or whom to contact about web access to recorded video of any of the PEN world voices, pls email me at davidwinn00@earthlink.net..... thank you very much ... cheers D..
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| 5-1-07 12:48PM: victoria redel said...
I saw someone taping /video maybe....
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| 4-30-07 5:40PM: David R Winn said...
No Comment/no real comment, that is -
from the above blog, this event sounds like it was wonderful and worthy of a do-over - so, rather, Queries:
Was this event recorded?
Is there a way to access such, if so?
so VR Thank You so much for a thought-full summary/observe.
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