Author Julie Gilbert Discusses the Writing of Her New Book ‘Giant Love’
Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
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I first met Robert Olmstead in January 1987. He was the teacher of my introductory fiction workshop at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Back then you were allowed to smoke cigarettes in class, and if you were a person like me, you not only smoked cigarettes in class, you chain-smoked cigarettes in class. I should explain what it meant to be a “person like me”: a person like me was a person who tried too hard. And I was the worst kind of person who tried too hard: I was the kind of person who didn’t know what person I was trying too hard to be, and so I tried too hard to be a lot of them. And one of the people I tried too hard to be was Robert Olmstead. At that point, Olmstead had written two books—the short story collection River Dogs and the novel Soft Water —and soon after he would publish his novel A Trail of Heart’s Blood Wherever We Go . These three books were, and, as far as I’m concerned, still are, among the very best fiction to come out of northern New England: they are tough, wise, terse; they are violent of deed and lovely of phrase. They are, like the winters in Olmstead’s native New Hampshire, fearsome. As was Olmstead himself: with his big red beard and his flannel and his taciturnity, he seemed to me the quintessential northern American writer. Which is to say, he was what I wanted to see, and what I wanted to be. Which is to say, I wanted to be authentic, just like Olmstead. I was the kind of person who didn’t know what person I was trying too hard to be, and so I tried too hard to be a lot of them. As everyone knows—well, apparently not everyone —you cannot try to be authentic. I mean, you can try, but you will fail. And when you fail, if you are the kind of person I was, you will blame not yourself; instead, you will blame the person you were trying to be. […]
Click here to view original page at Exposing Vulnerability: On Robert Olmstead’s Stay Here with Me
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Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
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