130206_Meet_Kent_Haruf(9m 7s)

ladies and gentlemen, our guest of honor tonight is mr.

kent

harris mr. Harris is the author of Plainsong, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Mountain and Plains Booksellers Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Maria Thomas Prize for Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. New Yorker. His novel The Tie That Bindes received a whiting. Foundation Award and a special mention from the Pen Hemingway Foundation in 2006 he received the Dos Passos Prize for Literature. I think we were all very excited to also find out that mr. Harris was born in Pueblo.

Tonight he is joined by his lovely wife Kathy. Please, People, join me in welcoming Mr. Kent Arif to our PCC LED stage over a period of six years and during that time a lot of things happened to me, including a divorce and a marriage, so it took a lot of time. I'm a slow rider anyway. He had a very deliberate intention. When writing that one, the two previous books I had written were written in first person and there was a narrator telling the story and in most cases the narrator was on the edge of those stories, kind of like the narrator in The Great Gatsby , but When it came time to write Flames during my career, I wanted to switch to the third person and write it in an absolutely simple, hopefully clear and direct way, if I had a lyrical ability like an aging James or William Faulkner for us and I could have done it.

I wrote more lyrics, but for me it was important to try to be as clear and direct as possible and also because it's in the third person, which allowed me to write a book externally to try to present the actors in an external way and my belief. is that if I do it well enough that you don't end up listening and you know them well enough to care about them and you can be the judge of whether that's successful or not, that was certainly my intention. I mentioned it. I write in an old 500 manual. I started writing that way and then the second novel I wrote I wrote on a computer, by then computers had already started to be used and they never liked that, I mean, obviously, the sound of the keys, I missed the tactile feel of the paper I have a special affection for all the yellow paper on which those favorite reporters wrote their coffee I can't find it anymore but I have several reams and I think I have enough to finish my career as a writer, when I returned to writing plainchant I knew I didn't want to do what I had done before and I also didn't want to be held back from having to write the perfect phrase if you found yourself in that particular situation. those sentences you put together are good enough, even someone like Shakespeare sounds amateurish or maudlin if your mind is in that state, so instead of letting myself be held back by my diction or syntax or word choice or grammar or spelling or punctuation or any of those things I decided to write blindly and what I mean by that is that I wrote that book and the two books that I have written feeling with my eyes closed and then I write on the typewriter and on a single single-spaced page in Maybe I don't I got up from 500 until I wrote that scene on a single page, in a single city and the idea was to try to write something spontaneous and natural without being stopped by the things I mentioned.

People have been amused by the fact. I sometimes covered my eyes with a stocking cap to make sure I didn't know my eyes, but I've done it often enough and I no longer use a thought we have much. I would be interested to know a little about the character names of some of them in simple songs. The McFerrin Brothers are named after my uncle Paul and that LC, my friend who used to live there. They are both crazy. Now they generally move to nearby eastern Colorado. the small town of Fleming my lady east of Sterling and my uncle Palmer Fern was weaker than a man, I admire them in his wife and Elsie was my father's youngest sister, she was the last of my father's 13 children and she often grew on a farm. in North Dakota, very far from the school, so they had their own school teacher who lived like a family and my father wanted to get an education, so he often went to Dickinson, North Dakota, to see the high school and work until high school and everything. that and in any case my Aunt Elsie was very dear to me so when it came time to name the two brothers I didn't want them to be given a name that meant anything to me so I named them affarin and after the book was published.

I sent a copy to Uncle Fall on That Elsie and about two weeks later I got a letter from Aunt Elsie and she said, "Well, we finished the book, it wasn't what we expected, but then she said, but it was good anyway." . So I appreciated it and took that of some kind of thoughtful man, Victoria Rupert, about the young woman. Her name. Her last name comes from my family history and my mother's side in South Dakota. Her father was the head rancher at a wheat producer. and he rented land to a woman whose last name was Reuben or that of an Indian woman from the Rosebud reservation and so in that name roubideaux has been in our family history for a long time and again I wanted to use the name that had some meaning to me , at least privately, we two little boys are kind of like my brother Mark and I, we had a paper route when we lived in the MERIS towns in that incident with the barber where he humiliates the sooner the team gets out of our experience and that It's my revenge.

Barbara in the old lady. Starns, which is up in the mainstream, that wasn't her name and I don't remember the woman's name, but there were several old ladies who lived all along Main Street and my brother and I were never favorites in these long dark hallways for people. de They and everyone always found it a little scary to us and our agents going into those dark apartments, but I had a great affection for Ms. Stone and then she came out of my experience, okay, thank you, the question is what Writers influenced me in the development of my writing and I must quickly say that I learned very slowly.

I have been practicing for almost 25 years. and I went to the Writers Workshop in Iowa when I was 30 and studied writing formally, but I still didn't publish anything until I was 41, so I spent that time trying to learn my craft and with the writers I read more closely instead of do it, where the great players of the century of American fiction writers William Faulkner and he sympathetically I still read them almost every day, when I sit down to rock, I write a little in a journal and then I read something I've read 50 times before and I simply try to get my mind to think about prayers and not about nails or my children or whatever, and that's why I often go back almost every day to read something by The Father, the writer who wants to tell me in my recent life He is the Russian writer Chekhov and if you know he is writing, then you will know, so he writes simply and directly and makes tragedy from short realities.

He is an amazing writer and to me now I would say he was one of the best fiction writers of all time, so those miners are people I haven't learned from and still hope to. I thank you again for coming tonight and supporting this library and supporting this program. It is a great honor for Kathy and I to be here and again we congratulate you on this wonderful honor, thank you.