Driftless (57 page)

I’ve been writing since about the age of fourteen. Somewhere around that time I discovered that herding words into stories often gave rise to strangely satisfying states of mind—agitated, but satisfying. Maybe I was a little like a herding dog. That first glimpse of a pasture with bunched-together sheep had a different effect upon me than, say, a companion dog that looks at the same pasture and thinks, “Sheep, who cares?” As individuals we seek out activities we can lose ourselves in, and those activities, paradoxically, reveal things we couldn’t otherwise know about ourselves.

Driftless
was my first
published
work in thirty years. I resumed writing within three or four years after the accident, but the results were dismal. I think serious physical injuries necessarily involve a hornet’s nest of psychological problems and at least for me it was hard to begin again where I’d left off. All my equilibriums were disturbed. I didn’t know myself any more, unconnected to the embroidered chain of memories and relationships that had earlier defined me. The activity of writing helped me work through this disjunction, though the end product of much of that work remained too dark and dimly focused for general consumption.

For me, rural life offers ample qualities of space. Wherever you look are unbounded areas of tumultuous nature, set against ever-expanding vistas of sky. In fiction, this vast roominess offers the psychological space needed for characters to explore their feelings, motivations, and sorrows, lending a depth that might not otherwise be available. As noted in the old fables of the country mouse and city mouse, the city has many wonderful and exciting things to offer, but for nurture, healing, and careful thought, the country is the place to be.

Characters serve as receptacles for our own projected feelings and through characters we imaginatively encounter parts of ourselves. Characters teach us to loosen up, not take ourselves so seriously, see other points of view, and have fun. At their best, characters shine a light into otherwise dark areas—places we can’t, or won’t, go on our own. They help us explore our interior world. When I found July Montgomery, he immediately wanted to take me to places I was afraid of going. But his spirit was so courageous and resilient that I was willing to go along.

The untimely death of a friend/neighbor provided the original impetus for the story. At his funeral I understood that I knew only a small part of him. The completed picture of my friend was held compositely among all those who knew him. This presented me with a new way of looking at personal identity, at who we are or think we are, and it was this more dynamic idea of collective interaction giving rise to the qualities of personal identity that I wanted to attempt to present in the book.

For me, there are three interconnected elements of a story. The first is a sense of place—in this case the Driftless Region of Wisconsin. The place limits the kinds of characters that can effectively be imagined living there, their ways of life, and to some extent their personalities. Once a group of characters have volunteered to live in a fictional setting, the plot or action of the story comes out of them. Certain characters will only do certain things. So place gives rise to character, which in turn gives rise to action. I waited for my characters to tell me what they would and would not do. After I had a general idea for what would happen, I began the long process of refining the individual voices and stories to lead in a certain direction, toward a particular feeling I wanted to develop. This took the longest time and is more difficult to talk about coherently.

I’m probably influenced by everyone I read, and I read incessantly. As a young writer I remember most wanting to learn how William Faulkner could speak for a whole family or community. His narrative voice was not an individual point of view, but rather a cultural force. Later, I came to appreciate Charles Dickens’ unique abilities of characterization. All his social commentary and criticism took a second seat to his joy of human portraits, and he depicted the universal qualities of men and women through eccentric characterization. More recently I’ve been impressed with Louise Erdrich’s ability to endow certain specific physical objects in her fiction, like a painted drum or violin, with such phantasmagoric histories that the objects themselves take on living, spiritual dimensions. I don’t think I know of anyone else who takes such pains to do this.