HOMETOWN WRITERS MISS THE BOAT?

Hometown writers miss the boat when they think everything’s been said about where they grew up.

Then, to save their careers the turn their focus to their hometown.

More like they use a sense of home to lure readers in.

Like Thomas Wolfe.

He wrote a book about his hometown. The people complained about being portrayed in such a poor fashion.

Then he wrote another and they complained about being left out.

Can you really have it both ways?

If you live in a complaining culture where everything needs a good rag-job you can have it any way you want.

Clyde Edgerton is not banned from Thomas Wolfe’s porch.

From The News and Observer:

As a novelist, Clyde Edgerton is best-known for his loving and satirical take on the North Carolina backwoods, novels that get celebrated from Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books to the pages of The New York Times. He teaches creative writing at UNC-Wilmington, a star professor with an armful of awards.

But Edgerton, 72, is also a parent in real life. Two of his three children attend Forest Hills Elementary in Wilmington, and if matters go unchanged, he will not be allowed on campus to watch graduation next week without permission from the principal. As it stands, Edgerton is banned from all public schools in New Hanover County.

Bet on Clyde Edgerton.

What do I know about Edgerton? Nothing except for the chair on the porch of Wolfe’s hometown writers.

And there’s a bunch of them.

Oregon’s Hometown Writers

The Wild Birds on Goodreads.com:

Emily Strelow’s mesmerizing debut stitches together a sprawling saga of the feral Northwest across farmlands and deserts and generations: an American mosaic alive with birdsong and gunsmoke, held together by a silver box of eggshells—a long-ago gift from a mother to her daughter. Written with grace, grit, and an acute knowledge of how the past insists upon itself, The Wild Birds is a radiant and human story about the shelters we find and make along our crooked paths home.

Emily Strelow’s book comes in at #1, but #2 is my personal #1.

Why is Ken Kesey’s ‘Sometimes A Great Notion’ particularly appealing? I grew up in a small Oregon town with loggers and mills and the stuff of legend that Kesey captures.

Is Kesey Oregon’s version of Thomas Wolfe?

When an author has a movie done of their work that is up for Official Film Of Oregon, they might have something going on.

Even better is the feud Kesey had with the movie version of his work.

Did Wolfe have any movies of his work done?

Does North Carolina have a state movie?

This is Oregon’s only Pulitzer for fiction.

The New Oregon Story

These are novels with an Oregon setting.

Some are famous, some have famous authors, but something’s missing.

A new Oregon story:

This is the coming of age story of a lost boy on the Oregon coast looking for meaning in his small town.

Raised in a sports family Woody isn’t as good at football, basketball, or baseball as his gifted brothers.

On the verge of quitting altogether, school and sports, he finds a dank basement room in the old gym. Other high school boys grunt and groan their way to learning how to wrestle.

He joins in and learns the details of the hardest sport ever invented.

With renewed confidence he engages in every hard task he can find from cutting firewood, digging clams, and odd jobs his dad finds for him during school breaks.

With college a new possibility Woody instead joins the Army. He finds the hardships minor compared to where he grew up.

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He is recommended for advanced training with the end result being assigned to an elite team monitoring arms deals in Europe.

But the team is disbanded and he is shuttled off to a backwater clinic for the rest of his enlistment.

There he meets an ROTC candidate who is actually an undercover recruiter for a secretive government agency.

Woody meets the people, who are former team members monitoring arms deals in Europe.

They are professionals at making people disappear and he trains with them until he’s offered an assignment that brings him back to Oregon.

A super weapon is being built that uses special metals designed in a secret program at Teledyne Way Chang to hide the residue from the process.

Woody sneaks into the facility to discover the metal has just been shipped. He follows clues up I-5 to Portland where he learns the super weapon is being built undercover for a hostile government.

He missed connections and follows the glowing trail to Europe where he comes face to face with the uncomfortable truth of collusion between U.S. arms manufacture, America’s enemies, and how they work together for greater profits.

Do you have an Oregon Story?

Let’s hear it.