Read enough about Alexie, Raban, Guterson, and Robbins? Beyond
the usual suspects, the Northwest has a diverse array of authors
working in all quarters and genres.
A Shoreline boy who moved to New York for college and film school, Garth Stein
returned home 18 years later with wife and kids two days before 9/11. Talk about
good timing. The 2001 move also marked a transition out of film and into print for
Stein, who'd spent many difficult Manhattan years working in documentaries. On
the side, "I wanted to be a screenwriter," he explains, yet what was supposed to
be his breakthrough script instead became his breakthrough novel, 1999's Raven
Stole the Moon, a family mourning road-trip saga set partly in Seattle and partly
in Alaska, where Stein has relatives.
Wasn't that an odd jump from nonfiction filmmaking to novel writing? "It's all
about storytelling," says Stein. "I learned how to construct a story through
documentaries." Thus a new career was born, "without realizing how difficult it
would be to write the second novel." In New York, his first draft needed rewriting,
he remembers, and "two months turned into two and one half years." Recently
named a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association prize winner, How Evan
Broke His Head and Other Secrets finally reached print in 2005, earning
generally favorable reviews for its tale of surprise fatherhood, epilepsy, and
charting a music career. (It's new in paperback from SoHo Press, $13.)
And, during that arduous process, Stein even wrote his first play, Brother Jones,
produced last year in Los Angeles. Now also working as a consultant in primary
education, he likes Seattle's small and collegial literary community. "In New York,
there are no local writers. You're either a big fish or you're chum. I have a feeling
that what I'm doing is part of a Northwest school." At present, he's working on
two books, one related from a dog's perspective. Instead of young hotshots being
propelled to literary stardom in McSweeney's, he sees more of a low-key
craftsmanlike approach to writing here—even if that means accompanying a
friend and fellow author on the ferry to a reading at Eagle Harbor Books on
Bainbridge Island. In a crowd of a half-dozen, a friendly face counts.
BRIAN MILLER