Steering away from 'the store bought'

COEUR d'ALENE - The Idaho Humanities Council explains the humanities are "a vehicle to understanding the human experience" and on Friday evening, writer Anthony Doerr illustrated just what that means.

Doerr, winner of some of the most notable awards bestowed on writers, was the speaker at the Idaho Humanities Council's annual Distinguished Humanities Lecture and Dinner at The Coeur d'Alene Resort.

Doerr provided vivid descriptions of several events from his own life. Using uniquely potent phrases to create powerful images, Doerr's words tied the imagery to thoughts, feelings and insights that emerged from the experiences.

In a story about growing up with a mom who shunned anything store-bought, Doerr shared the bittersweet experience he had when he made a knight's costume for himself using foil and a wrapping paper tube for a sword.

"When Halloween night came and I put on my suit of poster board armor, I could barely walk or see," Doerr said. "If I had been able to see myself from the outside, I would have seen a child executioner in ski gloves, with a paper trashcan on his head, a wilting black poster in one hand, and a giant silver phallus in the other. I was 7, uninterested in mirrors, and in my mind, I was cloaked in armor. I was invincible. I was the black knight."

Doerr spoke about the challenge of writing original, creative sentences, and why it's so important to avoid cliches, commonly used groupings of words that are so familiar, that they have become almost meaningless.

"Cliches deaden our experience of language and they obscure our ability to pay attention to our lives," he said.

It's easier, Doerr said, to use a cliche like "stumbling block" or "chills ran up my spine," than expend the energy it takes to write something original that engages the brain and puts the reader into a willing state of "suspended disbelief."

Cliches are comfortable and conventional, Doerr said, like habits.

"I've come to believe that while habits are imperative and necessary, habits also need to be shaken up ... we should also make an effort every now and then to break up the cliches in our lives," Doerr said. "This, I believe is the fundamental role of the humanities."

The humanities disciplines - art, philosophy, photography, opera, literature, architecture - when done well should present the familiar world in an unfamiliar way, he said.

"They should steer us away from the expected, the familiar, and to borrow my mother's phrase, 'the store-bought,'" Doerr said.

Doerr lives in Boise.

The list of awards his work has received includes four O. Henry Prizes, the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, three Ohioana Book Awards.

His most recent story collection is "Memory Wall," which earned Doerr the 2010 Story Prize. One of the pieces featured in "Memory Wall" won the 2011 London Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, considered the largest prize in the world for a single short story.