Doerr to speak at humanities council event
Award-winning fiction writer Anthony Doerr said he's looking forward to visiting Coeur d'Alene next month. Doerr, of Boise, is headed north to speak at the Idaho Humanities Council's Distinguished Humanities Lecture and Dinner.
The event starts at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 12, at The Coeur d'Alene Resort, and tickets are available.
"A lot of my work is about resisting cliches. The literature I care about helps me wake up and keeps me from sleepwalking through life," Doerr said. "My favorite stories are the ones that allow me to become somebody else."
It's the commonality of the human experience that makes it possible for a reader to slip into another time, place and culture, he said, whether it's by reading Melville's writing about whaling in the 18th century or a book about a boy flying a kite in Afghanistan. Doerr will likely touch on this concept when he speaks at the October banquet.
He considers it an honor to be joining the ranks of historians, journalists and fiction authors who have spoken previously at the state humanities council's annual North Idaho event.
Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War historian James McPherson, National Book Award winner Timothy Egan, news analyst Juan Williams, detective novelist Sara Paretsky, and western writer Ivan Doig are among recent years' lecturers.
"Some of the people in this series are on my shelves," Doerr said. "I'm flattered that they would select a younger writer, and I'm from Boise, so it's not too far." Doerr, at 38, is no literary lightweight himself. The list of awards his work has garnered is long and 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.
"Memory Wall" is a "suite of stories about memory, particularly about how we age," he said. Much of it stems from Doerr's own experiences as he watched his mother care for his grandmother as the older woman descended into Alzheimer's disease.
"It's about people struggling with the fallability and evanescence of memory," Doerr said. It is also about the realization that memory can be wiped away.
Doerr said he loves to travel, and with a collection of short stories, he feels he has the chance to carry a reader to many different locales.
The collection includes a story about a Holocaust survivor, one about a widow in South Africa, and the tale of a U.S. teen living in Lithuania. Another "Memory Wall" piece features the Three Gorges dam project in China, where thousands of villages became nothing but memories when they were flooded to create the dam.
The stories "move to a rhythm that suggests something pulsing under their calm surfaces, the steady breaking of old blood, old memories, the oldest waves of human feeling," wrote Terrence Rafferty, in a 2010 New York Times Book Review of "Memory Wall."
Doerr was born in Ohio.
"I fell in love in college with an Idaho girl," he said.
He attended Bowdoin College in Maine. After graduate school, his wife was hired by a Boise firm.
"Boise was much prettier than where I was," Doerr said.
He lives in Idaho's capitol city with his wife and twin sons, Henry and Owen, who are third-graders.
Doerr was Idaho's Writer-in-Residence from 2007 to 2010. He teaches writing at Boise State and at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina.
Tickets for the Coeur d'Alene dinner and lecture are $45 and can be purchased online at the Idaho Humanities Council website, www.idahohumanities.org, or by phone, (888) 345-5346.