“Ghosts in the trees.”
Last Thursday, that was the first sentence read aloud from “Day of All Saints,” the subject of EMU’s latest “Writers Read.” It is a novel written by Patricia Grace King, who was hosted in Common Grounds Coffeehouse for the event on Feb. 22, where members of the school as well as the community congregated to listen.
King is an alumna of EMU and has worked here in the past. Her various stories have been published by Plowshares, The Gettysburg Review, Narrative Magazine, Nimrod, and other journals. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College’s Program for Writers and a Ph.D. from Emory University, and she was a Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.
King gave very little introduction before beginning the reading of her book, which portrays the experience of a young Guatemalan man named Martín, a survivor of his country’s civil war. “Day of All Saints” explores the effects of historical trauma on Martín as an individual, but it takes place on a Halloween afternoon in the city of Chicago, where Martín has followed his American fiancée. The author read the first scene of this novella before allowing questions from audience members. Topics discussed by King and the audience ranged from the revision process to teaching, yoga, and more.
King gave a great deal of advice for aspiring fiction writers. She affirmed that there is value in allowing oneself to write a “horrifically bad” first draft, focusing on the big-picture ideas of a book rather than its linguistic detail. “I think a lot of us who start writing fiction or poetry do so because we love beautiful language. [We’re] attracted to description and lyricism and the fun of putting together a sentence that just sings,” King mused. “I’ve learned that I don’t really get to that level of writing until almost the end now. I’m just trying to say, ‘What’s the story?’ or ‘Who is this person?’”
First-year student Christian Stutzman’s comment on this was that it is okay to take a break from content to have a fresh outlook at another time. “Leave your stuff to sit for a while, come back to it a little later,” he said.
After a round of questions, King gave an encore reading at the audience’s request. Following a reading of the book’s second scene, King answered a few more questions, one of which asked whether she had a specific agenda to convey a particular theme. “In this case, I definitely was thinking about the pain of the stories that I heard for years at Witness for Peace of people who had survived the civil war there in Guatemala, and I want that to come through and I want people to be affected by it. There was something about those stories that I wanted to put back out into the world,” King replied, referring back to her several years spent in Guatemala, which is the setting for much of her writing.
Finally, King addressed the connection between a writer’s content and life experiences. “I’m lucky that I’ve had experience in another culture. It’s given me a wider pool of experiences to pull from, and I hope I keep having those experiences,” King said. “But anyone who’s lived through their childhood has material enough to be a writer,” she added, quoting Flannery O’Connor.
First-year student Jonathan Nielsen particularly appreciated this advice. “It emboldens me to just start writing something. I survived my childhood, and it was a heck of one at that,” he said.
Nielsen was not the only young audience member impressed by King. “I thought she was lively, and her novella seems interesting… I gotta buy it now,” said first-year Anna Cahill.
