This article, written by David Jasper, originally appeared in The Bulletin, a newspaper based out of Bend, Oregon, on April 2, 2006.
Writing stories the color of Oregon
Former resident releases collection of short tales
"You start to see it ... as mystical," says author Benjamin Percy, waxing reminiscent about the High Desert , which has haunted his memory and fed his fiction since he left Tumalo almost a decade ago.
"Somehow, fairy dust gets sprinkled over memory," the 27-year-old continues by phone from Milwaukee , where, for now, he teaches at Marquette University . He sounds every bit the writing and composition professor: "There you are, living in this city ... clogged with concrete and glowing with neon lights and it smells of bus exhaust, (and) you're remembering the sweet smell of sage and the way the sun looks setting over the Cascade mountains ."
He calls Central Oregon nothing less than his muse, and it's the choice of setting, and more, in much of his work.
"I want to carve out a place for myself there just like - this is a lofty ambition, I know - but like Hawthorne did in New England or Faulkner did in the South," Percy says. "I'm interested in representing the West like Kesey did in 'Sometimes a Great Notion,' where place becomes a character in itself, a thing of violence and wonder and healing."
That's evident in his just-published debut collection of stories, "The Language of Elk." For the next few months, the paperback is available for $16.95 through Carnegie Mellon University Press, www.cmu.edu/universitypress. It will become available more widely this summer, timed for release in conjunction with magazine reviews.
In the book, Percy describes the dry side of the Cascades, where "the wind blows in heated gusts, like the breath of a big animal." In the story "Winter's Trappings," he writes about "a stretch of highway, just outside Sisters, where semis ... came rumbling down from the Cascade Mountains , a long steep descent, and slammed into deer, dragging them sometimes 30 feet, tearing them open."
The book's opening tale, "Unearthed," tells about a father who struggles with the suicide of his wife. He's on a downward spiral witnessed by his confused young son, whose own grief is all the more tragic because of his dad's erosion. Their house is "full of dead things."
Percy says that, as a child, he spent a lot of time traveling with his parents, turning over rocks in Eastern Oregon , digging up thunder eggs and petrified wood. There are other autobiographical elements in his stories, and his real-life friends should not be surprised to find themselves sometimes mentioned by name in his stories.
"I think (in) all fiction ... there are elements of the author's life, and over the top, a healthy serving of imagination," he says. "That's certainly the case with my work."
Percy was born in Eugene and lived for a short time in Hawaii . His family moved to Tumalo when he was in fourth grade. As a kid, he "was always obsessed with stories, with movies, with books, but never thought I would become a writer. I, in a way, fought it."
Trish King was his eighth grade English teacher at Sunriver Preparatory School , a Bend private school that closed in 2003. The mother of his best friend and a mentor to Percy, King remembers him as an avid reader with a fascination with words. King now works at The Island School, located on Bainbridge Island in Washington , but keeps tabs on Percy through his parents, who now live in Portland.
"He's come a long way since eighth grade, I'll tell ya," she says, laughing. "His sense of how to draw a character and how to make language come alive on the page has evolved into something rather amazing."
Percy says he "didn't think of English, as much as I loved it, as a practical route through life. So for the longest time, I thought I was going to go into archaeology."
When he was a high school student at Sunriver Prep, he spent a summer scouting and mapping out rock art sites around Oregon as an intern with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.
Another summer, this time through a University of Oregon course, he helped excavate a Paiute village site in Christmas Valley . Slowly, grudgingly, Percy began to concede that archaeology was not the romantic stuff of Indiana Jones. "There were no Nazis, no rolling boulders or snakes or beautiful women to rescue. It was just dirt," he says. "The highlight of the day was finding a bone chip." Still, as a freshman at Brown University in Rhode Island in 1997, he studied archaeology and anthropology, and later geology - "another stumble along the way," he calls it.
But during another summer job, at a hotel in Montana 's Glacier National Park , Percy met Lisa, now his wife and mother of their newborn son. "I was given a wake-up call (by her) to pursue fiction, and I'm grateful for that. I listened," he says.
His wife might want to go into career counseling: In March, "Refresh, Refresh," a Percy story that ran in The Paris Review, was selected for "Best American Short Stories 2006," by this year's editor, best-selling author Ann Patchett. The series has been sponsored by Houghton Mifflin since 1915; Percy's tale (which is not in "The Language of Elk") was among 20 Patchett selected from American magazines and journals. It's an achievement that puts him in such company as John Updike and Michael Chabon.
"I'm feeling unworthy and out of my league. But I'm damn excited," he says. "It was sort of a coup I never expected. Total surprise. I keep waiting for Ann Patchett to call and revoke my entry into the anthology.
"It's a major affirmation. Writing is sort of like howling in the middle of a cornfield. Every once in a while somebody wanders into the corn and says, 'I heard you.' This is one of those times I feel like I've been heard."
And to think his budding career got its start through "all the tawdry love letters I was writing (Lisa), and bodice-ripping poems," he says.
Upon graduating from Brown, he immediately enrolled at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale , Ill. , where he studied and earned his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing under the guidance of author Brady Udall ("Letting Loose the Hounds," "The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint").
Around the summer of 2002, Percy began what he calls a "carpet bombing" campaign, submitting his short stories 20 at a time to various literary journals and magazines. Needless to say, it worked. He also won literary contests put on by The Chicago Tribune and Idaho Review.
His choice of setting may have helped his work avoid the slush piles at many publications. Editors, particularly those on the East Coast, "seem to view Oregon as an exotic setting," he says. "It's sort of a still-wild place. There are these pockets of the frontier that still exist there."
Percy recently completed his first novel. He says writing it was "marathonic" compared to the sprint of short stories, which the former high school sprinter finds he prefers.
He adds that the academic world is very accommodating of his writing schedule, even if his new son is not. Acting on the suggestion of an author friend who is also relatively new to fatherhood, Percy is taking a couple of months off from writing. He then plans to complete the last story for another in-progress collection. Meanwhile, Percy's time as a visiting assistant professor at Marquette University is winding down. He has the option of staying another year, but he's on the market now. Getting selected for "Best American Short Stories" will help him "in the academic hunt."
He would love to teach at a school in the West. The trouble is, he says, thousands of other applicants would also like to land on the left coast. He doesn't make it back to this area often - visits with his parents now center on Portland - and he has no immediate plans to promote his first collection here. However, "I feel like no matter where I am, Oregon remains inside," he says. "My soul remains there. It remains my muse."
King, his former teacher, says that Percy reminds her of no other writer. "I think he's found something pretty unique, in terms of his writing style, he's got a voice that's really his own. There are times when I read him and there are pieces that smack of Southern writing, because he gets so deeply into small-town characters. He's able, I think, to bring their voices alive."
In his work, Percy is "concerned with the West as a mythic territory," he says. "I think I'm writing about it with a mythic voice. My stories are about bigfoot and bearded ladies, horse ranches, marijuana colonies and elk-hunting resorts. And I'm writing about all these things with a salty, mystical voice (that) I hope partners the material and the landscape."
And if the mountains and desert of Central Oregon are going to become a presence known in the literary world, Percy says he wants to be there.
"No more than 200 works of fiction have emerged from Oregon 's woods. It's a literary canon coming of age. And I'm very interested in putting my graffiti on the bathroom wall."
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