About Ron Carlson

At fifty-eight, Ron Carlson is gray-haired, large-boned, one of those men who at six-foot-something is big without being imposing. He could pass for a park ranger at the Grand Canyon, or your local TV anchor, or maybe a third-base coach in the majors, and he seems solid and grounded in ways that go with those professions. But when the conversation turns to his writing, particularly if he's been writing well, he seems lighter, younger than his years.

"I'm in one of the most productive periods of my life right now," he said recently. "For now, anyway, I let go of one trapeze, and somehow there's the next. There are days when I'm as eager to get to the writing as I was thirty years ago. I picked the right career."

By anyone's definition, it has been a very fruitful career. Carlson is the author of four novels, Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Truants, The Speed of Light, and Five Skies, forthcoming from Viking in May 2007. He has four collections of short stories, News of the World, Plan B for the Middle Class, The Hotel Eden, and At the Jim Bridger, as well as A Kind of Flying, which puts in one volume many of his signature stories from the first three collections.

Born in 1947, Carlson grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. Living in this heavily Mormon community, he and his family were drawn closer together than they might have been otherwise. His happened to be a family of storytellers. Both his mother and father were from South Dakota farming families where trading anecdotes was second nature, particularly at the end of the day around the dinner table.

Stories were the currency of the realm as he grew up, and he found in high school and college that literature and writing courses came easier to him than anything else. He majored in English, receiving his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Utah.

In the early 1970's he joined the faculty of the Hotchkiss School, a prep school in Lakeville, Connecticut, where he would remain for nearly a decade. He entered a world where one's teaching was one's life, and one's life was one's teaching. And there, alas, was the rub, for no matter how much he might have loved teaching literature in a classroom, and love it he did, Carlson's greatest ambition was to be a writer himself.

His master's thesis was a collection of short stories, The Larry Stories, most written in the voice of one character, Larry Boosinger, Carlson's surrogate, someone learning about life everything that schools had neglected to teach. Carlson found in these stories the makings of a first novel, Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald. He worked late at night and over the weekends, anytime he could manage, anywhere, not fully certain he knew what he was doing, for little in his training had prepared him for writing novels. Finally he sent it off blind to Carol Houck Smith, a senior editor at W.W. Norton, a name and address he got from a book in the library. Norton published the rite-of-passage novel in 1977, beginning a professional relationship that would last the next twenty-five years.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch called Carlson "an imaginative young writer in the bud." The Library Journal deemed him "a splendid storyteller." Francine du Plessix Gray compared Carlson to "an early Evelyn Waugh."

Carlson took a sabbatical from Hotchkiss and set to work on a second novel, this time with an outline, a plan, a real plan, a writer's plan: a road novel about two men, one young and one old. Unexpectedly, a third protagonist came onstage as he drafted, a young girl fleeing a carnival and her daredevil father. Soon, what had begun as a book about a boy running away from a juvenile detention center and an old man fleeing a nursing home became Truants, a novel about a trio of misfits discovering who they are by learning to trust and love one another.

"Sometimes you have to get out of the way of your own writing," Carlson recalls. "I was lucky to learn that when I did. I meant for Louisa to be a minor character, but I couldn't get her out the door, she wouldn't leave. That's what happens sometimes. There's only one thing to do, just get out of their way. They'll knock your socks off if you let them. Seriously. Give them some room. Just get out of their way, and go look for your socks."

Carlson left Hotchkiss upon the publication of Truants in 1981 and returned to Salt Lake, intending to devote his full-time attention to writing a third novel. The novel stalled. Carlson did what he continues to do today when things aren't going his way: he put his head down and kept working-memories, shopping lists, anything to make him stay in the chair and keep writing. Stories emerged eventually, most set in the neighborhoods he knew best, the west side of Salt Lake. Many of these stories found highly desirable homes, TriQuarterly, McCall's, Harper's, and his work began to be cited regularly in best-of anthologies.

It had been a long time since we had seen stories with such happy endings as the ones Carlson wrote in this transitional period of his life. America was regaining its footing after Vietnam, Watergate, Billy Carter, trickle-down economics, and the Reagan Western White House. Certainly it was a good era for Robert Stone, Raymond Carver, and Richard Ford. But for this? Here were couples in love, relationships that actually worked, homes you might like to come home to, good places to raise a few kids, neighborhoods with trees. Particularly in stories such as "Milk," "The H Street Sledding Record," "Blood," and "Life Before Science," Carlson seemed to be rubbing our faces in the riches before us, shaming us for our savvy. Here was everything that mattered, ours for the taking.

When these were collected with others and published in 1988 as News of the World, an appreciative Washington Post praised Carlson for evoking "the kinds of love and longing that never really go out of style."

By this point, Carlson was teaching again. With their two young sons, Nick and Colin, both still in diapers, the Carlsons left Salt Lake to come to a Phoenix suburb, Tempe, Arizona, where he joined the faculty of Arizona State University in 1986, soon to chair its new M.F.A. program in creative writing. In short order he became one of the most admired teachers on the campus and one of its most effective administrators, rising rapidly through the ranks and eventually having bestowed on him the university's highest honor in 2002, the rank of Regents Professor.

It was a good move all-around. Carlson found in working with students just the complement he needed to hone his writing skills. He wasn't about to accept that universities were where writers went to disappear. "We loved our time at Hotchkiss," he says, "we really did. We made friends for life there, we're all still in touch. Hotchkiss, the place in Salt Lake. I drive past that house now, and I think, Who were those wonderful youngsters, what could they have been thinking, how did they do it? Those were sweet, sweet days, they really were, but there was no way to catch our breath, ever. There wasn't time. So when the job at ASU became available, we went for it. Which was the right thing to do. It was as if we'd been swimming the length of a pool underwater, and here was a chance to surface. Phoenix was perfect. There was so much sun and air."

In 1992 he published Plan B for the Middle Class, a collection that celebrated the pleasures he was finding in middle-class family life. Reviewers embraced his range, admired his capacity to be brazenly comic, spoke of the deft hand he employed with bizarre characters in unlikely situations. The New York Times selected it as one of the Best Books of the Year.

Several critics, however, noticed a "bittersweet" quality that wasn't to be found in News of the World, a difference Carlson himself acknowledged. His endings were no less happy. The protagonists of these stores were no less certain than his earlier characters that family life, if it's sustained, is the peach of all blessings. The difference was that the protagonists of these stories were grownups with families, and, as the book's title suggests, life was teaching them one of its most potent lessons. Time and again, we have to start over. It's always like starting from scratch. "I was already on Plan B—or was it Plan C?" says Lew, the narrator of "Plan B for the Middle Class." "What a deal. How could I not smile? What would stop me there, half in the ocean, from smiling? Plan B. A person could go through the alphabet. With a little gumption and love, a person could go through every single letter of the alphabet."

In that story and others such as "Blazo" and "DeRay," his protagonists discover a need for patience and courage in the face of disappointment, a kind of fortitude which was not called for in News of the World. And this was even more the case in his third collection, The Hotel Eden, published in 1997. While the first two collections were about the heart and all its frailties, here the title story and "The Prisoner of Bluestone" and "Oxygen" are about how easily the heart can fissure.

Hotel Eden was selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of the year, and his next collection, At the Jim Bridger, published in 2002, was selected as one of the best books of the year by The Los Angeles Times. In both collections we meet characters approaching middle life, drawing upon resources they are no longer certain they possess. Often someone's fate turns on a single moment, as happens to Donner, the protagonist of the title story, "At the Jim Bridger." He comes upon a barking dog in the bed of a pickup, and he knows what's about to happen before we do. He doesn't say it. He just knows: This is life. It's life as most of us live it. It's the only one we've got, so heartache is never a deal breaker. What you have to do now is get through it.

Carlson's volume of selected stories, A Kind of Flying, was published in 2003, and it allows a reader to see his most famous work in a larger context. There is particular pleasure to be had in revisiting the wonderful young couples of the early books, even if now there is something unsettling about these stories that wasn't there initially. A reader can see in the context of what Carlson has gone on to produce that his earliest characters were skating on thin ice, as only the young can skate.

For those who are coming to Ron Carlson's work for the first time, perhaps the novel The Speed of Light, also published in 2003, is the best place to begin. A summer of discovery in the lives of three close friends, Larry, Witt, and Rafferty, all twelve years old, The Speed of Light was marketed as a young adult novel, though it stands to be more fully appreciated by the rest of us; for there is not one theme to be found here, nor one dramatic situation, which is not also to be found somewhere else in Carlson's fiction. When Witt Dimmick says, "It's just the world; we can figure it out," he could be speaking for most of Carlson's protagonists. Just be certain Witt, like all the others, is about to learn his lesson. You never figure it out. Not once and for all. We are always starting over, moving in, then moving on.

This fall Carlson himself will be moving on, leaving Arizona State to take a position at the University of California at Irvine as director of its writing program in fiction. No doubt, other than location, not much will change in terms of Carlson's popularity as a teacher, administrator, and writer. "There are readers out there who have been loyal to me throughout my career. I hear from them sometimes," he says. "They've been wonderful. They make it seem like we've grown up together, moved around, raised our families, watched our kids leave home. Life can do things to you."

To illustrate this point to his students, once a semester in the classroom, he draws a cauldron on the blackboard with a fire under it, and then some people sitting inside. "The characters are tested by the events," he tells them, adding steam rising from the sketch, which without commentary would be hard to discern. But the lesson is easily taken: Carlson has been throwing his everyday characters into all kinds of hot water again and again to reveal how their hearts work, and while they start out so many times as "other people," they emerge strangely recognizable to us. He writes closely, and though his stories sometimes wander wildly, they end up close to home.

He generally begins a story a little higher than it is safe to be, high enough so you feel you might want to say something after a paragraph or two, but the view where you're headed is special, so you don't. It's a little like cutting class in high school and driving the streets and noticing that the houses and the streets look different in the daytime, or like when you see that pattern of houses and streets from a plane right after takeoff, only there's never any turbulence. Then before you know it the story has you in its lift, and it doesn't matter where his characters live, or what they are that you're not. You feel like Carlson has you floating up to where there's less need to get your bearings, and once he gets you high enough, you're glad you kept your mouth shut, because the story has figured out what you're only learning, that it all has to do with emotions and how honest you can be with yourself about what you feel.

And that's how he does it. That's when Carlson has you. From a certain precious altitude, all of his characters will be as familiar to you as your own reflection.

J. Boyer teaches in the creative writing program of Arizona State University.