Trip to Oviedo & Richard Ford ~ Donostia Book Club

My computer was attacked by a really malicious malware. I've lost all my files, all the e-books and all the posts I had ready for the blog... Some of the files I've recovered, some are lost forever. That means that the post and presentation about Harper Lee and “To Kill a Mockingbird” will be a bit late. Sorry for that. Meantime, I give you a long overdue post about Oviedo. With fewer photos than originally were planned, the rest was cruelly consumed by the gods of the internet....

On Oct. 18^th some of us had the opportunity to go to Oviedo and participate in a meeting with Richard Ford, Princess of Asturias Award in Literature. The transport was paid by Princess of Asturias Foundation to promote the event that they organize each year: the meeting of the winning writer with book clubs from all over the country. And this year it was Richard Ford. Already on a bus we started exchanging our opinions about Ford's books. Most agreed that he is very accessible and easy to follow. However, not all agreed that it's enough to receive this kind of award. That's what makes our book club special: we always have so many different opinions! And no one ever should be afraid to express what they think!

How did the jury justify their choice? On the official page of the foundation we can read:

“ At its meeting in Oviedo, the Jury for the 2016 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, composed of Xuan Bello Fernández, Blanca Berasátegui Garaizábal, Luis Alberto de Cuenca y Prado, José Luis García Martín, Álex Grijelmo García, Manuel Llorente Manchado, Carmen Millán Grajales, Rosa Navarro Durán, Carme Riera i Guilera, Fernando Rodríguez Lafuente, Fernando Sánchez Dragó, Ana Santos Aramburo, Sergio Vila-Sanjuán Robert, chaired by Darío Villanueva Prieto and with José Luis García Delgado acting as secretary, has decided to confer the 2016 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature on American writer Richard Ford.

His work forms part of the great tradition of the 20th-century American novel. Author of works such as The Sportswriter, Lay of the Land and Canada, his characters, plots and story lines are defined by an ironic, minimalist sense of epic. The careful attention to detail in his descriptions and his somber, dense gaze at the daily lives of anonymous, invisible people meld with the desolation and emotions emanating from his stories. All this makes Ford a profoundly contemporary narrator, as well as the great chronicler of the mosaic of interwoven tales that is American society.

Oviedo, 15th June 2016 “

Richard Fords biography is rather unusual for any writer. Like one of the characters in his novel “A Piece of My Heart”, Ford's father, Parker was a travelling salesman, and his mother, Edna realised she was pregnant when they were on the road, selling starch. They settled in Jackson, Mississippi, where their only child was born on February 16 1944.

The father maintained his lifestyle until his death of a heart attack, when Ford was 16. The boy was sent to Arkansas to live with his grandmother and her second husband, a former boxer, who were running a hotel.

Ford didn’t read for pleasure until he was 20. All because of his problems with dyslexia: the process of learning how to read and write with dyslexia was slow and the boy felt rather misunderstood. Reading was nightmare and not a pleasure. He once told the Washington Post:

“I went all the way through school not really reading more than the minimum, and still to this day can’t read silently much faster than I can read aloud. But there were a lot of benefits to being dyslexic for me, because when I finally did reconcile myself to how slow I was going to have to do it, then I think I came into an appreciation of all those qualities of language and of sentences that are not just the cognitive aspects.”

“The syncopations, the sounds of words, what words look like, where paragraphs break, where lines break, all the poetical aspects of language. I wasn’t so badly dyslexic that I was disabled from reading; I just had to do it really slowly.”

“And as I did–lingering on those sentences, as I had to linger–I fell heir to language’s other qualities which I think has helped me write sentences.”

Considering all that, it's rather amazing he became an author, and a successful one.

He published his first novel, A Piece of My Heart, the story of two unlikely drifters whose paths cross on an island in the Mississippi River, in 1976, and followed it with The Ultimate Good Luck in 1981.

Even though critics are divided, just the way we were on the bus, he has won many awards and is a member of the Writers Guild. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the PEN/Faulkner citation for fiction for The Sportswriter, in addition to the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer for Literature for his novel Independence Day.

During the meeting with over 1500 readers from book clubs from all over Spain, Ford was interviewed by Valerie Miles, the publisher and founder of the magazine Granta in Spanish. She asked him the questions previously submitted by the audience. It's a real pity she hasn't prepared herself a bit better. To me it seemed she had no idea about his work or any previous interviews. Just changing the order of some questions might have helped, but was not done. It might have been stress, problems with the language, however with the event of this scale I expected much more. Still, Richard Ford is definitely a charismatic person (with bright green socks clearly visible from the far end of the auditorium) and he made the evening worth being there.

Here are some of the things he shared with us:

About What He's Working on:

He's currently finishing memoir about his father, who died when Richard was only 16. It helped him to see language as a reconciling medium. He continued his reflection: “Language that you speak every day is important. Language is not trash.”

About Writer's Attention:

“If you don't want to see something in the book don't tell it to me. We're professional at paying attention. (…) If I can't write something different from myself, then I'm not a good writer.”

“It makes you very attentive to the details in the life. That's where the stories are.”

That last part referred to autobiographical elements in his books, which, he states, are not many...

About Taking Notes and Always Carrying a Notebook:

“ When this notebook gets half filled in I get very nervous about loosing it. And I leave it somewhere, not to lose it. And, you know, refrigerator is a good place. It's not going to burn if there is fire.”

About Politics and Trump (one month before election):

“There is a moron who might be a president. How can you shy away from that?!”

About Recommending a Book to Trump:

“In Trump's case it would be impossible. He doesn't know what the book is. It would be a waste of time to recommend him a book.”

About How Much Frank Bascombe Is There in Richard Ford and How Much Richard Ford in Frank:

“I made him more or less my age to have better access. It is useful for him to live the same period of time. Being a writer I have a use for these things [what he lived, thought and saw]. I try to make Frank different than I am. I made Frank a nicer man.”

About Characters:

“ I want them to be people to you. Artificial, but people. They never are as real to me as I want them to be to the readers.”

Abut being a writer:

“I owe my publisher 1 book. Last two months of writing are the weakest moment for me as a writer. I get sick, I am obsessive. What you write there, in that time, is going to be there forever. That's how you are going to see the book, that's how you're going to see me. That's probably the difference between me and Dostoevsky. Am I up to it? Am I going to be there, doing it at 73? I hope I am.

(…)

The only reason for me to write a book is to make it better. Our job is to get better at what we do. You have to be able to say 'I've learned something during this 40 days and I'm able to do it better.' I just want to make my books seem plausible. For you to say 'Well, this could have happened'. It doesn't mean it's a better book, but more plausible.”

About Language:

“When language becomes just a medium of communication, it's dying. (…) Mark Twain said that the difference between choosing the right word and the wrong it's a difference between a lightning and a lightning bug. And I don't want a lightning bug in my books”

About Music:

“ I never listen to the music when I write, I would never write anything. I would just seat there and listen to Bruce Springsteen.”

Personally, I found these parts the most interesting. If you remember any more, or maybe took notes, please share in comments!

The trip to Oviedo would have never happened without a great organisation by Goyo Layana, from the library in Leioa. Thank you Goyo!

(Goyo on the left)

Another huge thank you note should go to Chelo Veiga, a librarian from Oviedo who gave us a speedy literary tour through the old town. Thank you Chelo!