Now please welcome Timothy Dyke.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Gail.
Thank you all.
Maybe all students of good writing
ask themselves at least on occasion,
why do I aspire to the writing life?
What are my goals?
What am I trying to achieve?
Sometimes, people who read a lot may
stop to consider what is writing good for.
If I ask too many of these kinds of reflective questions,
I can drive myself crazy, but inquiry
about intent and purpose, and possibility
is part of my writing consciousness.
And I have found that one of the best ways to seek answers
is to read good fiction to acquaint myself
with writers who tell stories with purpose and power
and originality.
I'm glad that over the past few months,
I have put myself in the company of fiction by Ann Cummins.
A graduate of the writing programs at Johns Hopkins
University and the University of Arizona,
Ann Cummins is the author of "Red Ant
House," a story collection, and "Yellowcake: A Novel."
Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney's, Best
American Short Stories, and many other publications.
Ann Cummins has received a fellowship from the Lannan
Foundation, and she teaches creative writing
at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.
As the novel "Yellowcake" opens, we
meet Ryland, a man who has spent his life working at a uranium
mill.
He has to wheel an oxygen tank with him wherever he goes,
and yet he has difficulty admitting
that the company he worked for should be held accountable
for the condition of his flimsy lungs.
Ryland's wife is less hesitant to fight corporate power.
"Yellowcake" is a novel as I read it about families
and what it means to stand by people we love.
"Yellowcake" is a story about industrial culture and Navajo
culture, about land as resource to be managed, and land
as partner to be loved.
"Yellowcake" is about friendship, time flies,
toxic rock, owning up to the reality
that things may not have worked out as planned.
In the "Red Ant House" stories, we
meet young women who live on the edges of Indian reservations
in New Mexico.
We meet Six Slim, who rumor has it,
will pay good money to see girls naked.
We meet a hypnotist of questionable intention--
the second most handsome man on the entire reservation.
Maybe in a certain mood, a reader
would describe the lives of many of these characters as
hopeless, but the people who populate these stories
never give up hope.
Ann Cummins shows us what characters choose when
there seem to be few choices.
Listen to the language used to render these narratives.
This is from the story "Red Ant House."
We hid in the little cave under Jesus Rock
up there on Smelter Mountain.
Theresa Mooney moaned, "I'm dead."
She scrunched in the dirt, shivering up against the rock,
and I didn't tell her there were ants there in the shadows.
Ann Cummins helps us to see what's
there in the shadows, what's hiding under rocks.
The writing is artful, funny at times, respectful always,
and brimming with care.
I read and I fall into the lives of the people on her pages,
but I also ask myself questions about the way her stories are
composed.
How does she do that?
How does she inhabit the minds and bodies,
and spirits of people who are so different from one another?
How does she generate universal concern out
of such specific description, of such specific people?
How does she make me think of my life over here,
when she's talking about those girls who live way over there?
How can this book be about sand and alcohol,
and yellow cake, and love, and home, and disability,
and celebration, and mourning all at once?
I ask these questions not because I
expect specific answers, but because I'm
trying to show how the fiction of Ann Cummins works on me.
It gets me thinking.
It causes me to wonder.
It taps into my reflective side.
I watch the way her author's eye gazes inside her characters,
and I listen for how this gaze is translated into language.
I guess that's what I'm trying to get at here.
This fiction makes me want to listen more carefully and more
closely to language.
I want to listen to my friends, to my parents, to children.
I want to listen to the language of the wind
that blows from desert to city to desert again.
The fiction of Ann Cummins makes me
eager to listen to Ann Cummins, and right now, it
makes me happy to say we are all going to get that chance.
Please help me welcome Ann Cummins.