Hello, and I will be happy to be the third person
to welcome you to this presentation of the Prose
Series.
As Aurelie Sheehan said, my name is Reina Wagner,
and I'm an adjunct faculty member
of the English department, and the creative writing
program with the event.
And as Aurelie also mentioned that where
I've also been a recipient of my MFA in creative writing
which means that our esteemed guest, Richard Russo, and I
have something in common.
We're both Wildcats.
And unfortunately, for me at least,
that's where our list of commonalities ends.
For a while I am still, and may forever
be, an aspiring writer as evidenced
by all of his body of work most particularly
by his Pulitzer Prize winning 2001 novel, Empire Falls,
we all know that Richard Russo is a writer, one who
has most definitely arrived.
And he has also had the talent and the good fortune
to make his living as a novelist and screenwriter for some years
now, and his production has been prolific.
The novels include Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody's Fool,
Straight Man, and of course, Empire Falls,
and his new short story collection, The Whore's Child.
His work has also been well-reviewed and bestselling.
And while this is a fortunate turn
of events for all of us fans of his work,
not to mention Richard Russo, it also
means that Professor Russo, PhD, doesn't exist any longer.
Dr. Russo has left the building.
But one only has to open the pages of one of his books
to realize that Richard Russo has never stopped teaching us.
Now, rather than presenting a lecture
before a group of lit students at Colby College in Maine,
Richard Russo carries us all along with him
in a lesson featuring his honest characters,
his sharp eye for the personality and place,
and a perspective that never forgets
how all people carry their history with them everywhere
they walk.
Richard Russo has been called a champion for the common man,
for blue collar workers, and an author who
brings back to life towns that had
their heyday five decades ago.
His attraction to these characters and these settings
is as natural as any writer's inclination to the familiar.
"Writing about blue collar folks is
something I've been doing right from the start."
He said once in a recent interview.
"It's a world I know pretty well,
and its people seem worth talking about to me.
I like most of these folks quite a bit."
For an example, of how much he likes these folks,
look at this passage from Empire Falls,
one that describes the working psychology of Sunday afternoon
sports fans in terms that rings true with both his character's
point of view and his reader's sensibility.
In this section the sports bar owner Bea
justifies not buying a big screen TV,
despite the insistence of her patrons
that because of unequal game viewing
vantage points along bar, this is just what she needs to do.
He writes, "What her customers didn't seem to understand
was that deep down, they enjoyed being bunched up.
Just as they enjoyed the jostling and the spilled beer
and the stolen bar stools, they enjoyed
holding their urine as long as they could,
and then asking the guy on the next stool
to save theirs until they got back,
knowing full well he wouldn't even after he promised to.
But there wasn't a damn thing wrong with imbalance.
What was life but good bar stools
and bad ones, good fortune and bad,
shifting from Sunday to Sunday, year to year,
like the fortunes of the New England Patriots.
There was no such thing as continual good fortune,
or misfortune, except for the Red Sox,
whose curse is eternal."
The affection Richard Russo has for these characters,
who complain out loud about the television
in order to drown out the litany of problems that
scream inside their heads, their livelihoods, their children's
futures, the slow but steady disappearance
of passion from their marriages, that affection comes across
with each sentence, each plot twists,
each historical revelation.
And I think we can feel that affection on the page
because Richard "Rick" Russo, feels it in life.
His novels are rooted in truth.
As he told the interviewer from USA Today,
after that newspaper selected Empire
Falls as the inaugural book for his book club
earlier this year, everything in his books is true, "Yes,
all of it."
Russo said, "but some of it I made up."
That truth, made up or not, enables
Russo to use stock characters, the bitter professor
in Straight Man, the Empire Grill's
sexy, sassy, past her prime waitress.
The solemn high school owner who provides Empire Falls
with its startling climax.
In a lesser writer's hand, these people would be nothing
but stereotypes.
Richard Russo reminds us that stereotypes
became that way because they truly
occurred so often in light.
So as you can see, the lessons keep coming,
Professor Russo or not.
I'm sure you join me in hoping that Richard
Russo, fellow Wildcat, keeps gracing us with his wisdom,
whether it's from behind a lectern,
or with no more teaching paraphernalia
than his writers pen.
And likewise, I'm sure you join me in welcoming back
to this lectern, Richard Russo.