That early August morning in Vermont, a lean, long-haired young woman refilled my coffee cup. She was wait staff at the Bread Loaf, which meant a scholarship recipient to this old and esteemed writer’s conference. Printed material I’d received the afternoon before identified the writers who would be waiting tables. I knew from a photo and bio of her that after the conference she was headed to Stanford University as a Stegner Fellow. A big deal and highly competitive, I knew. My friend and mentor, Wayne Johnson, had been one, and this fact was largely why I selected Wayne’s writing course in 2010 at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. His guidance and help are the main reason that in 2012 I received the Donald Axinn Fiction Scholarship to the Bread Loaf.
Now three years later, I offered congratulations to the young woman, adding, “What an honor to be a Stegner Fellow.” She thanked me and turned to leave. “Don’t you love Stegner’s fiction?” I asked.
“I’ve never read him,” she said. “Too old school.”
I sat there and felt dismay. I had not forgotten my cocky and arrogant youth. Yet by the time I graduated USC as an English major, I was acutely aware of my ignorance; and I recognized the need to have a solid foundation in the classics, and a deep understanding of the historic progression of a genre like the novel. I also left college determined to read both the old and the new. Which is to say it appalled me that someone honored with a Wallace Stegner scholarship would deem him too “old school” to read. Did those two words describe Mark Twain, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Henry James, George Eliot (female), and Charles Dickens? My list of “old school” might form a long literary parade. Did this young woman know how many summers Wallace Stegner spent at the Bread Loaf in earlier years? Was she aware that he started the Creative Writing program at Stanford in 1945 and didn’t leave the university until 1971? Did she realize that four of his five later novels were written when his official teaching days ended? And what about Stegner’s two collections of short stories, or the twenty non-fiction books he wrote? Was his environmental activism also “old school” when he joined the Kennedy Administration and worked with Secretary of the Interior, Stuart Udall?
A voice just said, that’s enough for now, Gail. Here are six Stegner novels worth reading!
Until next week and more on Wallace Stegner…