RODGER LARSON
BIOGRAPHY

When I was a kid growing up on a ranch in the Central Valley of California I had no idea that I could write. Living on a ranch in the middle of nowhere, I idealized writers as people with mythic powers and abilities. They possessed skills beyond anything I could hope to achieve. Those early years are now rich material for my writing. I am able to revisit that time and place and draw from the emotional well I find there.

In the fall of 1979 when I was 38 I came out as a gay man: I was divorced and lost custody of my child. My concept of my life work changed. I wasn't the person I had thought I was. I had to adjust. Getting honest with myself and the world had a profound effect. In an effort to make sense of my life and to record the emotional upheaval I experienced I began to write. The clarity I developed during this time has stayed with me, I believe, and allows me to write with an honest, truth-telling voice.

In 1993 I received an M.A. Degree in Creative Writing from Antioch University; I have a B.A. Degree in Humanities from The Evergreen State College. I have completed course work at the Northwest Writing Institute and Portland State University. Private study has been with writers Tom Spanbauer and Martha Gies.

My influences are many. Those who come to mind first are Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Sherwood Anderson. I read many contemporary authors; beautiful writing is my main criterion. I read poetry to help my use of language. Poets I return to frequently are Robert Hass and C.K. Williams.

My objective is to write using simple and powerful language. In this way I hope to trigger an emotional response in the reader. With What I Know Now I wanted the narrator's voice to sound spoken rather than read. I wanted the voice to be particular.

When I was a child I read a lot and beyond my years. At first I read Classic Comic Books. I remember reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Two Years Before the Mast in that form. A favorite book of my early teen years was Silas Marner. I love that book and have read it several times .since. Plot is important to me, good narrative flow and interesting characters.

It is hard for me to be exact about the amount of time I spent in writing What I Know Now. But I would say about two years and then another eight months working with, Marc Aronson, my Holt editor. The book began as a short story. I was studying with Tom Spanbauer and he said, "This sounds like it wants to be a longer piece. Why don't you just keep writing and see where it goes." That is what I did. I couldn't not have an ending.
however, and so I skipped ahead and wrote an. ending which I later re-wrote and then in the final editing re-wrote again and changed completely. I also went back and added several beginning chapters. The prologue, which lays out the story was the first thing I wrote and it stayed pretty much as written.

The original story is based on an incident from my early teen years. My mother and I did in fact build a garden, although my parents never separated. My mother and I met a nurseryman who gave us advice, but we knew him only slightly. We read in the paper one morning that he died in an accident at Big Sur. While hiking he walked near the edge of a cliff above the sea and the ledge gave way and he fell more than two hundred feet to the rocks and surf below. It was a shocking event for me as a boy. In the original short story the end is ambiguous. The narrator wonders if the man's death was a suicide.

I am trained as a landscape architect so I didn't need to research infonnation on plants or garden building. I did visit Luther Burbank's garden which I had done as a child.

In writing What I Know Now I set parameters which I hoped would help me be successful in completing the book. I believed I could manage a limited time span--I decided on one summer. I also felt I could handle a small group of characters, three major characters and several minor characters. This was the only organizational strategy I used in the writing.

Currently I teach writing part-time to high school students at the Metropolitan Learning Center in NW Portland. I have taught for Portland State University, School of Extended Studies and for Portland Community College at the Columbia River Correctional Institution. For the past two years I have offered an on-going ten week fiction workshop in my home.

I have given readings at Powell's Bookstore, Common Ground Coffeehouse, and Scooter McQuade's Tavern.
My second novel which is in the early writing stages is set in the foothills of the Oregon Cascades. It has the working title ELI RIDDLE.