Prolifically Raw: Book Talk: Faraway Places by Tom Spanbauer

Friday, February 18, 2011

Book Talk: Faraway Places by Tom Spanbauer

By Anne Gudger, a veteran teacher and memoirist who lives in Portland, Oregon

Faraway Places by Tom Spanbauer is a stunning little book. In only 124 pages Spanbauer probes sexuality, racism, and violence all set against the backdrop of farm life in Idaho in the 1950’s. It’s a coming-of-age novella where 13-year-old Jake’s adolescent rebellion dovetails with him witnessing a brutal murder. The life Jake lived starts to unravel, then implodes and explodes, and in the end is blown to smithereens.

As a writer, I marvel at how Spanbauer waxes poetic without being sentimental and moves the action forward by giving the reader a peek view of what happens but also manages to withhold the entire story until the end. As a reader, I turned pages to find out what Jake saw, what Jake knows and who Jake is.

I am especially wowed by Spanbauer’s attention to detail and how the small becomes huge. What Spanbauer does with sky is truly remarkable: “There was sky everywhere: outside the windows, under the beds, between the ceiling and the floor there was sky. There was sky between your fingers when you spread them, and sky under your arms when you lifted them up. Sky around your neck and ears and head, and sky pressing against your eyeballs. When you took a breath you were breathing sky. Sky was in your lungs. My mother hung up wash around the sky. I swung in my swing through the sky. There was no escaping it. The sky was as everywhere as the nuns at the St. Joseph’s School said God was. Only the ground stopped it, and even then it didn’t stop there.”

Notice he doesn’t just tell you the sky is blue or big. He evokes memories. He engages the senses. He starts with sky and ends up talking about God without saying “The sky reminded me of the nuns.” As a writer you can use the same technique to immerse your reader in the environment and when you do, you can take them further and deeper into your story, into your memories.

Read Spanbauer’s sky again and look out the window or go outside. I bet the sky will look different to you. Try the same thing in your own writing. Look for near and far away places to engage your writer senses. Spanbauer teaches us, by example, how to go beyond describing how something looks and into how it feels, smells, sounds, even tastes. These sense loaded details are where the gold is. That’s where you’ll win your readers’ hearts and once you have our hearts, we’ll follow you anywhere.