Location: Community Recreation Center, 3000 Glenview Road, Wilmette, Illinois

For more information, visit the Wilmette Library website.

Read the Charlotte Observer article by Pam Kelly.

EXCERPT:

Elizabeth Strout, who recently won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel “Olive Kitteridge,” compares her life as a writer to the life of a toad.

“Because I grew up in Maine and played in the woods, I played with toads.” It was Friday noon, she’d just gotten off a plane, and we were talking by phone while she ate a sandwich in a cab.

“Toads live under pine needles. It was so cozy, to see the little toads in there, breathing. I think of that in terms of my work. That’s where the work takes place, underneath the pine needles, where the earth is dark and rich.”

Publicity and prizes, she went on, arrive like flashlights to flush the toad out, which is fine, as long as the toad makes it back to the hole.

Strout, who is 53, has spent a lot of time lately outside the toad hole. On Thursday, she collected her Pulitzer — a Tiffany paperweight — at a luncheon in Manhattan. On Friday, she had just flown into Charlotte, N.C., to teach a writing class at Queens University.

Next Sunday, she’ll be in Chicago for a discussion I’m moderating at the Printers Row Lit Fest, which was why I’d tracked her down.

Strout has been writing since she was a girl, scribbling the day’s events into notebooks her mother gave her. To this day, she writes by hand, usually on lined paper with holes on the side, which may help explain why her sentences are uncommonly clear and fluid.

“Sentences,” she said. “I love them. I love the sound of them. I love finding the right rhythm. There’s no detail that’s too small for attention. Somebody told me four or five years ago, ‘Why bother to write a good sentence anymore? Nobody notices.’ I don’t believe it. I believe that people don’t know they need good sentences but they do need good sentences.”

When Strout moved to New York with her husband 25 years ago, she briefly joined a writing group. She dropped out because she felt the members came mostly to read their work aloud and be told it was fine. She remains ambivalent about writing programs, even though she teaches in them.

“I didn’t go to one and it wouldn’t have been for me,” she said. “It’s not my nature to let people see my work.”

In writing programs, writers get pummeled with opinions, conflicting opinions. Strout has relied on the same female friend for years to be her main reader and critic.

For many of those years, she wrote without telling most people that she did. She’d spent six months as a lawyer — “oh my God, the most awful time of my life” — and when she couldn’t find a publisher for her novel “Amy and Isabelle,” she considered becoming a nurse.

Then “Amy and Isabelle” turned into a sleeper hit. “Abide With Me” followed. Now “Olive Kitteridge,” a collection of connected stories that add up to a novel, is on the best-seller list.

All good novels are in some way about secrets, about the things people hide from one another or themselves. “Olive Kitteridge,” the book, reveals its secrets one story at a time. Olive Kitteridge, the woman, is never exactly the person you’ve decided she was.

A retired 7th-grade math teacher, Olive is imperious, cantankerous, tender, harsh, philosophical, frank, deceitful, emotionally frozen and alive with desire into old age. She’s an unapologetically difficult wife and mother who sometimes, but only sometimes, tries to do better.

In some of the stories, she’s a minor character, seen only in passing by other inhabitants of her small Maine town.

“I grew up in Maine with a lot of elderly relatives all living on the same dirt road,” Strout said. “She’s a compilation of many relatives who were of a certain New England style. And yet, she kind of rose off the page as herself.”
Strout considers herself a self-taught writer, but she offers these tips for other writers:

Read good writing, for example Alice Munro, William Trevor, Anton Chekhov: “So your mind is getting filled with good sentences, not bad sentences.”

Tap into a deep urgency: “You have to write something that makes you feel if you don’t write it, you’ll die.”

Be wary of praise and criticism: “You have to learn to listen deep down inside yourself.”

Revise. Revise. Revise the revisions.

Be prepared to stay down in the toad hole.

Read the original article on the Chicago Tribune website.

EXCERPT:

Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction a long six months ago, but she’s still giddy about being awarded American literature’s top honor.

And why not? Since joining the esteemed rank of writers, which includes the likes of Hemingway, Faulkner, Mailer and Morrison, she’s gone from under-the-radar author to name-brand novelist. Her books have shot up bestseller lists, and she’s been invited to receptions, readings and literary festivals around the world.

Even Hollywood has become a fan. Oscar winner Frances McDormand (”Burn After Reading”) recently optioned the movie rights to Strout’s winning work, “Olive Kitteridge,” a collection of connected short stories featuring Kitteridge, a forceful and sometimes scary junior high school teacher.

But while all the fuss has been fun, Strout wants to get back to what she does best: writing.

With so much traveling, she recently went six long weeks without putting pen to paper (literally, since she writes longhand). So she’s looking forward to sitting down at the kitchen table in her Upper East Side apartment, where she’ll finish her next novel, tentatively titled “The Burgess Boys.”

Despite her busy schedule, Strout will take time out Tuesday night to participate in Manhattanville College’s “Meet the Writers” series. And she cheerfully agreed to answer a few questions before the free event.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE

on the LoHud.com website.

EXCERPT:

NEW YORK – On the way to writing Olive Kitteridge, the collection of linked stories that would win her a 2009 Pulitzer Prize, Elizabeth Strout made one of those intuitive leaps that show why the creation of fiction is such a mysterious enterprise.

Ever since she was a teenager in the early 1970s, she had been fascinated by the Stockholm syndrome, the psychological phenomenon in which a kidnapping victim such as Patty Hearst appears to identify with the people who have abducted her. Decades later, Strout was trying to write a story about this.

It centered on a character named Evelyn who, while driving with her husband, stops at a hospital to use the bathroom. Before they know it, they’re being held at gunpoint by young men who’ve invaded the place in search of drugs.

“I had been working on that story for a long, long time,” Strout says. Somehow, she could never get it right.

In the meantime, she had written and published a story about a woman she called Olive Kitteridge.

Olive is a forceful personality, to put it mildly, with a powerful, not always positive effect on those around her. At her son’s wedding, she overhears her new daughter-in-law, a physician named Suzanne, say how hard it was for the son to grow up in Olive’s scary shadow.

Wounded, she sits in the couple’s bedroom, head in hands.

“She would like to say this to Suzanne,” Strout writes. “She would like to say, Listen, Dr. Sue, deep down there is a thing inside me, and sometimes it swells up like the head of a squid and shoots blackness through me. I haven’t wanted to be this way, but so help me, I have loved my son.”

Instead, she steals a bra and one of Suzanne’s shoes, which end up in the trash at Dunkin’ Donuts.

Strout says she knew right away that she would write a book of stories about Olive. All would be set in the small, fictional town of Crosby, Maine. Olive would be central in some and peripheral in others: She was too overwhelming to have onstage all the time.

Then came a revelation about the problematic hostage story.

“Wait! Wait! This is Olive!” Strout thought. “Omigod, it’s just been waiting for Olive. It’s not Evelyn — go away!

“You put Olive in there, and it’s like: Boom, boom, boom!”

READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE

on the Washington Post website.

At the edge of the continent, Crosby, Maine, may seem like nowhere, but seen through this brilliant writer’s eyes, it’s in essence the whole world, and the lives that are lived there are filled with all of the grand human drama–desire, despair, jealousy, hope, and love.

At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance: a former student who has lost the will to live: Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.

As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life–sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition–its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.