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Arts & Entertainment

Award-Winning Author David Vann Speaks at Belmont Library

Art imitates life -- sort of -- in the works of David Vann.

David Vann was 13 years old and living in Northern California with his mother when his father called from Alaska and asked if Vann wanted to spend a year homesteading in the Alaskan wilderness.

Vann declined his father’s offer.

Two weeks later, Vann’s father committed suicide.

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For the next three years, a combination of anger, guilt, and shame caused Vann to tell people that his father had died of cancer.

Vann told the several dozen people who came to the to hear him speak that at the time of his father’s death that he felt if he'd agreed to the year in the Alaskan wilderness that maybe his father wouldn’t have killed himself.

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And when he visited the Belmont Library again on Sunday night, he spoke about second chances.

The confusion following his father’s suicide resulted in a teen who spent many nights riding around his California neighborhood shooting out street lights with his father’s guns, which had been given to him.

When Vann was 19 years old, and a student at Stanford, he began writing Legend of a Suicide. The process of writing the book was a slow one, taking Vann 10 years to complete.

The book consists mainly of the novella “Sukkwan Island,” which is about a boy and the year he spends in the Alaskan wilderness with his father.

“When I wrote it, I didn’t realize that this was the boy saying ‘yes.’ That this was a second chance,” Vann said.

Vann said he believes in the redemptive power of fiction. He enjoys being able to give the events in his and his family’s life a reimagining, or second chance. He likes that fiction events, even tragedies, have meaning and make sense at the end of the story.

While the writing of Legend of a Suicide was slow, the process of seeing the book into print was even slower. Vann spent 12 years trying to get the book published.

In 2007, Legend of a Suicide won the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. Part of the Grace Paley Prize involves publication and so the book was published without the benefit of an agent or editor.

Despite its publication, Legend of a Suicide received almost no attention in the U.S., being reviewed by only three publications.

The book, however, went on to become a bestseller in Europe, especially in France and England.

The book that once had a difficult time finding people to believe in it has now been published in more than 50  countries and in 16 languages, most recently in Basque.

While Legend of a Suicide, which also consists of five short stories, was the first book that Vann wrote, it was the second of his books to be published.

His first published book, A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea, also sprang from real life circumstances.

A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea is the memoir that emerged from Vann’s boat sinking during a hiatus he took from writing in which he pursued a life as a boat captain.

Caribou Island, Vann’s debut novel that depicts a marriage going wrong in the Alaskan wilderness, also took many years to finish.

“Fourteen years ago I wrote the first 48 pages and then I got stuck,” Vann said.

Vann said he had trouble finding out whose story he was going to tell and what would be the longer arc of the story.

In January 2009, Vann had an epiphany and figured out how to tell the story.

“I had some idea that it would be about a woman’s rage toward her husband,” said Vann.

Vann said he knew the woman in the story would be 55 years old and in a transitional stage. He knew she would be newly retired and her marriage would seem kind of empty.

Vann said he liked the idea of putting two characters together, where they can’t get away. He wanted to construct a story that put the characters under pressure and watch them break, thus allowing the reader to learn more about them.

“It seemed like a perfect setting,” Vann said of the actual Caribou Island. “It’s an island and a lake with no signs of humans anywhere.”

Caribou Island was released on Jan. 18 by Harper.

The event was co-sponsored by theand San Mateo’s “M” is for Mystery bookstore. The wine and cheese reception was provided by the Friends of the Belmont Library.

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