Cheuse, Brooks next in Writers Series

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Alan Cheuse

March 30, 2012

Cheuse, Brooks next in Writers Series

Historical fiction, ideas and work likely to be topics

By MARTA HEPLER DRAHOS mdrahos@record-eagle.com The Record Eagle Fri Mar 30, 2012, 07:29 AM EDT

TRAVERSE CITY — Geraldine Brooks is fascinated by the Manitou Islands and hopes to learn a bit about how they came to carry the Native American name that means "godlike" or "miraculous."

That's not surprising, since Brooks has made a career of building books on shards of history that capture her imagination.

"My shards tend to be events that actually happened, but are so implausible that no novelist would ever dare to make them up." said Brooks in an email interview. "That the first Native American graduated from Harvard in 1665. That a rural village in Derbyshire took the unique decision to quarantine itself rather than spread the plague. That a Hebrew manuscript was saved twice by Muslims willing to risk their lives for it. That's the kind of thing I fall on with delight."

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author will talk books and writing with National Public Radio's longtime "Voice of Books" Alan Cheuse at the next National Writers Series event, 7 p.m. Thursday, April 5. at the City Opera House.

A native of Australia, Brooks penned several international best-sellers and won the 2006 Pulitzer for "March," a novel told from the point of view of the father in Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women."

She also is a Columbia University-trained journalist who covered environmental issues for The Sydney Morning Herald and crises in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans for The Wall Street Journal.

"I love her work," said Cheuse, who's looking forward to asking Brooks how life Down Under informs her imagination. "She's a very interesting writer because she's Australian, she's lived in the U.S. for many years, she's a convert to Judaism and she writes wonderful historical fiction."

Cheuse is a regular on NPR's "All Things Considered" and has served as a fiction judge for the National Book Award and on the Pulitzer Prize committee that helped select the 2011 winner, "A Visit From the Goon Squad."

The Washington, D.C.-based wordsmith also has written four novels, three collections of short fiction and the memoir "Fall Out of Heaven."

"Because he's such a deft reviewer of other people's books, I'm looking forward to turning the tables on him a little bit and getting him to talk about his own creative process," said Brooks, who welcomes book events as a way to get out of her solitary rut and connect with readers about issues that are important to them.

Cheuse said he uses his imagination to a "very large extent" when writing, but excises it when reviewing, in order to focus on what's in front of him. He calls critics "taste makers" whose responsibility is to nudge readers toward picking up a certain book or, conversely, "alerting them that it may not be good for their mental health."

Above all, he said, critics should encourage people to vary their reading.

"I don't think we're making the wisest choices as a nation of readers. We should read more broadly," he said. "If you keep reading the same kinds of books, you narrow your potential for pleasure and education."

Brooks, who divides her time between Sydney and Martha's Vineyard, Mass., said she's surrounded by people who read widely and enthusiastically. But her one quibble is with traditional school textbooks, which are "dreary beyond belief."

Cheuse expects the pair's Traverse City talk to begin with the challenges of historical fiction, which mandates that you entertain by inventing, while keeping true to the record.

Tickets are $15 advance, $20 at the door; $10 educators; $5 students at cityoperahouse.org.