For the week of May 29 - June 4, 2002

The not so long and winding path to publishing

Heather Parkinson’s debut novel

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By ADAM TANOUS
Express Arts Editor

Idaho native Heather Parkinson has the kind of resume that makes people cringe with envy.

She has been a Fulbright scholar finalist, a Rhodes scholar finalist and the recipient of a Carson Research Grant. She has published a novel with a big New York publishing house, Bloomsbury. She lives in Idaho and gets to fly-fish in her spare time.

"Across Open Ground" By Heather Parkinson. 248 pp. Bloomsbury. $23.95.

And, not inconsequentially, she is only 27, though you would never know it reading her novel "Across Open Ground." The authority of the narrative voice and the author’s developed artistic sensibility belie her age. Beyond that, she writes extremely well: clear and precise at times, evocative and lyrical at others. Parkinson seems to have a natural sense of when to let her prose run and when to rein it in to keep the narrative on course. She is an unusual writer in this regard.

Parkinson will read from her novel Thursday, 7 p.m., at Iconoclast Books in Ketchum.

"Across Open Ground" is the story of Walter Pascoe, a 17-year-old who in 1917 leaves his parents for the open-air life herding sheep in and around the Wood River Valley. It is a life of comfortable routine until he meets and falls in love with a trapper named Trina Ivy. With the outbreak of World War I, Pascoe is drafted and must leave his new love. While they are reunited after the war, much has transpired to alter their relationship.

Much of the story is told from Walter’s perspective, though the narrative does switch to Trina for a short middle section.

`In an interview while visiting Ketchum a few weeks ago, Parkinson said she, ironically, "felt more comfortable with the male point of view."

"Across Open Ground" is a novel that, in a sense, began while Parkinson was an undergraduate at Willamette College in Salem, Ore. She received a grant to write a collection of short stories and poems about settlers in the Wood River Valley. "I really wanted to write about Sun Valley pre-resort," she said. Parkinson went through oral histories, photos, and other archives at The Community Library Regional History Department—a resource she said was invaluable.

After writing a number of stories and after graduating from college, Parkinson moved back to her hometown, Boise, where she worked as a journalist for the Boise Weekly. She loved the work but found she had little time for creative writing on the side. She eventually quit the job and in the fall of 1998 took a creative writing workshop at Boise State University. She used one of her "settler" stories for the workshop and found "that was the one everyone picked up on."

She knew she wanted to write a novel and that story seemed like the place to start. And so she began—writing chapter by chapter, but, she added, "chopping down trees all along the way." She didn’t have a grand plan for the novel. "I’ve never been one for diagramming or plotting things out," she said. "I definitely had trouble with the plot." There were dead ends and scenes she ended up cutting that, at the time, seemed incredibly important and poignant to her. Now she looks back at them and laughs heartily.

It took her about a year to write the first draft and another year to edit and polish it. She spent two summers writing in the Wood River Valley while she worked at the Sun Valley Garden Center.

Robert Olmstead, the head of the writing program at BSU, helped her with editing, as did a few friends. Then came the process of submitting her manuscript to literary agents. Parkinson said she received a few nice letters back but no acceptances. She started to think, "Well, it’s my first novel, it’s not going to pan out. What sort of job should I get now? And, for some reason I thought I would become a pharmaceutical rep." Parkinson laughed.

The agent she ended up getting, it turned out, had been on maternity leave and so hadn’t called her back. Soon after that point, the book was picked up by Bloomsbury. It has been published in hardback and paperback.

Now Parkinson is working on a second novel. It is what she termed a "loosely based sequel" to "Across Open Ground." It picks up with Walter’s war buddies as they drop him off in Idaho and head for the Seattle shipyards. It is a time, Parkinson explained, of one of the largest labor strikes in history and the onset of the Spanish Flu epidemic—an epidemic she said killed more people than World War I.

She is very excited about the project, but she also acknowledged the precarious nature of the career she has chosen. "Can you survive until the next book? is the question. You hope it comes fast, but if it doesn’t … That’s the thing with writing. Writers are always waiting for the rug to be pulled out."

 

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