Alaska provides setting for Oregon author’s tale of love and loss
(Author photo: Chan Christiansen; book cover, Red Hen Press)
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By Amy Wang | The Oregonian/OregonLive
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on August 21, 2016 at 11:00 AM, updated August 21, 2016 at 11:01 AM
Winter in Alaska is not for the faint of heart, as the narrator of Lori Tobias’ new novel, “Wander,” well knows. So it’s with many a misgiving that the young radio reporter, who goes by Pete, sees her bush pilot husband take off from their rural town for a season of chasing paychecks on “the Slope,” as the oil fields of northern Alaska are known.
Lonely at home and still striving to prove herself at work, Pete is in an emotionally vulnerable spot when she meets the new guy in town, Ren, a son of the Ivy League who offers a tantalizing glimpse at a different sort of life. What she doesn’t know about him is that Alaska isn’t his destination: It’s his escape.
“Wander” (Red Hen Press, 152 pages, $15.95) is a compact but fully packed story, a simple but heartbreaking tale of a woman caught to her dismay between two very different men in a harsh landscape. It’s told with sharp, spot-on dialogue and efficient characterizations – unsurprisingly, given that Tobias once wrote for The Oregonian and the Rocky Mountain News.
Tobias, who lives on the Oregon coast, will read from her book at several coastal events:
Newport: 2 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 28, Newport Public Library, 35 N.W. Nye St.
Florence: 10 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 24, Florence Festival of Books, Florence Events Center, 715 Quince St.
Manzanita: 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 21, Hoffman Center for the Arts, 594 Laneda Ave.
Tobias recently discussed her novel; her comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Where the title came from: At one point in the book, Pete is at a Valentine’s Day party when one of her radio station co-workers gets a surprise visit from his Lower 48 wife – in front of his Alaska girlfriend. “The general manager says, ‘Well, you know what they say: Absence makes the heart go wander.’ ”
Tobias originally titled the book “Hearts Go Wander,” but a colleague told her it sounded like a romance novel. So she shortened it.
About the novel’s relatively short length: “That isn’t so much a choice so much as how it played out,” Tobias said. “That was the story. I find writing all that stuff of getting from Point A to Point B the most difficult. At the heart you have this story you want to tell, but there’s all this other sub-plotting that goes along with it.”
Tobias said she had received a request from one publisher to trim her manuscript, so she did – then had Red Hen Press ask for the longer version, which was deemed “much more fulfilling and satisfying.”
On how much of her life is in the novel: “I actually did live in the middle of nowhere, Alaska. I hated it. People live their whole lives to go to this place, I hated it.”
Like Pete, “I got my first journalism job at an oldies radio station,” Tobias said. “I was the news reporter, I had no news experience, I had a very strong East Coast accent. That part is true.” She and Pete were also alike in being unprepared for life in the wild.
At one point Pete reports on a survivor of a bear attack who credits his continuing existence to the fact that he was stoned at the time – that “actually did happen to somebody I know,” Tobias said. Also based on reality is the subplot of a serial killer who preys on prostitutes and strip club dancers.
On Alaska being its own character: “I never thought about that actively,” Tobias said. But, she added, one memorable life-in-Alaska scene is pulled straight from her own experience. It’s a scene in which Ren and Pete drive across a frozen lake as a shortcut to her home one spring night and hear the top layer of the ice crack beneath them.
“I was alone in the car. My husband had said to me exactly what the husband in the story said (that the ice would hold). I’ve never been so terrified in my whole life. I got out of the car and I bawled: ‘You told me it was safe!’ I’ve never let him forget that.”
What she hopes readers take away from the novel: “Life is hard. People hurt. You never know what someone else is going through. Be kind.”
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