Returning to the Roots of Writing

BY TOMMY NGAN

January 27, 2010

BURLINGTON – Reaching into the deepest memories of childhood innocence, Pulitzer Prize winner Ronald Powers commemorates the journeys of a writer to the very roots of his journey during the League of Vermont Writer’s Conference at Double Tree Hotel.

Having grown up in Hannibal, Missouri, Powers draws upon much of his childhood experience to become a successful writer. He recognizes that writing is his books are “commodities,” but humbly adds that “there’s nothing wrong with that, but I think there are higher and deeper things to be concerned with.” While a successful writer, having won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 as the TV critic of the Chicago Sun-Times and an Emmy in 1985 for commentaries on “CBS News Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt,” and co-authored New York Times’ best seller Flags of Our Fathers, he lives a modest suburban life in Castleton, Vermont

While the philosophy of bringing people together is clear, the practice is never easy. The League of Vermont Writers strives to bring writers all around Vermont together for its quarterly public meetings on the fourth Saturday of January, April, July and September. To encompass Vermonters around the state, meetings are held at different locations; meetings in January are held in Burlington.

Everything Powers could draw upon from childhood memories have no conflict. “To this day, I know the topography of Hannibal. I know it as well as I know the features of my own face. That town has a sort of melancholy grandeur, still has.” There is a schoolboy glint in his eyes as he describes police officer Floyd Capp’s lecture on the “Five Ws of Traffic Safety.” A warm grin recalling “Media god Dancing Dan the Platter-Man.” Reluctant longing to dance again with “Becky Purcell, the Boggy Atom Bomb Shell.” His memoir could only attract himself. This is when he discovers a writer’s accountability. “That if it only matters to you, you have failed.

If you have not made the connection to the community, you’ve failed.”

Membership in the League allows members discounted fees for meetings, workshops and publishing conferences. With 186 members, the League continues to be a Non-Profit Organization, continuing the position since 1970. Workshops related to writing fiction, proposals, children’s books to building characters have been made open to the public.

Powers could write his own story for himself, but writing is never about always pleasing the self. He discovered this when helping a student of his at Middlebury College. Suggesting the student to rework an essay that did not captivate an audience. He could hold his student accountable for his work, and it was time he held himself accountable. Repeatedly, he emphasizes the importance of accountability. He makes the difference between internal accounting, which the writing only benefits the interests of the self and external account, which benefits the larger community. ““If the connection between the inward and the outward is broken, if this experience of a single human does not resonate with the common experience of humanity, then language fails.”

In 1988, Powers found the connection needed to balance himself. News of two murders in Hannibal, carried out by adolescents, shook away those childhood memories. “The town of my boyhood is a grid of perfect interlocking parts. A stained glass window of a town. Holy, and perfect, and utterly safe. At least that was my memory of the town. The recovered part. And now that holiness had been desecrated. Boys were killers there now.” Like the philosophy of bringing people together, Powers faced a writer’s challenge: fear. Terror. Interviewing friends and relatives in their homes. Facing the killers at the courthouse. Listening to childhood stories from the forgotten father of Hannibal, brought into light by his son’s murderous act. “People do have stories to tell and they want to tell them.”