Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr speaks to a crowd at Colfax.
The idea occurred on a train ride into New York in 2004.
A man was sitting in front of Anthony Doerr and his wife, talking on a cell phone about the sequel(s) to “The Matrix.”
His call dropped.
Doerr could hear the man’s frustration.
“How do we get to a place where we assume this thing could work,” said the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of “All the Light We Cannot See” to an audience at the Whitman County Library in Colfax Friday.
“It’s only in the past four generations have we been able to communicate across these great distances. ... That night I had a title, ‘All the Light We Cannot See,’ then; a blind girl reading a story to a boy over radio.”
The title refers to wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum which human eyes are not able to detect, such as radio waves.
After about a year playing with this idea, Doerr went on a book tour for “About Grace” (2004), which took him to Saint-Malo, France. While fielding questions in a smoke-filled room, he went outside for a break. Up a flight of stairs, he found himself on top of ramparts at low tide, the moon glowing onto the wet sand below.
“I felt I had stumbled into the city of imagination,” Doerr said.
Earlier in the day, he learned that most of the city had been destroyed by Allied bombs, in August 1944, two months after D-Day. It was the first recorded use of napalm.
“I started to think. Maybe this could be the place,” he said. “This is the place that radio might have been important.”
In further research, he learned more about Nazi Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels, and his speeches about radio and the Germans’ effort to build a new type with limited signals.
“That they could control – but it would be cool, so people want it,” said Doerr. “This is a mouthpiece for the party.”
Doerr then talked about broader ideas he wanted to explore with the book.
“One of the central themes of the story is, ‘Isn’t doing nothing a kind of collaboration?” he said. “What are the things we do just because everyone else is?”
He learned of the myriad ways that women served the French resistance.
“I kept gathering details, which my wife calls putting polish on a car when you don’t have an engine in it yet,” said Doerr.
He wrote much of the book in a small office in a church basement in Boise, where he and his wife live with their twin sons.
Gathering more and more information, Doerr eventually realized he had to pare it down.
“World War II was this rain barrel, all I had to do was explain one drop,” he said, paraphrasing a writer friend. “I feel like storytelling is investing in one individual; what it does is make us feel a little less alone in the world. ... If we’re making assumptions about people, it is usually a mistake.”
Doerr told the crowd that this book comes at a transitional time for the legacy of World War II.
“As the war passes from memory into history, it is important to tell stories about it as responsible and complicated as possible,” he said.
Doerr kept pushing on the “All the Light” manuscript – while publishing other stories and articles – including his main work as magazine writer.
“Writing is like farming,” he said. “In that there are a lot of activities involved in farming.”
Finishing his prepared talk in Colfax, he took questions from the audience.
A woman asked more about his process.
“On a good day, I don’t open my e-mail at all,” he said.
In answering another, he told of the missing and unaccounted for people of the war.
“So many of these families waiting at train stations never found out,” he said.
To another question about writing, he mentioned writer’s conferences.
“Part of me feels like, if you are serious about it, go into a Motel 6 for six days and write it,” he said.
A history graduate of Bowdoin College, Maine, he said his serious efforts to write began after college while working at a sheep farm in New Zealand. It was two years after graduation when he told himself he had to try writing, otherwise he knew he would regret it.
He later earned a Master’s in Fine Arts from Bowling Green in Ohio. He grew up in Cleveland.
After Doerr had published his first two books (“About Grace” and “The Shell Collector”), he still wouldn’t refer to himself as a writer.
“On a plane or wherever, I would tell people I am a teacher,” he said. “Even now. Now people around me are reading my book on the airplane. It is freaky.”
Aside from Doerr, the most recent Pulitzer winner to visit the Colfax library was likely New York Times reporter and author Timothy Egan, who appeared in 2002 to interview staff after Bill Gates’ appearance at the library. Egan, who was part of a Pulitzer-winning reporting team, did not give a presentation.
“All the Light We Cannot See” was this year’s featured book in the 15th annual “Everybody Reads” community reading program, which began in the Lewis-Clark valley in 2000. Participating towns and libraries now include Lapwai, Pullman, Moscow, Colfax, Palouse, St. John, Nez Perce, Asotin, Pomeroy and Dayton.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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