the history behind the story

The New Hampshire Writers’ Project is celebrating 20 years of serving the writers and readers of the Granite State with the Portsmouth Literary Festival in the city where the member organization started. 

The festival is the fifth version of the New Hampshire Writers’ Trail, which has presented similar but smaller events elsewhere in the state. The underlying theme is history, with events such as a workshop on exploring history through writing and a session on the area’s black history. But the Project has a history of its own.  

Founding member Diane Schaefer, who lives in Portsmouth, was working for a small publishing company called Tidal Press and a downtown bookstore, Little Professor, when she got the idea. Her job was to promote books by regional authors, and she turned to the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance as a model. The central goal of getting books by local authors into the hands of readers remains, but the Project has expanded.

Schaefer, who admitted she at first “didn’t know what the heck she was doing,” set up the first office in the Button Factory in 1988. It was a minimal operation that survived cold winters and a flood that drenched all the books in stock. She credits a dedicated board of directors for getting through the early days.

The first fundraising event, however, was a huge success. There were readings by esteemed poets Don Hall, Charles Simic, Maxine Kumin, and Jane Kenyon, all of whom have contributed to the state’s reputation for housing great writers. Schaefer said they had to turn people away because there was not enough room.

In order to be taken seriously as a statewide organization, Schaefer said, it had to move to a more central location. The next offices were located in Concord and now they are in Manchester on the campus of Southern New Hampshire University.

Current executive director Kathy Wurtz said writers seek out the opportunity to share their work and talk to others about it, since writing is an isolated activity. “It’s a craft. It’s an art that people want to share,” she said.

The Writers’ Project is now doing more to “celebrate” writing, hosting writers’ conferences, literary awards and events like the Portsmouth Literary Festival. Wurtz said she hopes communities where such festivals are held will carry on the tradition in years to come.

Highlights of the events from Thursday, Oct. 23, through Saturday, Oct. 25, include an interview with bestselling author Tom Perrotta, a discussion with former U.S. Poet Laureate Maxine Kumin, current N.H. Poet Laureate Pat Fargnoli and Portsmouth Poet Laureate Elizabeth Knies; literary walking tours; a flash fiction competition called Literary Idol; and author readings.

The interview with Perrotta, titled “Blurring the Boundaries,” is scheduled for Saturday at 7 p.m. in South Church on State Street. Wurtz said the author presents his own take on history, taking an event and creating a world within it.

For tickets and more information, visit www.nhwritersproject.org or call 603-314-7980.

Author Tom Perrotta rewrites history by taking real-life events and creating fictional stories around them. Perrotta’s latest novel, “The Abstinence Teacher,” is about a small-town culture war between spirituality and sexuality. He said he tends to write about events that happened a few years ago. “I’m absorbing what’s happened to me, and I’ve been writing about various eras in my own life,” he said. 

His first two books, “Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies” and “Election,” were set in high school, while the next was “Joe College.” “The Wishbones,” about a wedding band, takes place on the verge of marriage and becoming a responsible adult. The more recent books have to do with raising children. “I really am sort of tracking closely my own life as I get older and my kids get older,” he said.

While “Election” was inspired by the 1992 presidential race, including the Bill Clinton character issue, “The Abstinence Teacher” was written in response to the 2004 presidential election. “By the time the book came out in 2007, I thought that a new historical era had begun, that the culture war which the book is so much about really had settled down,” he said. “It almost felt like I was writing about a very recent historical era that had ended.”

However, by the time the paperback came out this fall in election season, this culture war seemed to have started up again, he said. “Something that seemed kind of an act of historical reflections suddenly felt like it was fresh news again,” he said.

While much of Perrotta’s writing has come from his political views or cultural interests, he says he does not want to simply reproduce his view on the page. “In fact, I’m as much interested in challenging them as sort of spreading them around,” he said. To write a novel, he said, you have to understand the other side from within. He said he hopes readers get to know characters on both sides of the argument equally.

“If you set up a straw man and have your side win, that’s an empty exercise. It’s really got to be a much more exploratory, internally persuasive kind of writing,” he said. He said he expects some of his readers to be surprised by the subject of religion in this novel, a new topic for him.

Perrotta has been compared by reviewers to Chekhov, John Steinbeck and Nick Hornby, but has other influences. He studied in graduate school with Tobias Wolff. “He’s just got this combination of great comic writing and serious moral investigation that I think is something I’ve really tried to emulate,” he said.

He’s also interested in the writing of John Cheever, who also wrote about suburbia. “He has this way of taking an ordinary and bland world and seeing it with a kind of narrative magic and dreamlike trance,” he said. “He could take the most ordinary place and infuse it with a kind of significance that was really inspiring to me.”
“Election” was adapted for an acclaimed movie starring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick, and, more recently, “Little Children” was adapted with Kate Winslet starring. Perrotta was involved in the second film and was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Oscar. He has since written a screenplay for “The Abstinence Teacher,” collaborating with “Little Miss Sunshine” directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris.

He said the effect of screenwriting on his novels is an interesting paradox. “Adapting the books into films made me much more aware about what’s different between the two media,” he said. “Rather than making my fiction more cinematic, I think it’s actually made it more literary.” He has become interested in writing in ways that can’t be easily converted to film, such as frequently transitioning in time and using complex prose.

Perrotta said he learned how to write screenplays on the job, but he found that he understood it better than he thought. His books are written with a concrete scenic structure, and a lot of dialogue, conflict and momentum, which are important in a screenplay.

In the past, writers went to Hollywood for the money, including William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but they weren’t adapting their own work. Perrotta said the independent film industry has changed that, enabling him to work on his own movies. He said he is able to work on projects he cares about without much interference from studios, because they understand that smaller films have to be well-written and driven by the writer and director. “It’s not the Hollywood that some writers found so crushing back in the ’40s and ’50s,” he said.