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Wide-open spaces inspire author Mark Spragg, who has
lived
a captivating life
Lifestyles Extra
By Ben Beagle
bbeagle@batavianews.com
March 3,2007
Mark Spragg has heard a lot of explanations for the bear in his novel,
An Unfinished Life.
It's nature gone wrong. It represents, through Mitch's injuries, the
scars we all carry. Or it's a metaphor for the things people wrestle
with as they try to find peace in their life. The bear is nothing so
complex, Spragg insists.
"Sometimes," he says in a telephone interview from his home
in Cody, Wyo., "the bear is just a bear."
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Spragg's novel - this year's selection for the "A Tale for Three
Counties" community reading project - is much more than a story
of a bear, two old cowboys or a single mom struggling to raise a child,
find self esteem and pull away from an abusive relationship.
It is an uncomplicated story that explores complex relationships. It
is funny in places, heartbreaking in others. But ultimately, it is a
tale of family, forgiveness and the relationships that bind long after
death.
"He's one of the most important writers of the Rocky Mountain West,
but the issues he writes about are universal," Kent Haruf, Spragg's
friend and the acclaimed author of Plainsong, says in a telephone interview.
"Given the material in the book, it's perfectly likely that readers
in communities in upstate New York would select this book."
Libraries in Genesee, Orleans and Wyoming counties have been encouraging
people to pick up An Unfinished Life for weeks. Since mid-February libraries
and other book clubs have been discussing the events of the novel. Readers
get a chance to meet Spragg during a series of talks and booksignings
scheduled Thursday through March 10 in Batavia, Medina and Perry.
Making life bearable
An Unfinished Life takes readers to fictional Ishawooa, Wyo., a community
much like the rugged lands from which Spragg draws inspiration and where,
the author says, bears are simply a part of life that you have to be
wary of.
In Ishawooa, Einar Gilkyson is still bitter a decade after his only
son's death. He has let his ranch fall into ruin and spends his days
in relative solitude - battling personal demons, milking a cow and caring
for Mitch, a trusted friend who was mauled by a bear (an incident Einar
blames himself for). Einar is as damaged emotionally as his friend is
physically.
Then, the woman Einar blames for his son's death arrives. His daughter-in-law,
Jean Gilkyson, is on the run from the latest in a string of abusive
boyfriends. With few places to go and even less money, Jean seeks refuge
with Einar. She brings with her Griff, the granddaughter Einar never
knew he had.
With Einar's life disrupted, his anger and accusations toward Jean resurface.
But slowly, Griff's curiosity about Western life and the longing for
a family chip away at the granite surrounding Einar's heart.
"Mark tells the kind of stories that make it bearable to be part
of the human race. He does not apologize for it but he makes it acceptable
to have all of our warts and our flaws and still be magnificant,"
Leslie Holleran, who produced a film adaptation of An Unfinished Life,
says in a telephone interview from her New York City office.
Driving finds answers
The story came to Spragg as an image of a man approaching 70, sitting
on a porch, surrounded by a mob of half-feral cats.
"He kept reappearing in my mind, occasionally in my dreams. Inevitably,
I started the process of questioning myself about him," Spragg,
55 this month, says. "Why is he embittered? Does he own a chance
for personal redemption?"
The answers came during long car trips with his wife, Virginia Korus
Spragg, in which they talked about this old man and his motivations.
Korus Spragg would take notes. They'd jot down pieces of dialogue and
scraps of scenes.
Griff, the young girl, appeared with similar spontaneity and Spragg
soon realized that if there was any hope for Einar, Griff was the agent
for that.
"She's the character about whom I probably get more comments, or
I find more readers have grown fond of than any of the other characters.
And for a very good reason: She's a wonderfully admirable little girl
and like many children coming out of relationships in which she's had
to assume the responsibilities of an adult early on, she has many qualities
that are more mature than kids her age."
Griff was Spragg's favorite character to write.
"I very intentionally set Griff at a pre-sexual age because I think
for children, before their hormones kick in, little boys are a good
deal like little girls. We haven't reached that point where we become
tragically self-conscious about ourselves and so desperately aware of
gender," Spragg says.
"I can think of nothing more hopeful than a 10-year-old child,"
he says. "I think they still believe that things are going to turn
out all right. It is her hope for her life that helps crack Einar open."
One story, two mediums
Spragg, who had previously written an award-winning memoir and a novel,
began writing An Unfinished Life after about a year of those conversations
in the car. At the same time, Korus Spragg expressed an interest in
working together on a screenplay. Spragg had first found success writing
screenplays in the 1980s.
"It just became a sort of interesting endeavor to us to see how
we would move the story forward through different means, to see if it
would be similar or if it would have to be different because of the
medium," Spragg says. "Maybe we don't get out enough."
The experience, he says, made writing the novel easier.
"I was very keen on An Unfinished Life to write a very stripped
down novel. I think the act of working on the screenplay at the same
time kept me honest," he says. "One never labors over a line
of exposition, trying to put in a poignant metaphor (in a screenplay)
because it's absolutely useless."
An original story
The screenplay and its many drafts made its way among a number of directors
- at one time attached to Robert Altman with Paul Newman as Einar -
before catching the attention of director Lasse Hallstrom and his long-time
producing partner, Leslie Holleran.
They were struck by Spragg's treatment of Einar and Mitch, two men whose
deep, abiding friendship - and genuine love for one another - challenges
the image of the macho cowboy.
"It was always clear that Mark lived and breathed these men. They
were the heart and soul of that story," Holleran says.
"That was what was original for me," she says. "The relationship
between these two men. It was something we - the film people world -
hadn't really looked at. To be friends for decades and decades, to know
somebody, to make your life with them in a platonic way and share their
dreams and share their pain and take on willingly and without complaint
the kind of caretaking of one another is so loving and very real. It
was beautiful for me. It was a love story that was unique."
Wise old cowboys
Spragg, who lives in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains, grew up on
the oldest dude ranch in Wyoming, leading treks through the Yellowstone
area. While he says nothing in An Unfinished Life is autobiographical,
the old cowboys he grew up with shaped the characters of Mitch and Einar.
"They were some of the wisest, most catholic decent men I've ever
met in my life. They were instructive for me in a number of ways,"
he says. "I was desperate to grow up to be as useful as these men.
"They did not fit the archetype of redneck, bumbling, truncated
outdoor laborers," he says. "They almost all had a favorite
book they kept in their duffel. But it wasn't Louis L'Amour. It would
more likely be the plays of Moliere or the essays of Milton. They were
complicated, honest men. Unbelieveably open, and loyal emotionally.
They did care that you came early and stayed late and kept your word
and worked alongside them. What they fell back on all the time was what
they carried with them, which was their character."
At times, Spragg says, it was as if he was living in another century.
It was 25 miles to his one-room schoolhouse in the valley, 50 miles
to the nearest small town. There was no radio or television. They had
an eight-party phone line. His father also kept a library of "a
couple thousand books." Spragg and his brother would read one each
month and then deliver an oral book report to their father.
"I lived in a very anachronistic place," he says. "So
I lived a very practical life in the mountains with the horses, but
I lived a very broad life through literature."
Later, as a young man he became eager to experience a more urban life.
He moved to New York City to become a writer. He lived in Greenwich
Village, Florida and Iowa. He went to Mexico, South America and Europe.
"I'm comfortable in a good many different places," he says,
"but it seems I only feel at home somewhere along this spine of
the Rockies."
It is also where he's most comfortable as a writer.
"I know the speech patterns. I know when the constellations head
off the horizon at what time of year. I know what grasses are by looking
at the seed heads. It gives me a certain shorthand," he says. "A
good many of our writers have written their stories from the place they
knew best. Š This is the place that I know the most about."
That knowledge is Spragg's strength, according to Haruf.
"He's absolutely determined to tell the truth of his people and
places," Haruf says. "There's a lot of romanticism about the
West and his stories are a good corrective. His primary characters have
a clear-eyed view of the world. They're not defeated by harshness."
It's also what allows readers in other parts of the world (his work
has been translated into 15 languages) to connect with Spragg's stories.
It may be an Oscar-nominated filmmaker from Sweden, or as in Holleran's
case, "a New Jersey gal who moved to Westchester."
"There's no doubt in my mind that the best part of making An Unfinished
Life was meeting Mark and Virginia. They are people that I will know
my whole life and they're people that I feel so supremely comfortable
with. And, you know, we live very different lives," Holleran says.
"But we're united in a lot of ways in the way we look at the world
and that's what a great novelist does. They make the connection of people
who are different from them or have never seen the places they write
about, but find a way to make people see and understand."
A late bloomer
After Spragg's mother's death he was going through her things and found
a baby book for him and his brother. At about 8 years old, his mother
had noted that Spragg said he wanted to be a novelist when he grew up.
All through high school and college he aspired to be a writer. He kept
journals and continued to read from his father's library. He had some
short stories published in his 20s, but not enough to make a living.
He taught for a time, but found that teaching used the same creative
muscles he needed as a writer. He would often come home too tired to
write. So, he looked for jobs that used different muscles. This led
to working on oil rigs, wrangling and shoeing horses, building fences,
guiding in mountains and working as a carpenter.
"I would often come home physically exhausted, but with an imagination
teeming with stories," Spragg says. "I was young enough that
with dinner, a shower and a pot of coffee I could write to 2 or 3 o'clock
in the morning."
In his 30s, he met Ron Bishop, a friend of John Steinbeck and a screenwriter,
who encouraged Spragg to try his hand at a screenplay. "I did,
and the damn thing sold," Spragg recalls.
Other sales followed. Some scripts became movies; others languished
in development. The income they generated was good.
At 40, after a decade of writing scripts, Spragg realized he had spent
all that time crafting screenplays, not prose. So he stopped. He began
to write short stories again, then moved back to Cody to take care of
his dying mother.
"One of the things that shocked me the most was the number of things
about her life that she regretted," says Spragg, who wrote his
memoir Where the Rivers Change Direction to show his mother how extraordinary
she was. It was published and she saw it two months before her death.
The memoir won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Award in 2000
for non-fiction the year that Haruf won the fiction award for Plainsong.
They met at the awards ceremony.
"The stories he told about himself were so riveting and engaging
and brought you into that kind of life," Haruf says. "I was
so enthralled by it. The lyricism of his writing was extraordinary."
Spragg's first novel, The Fruit of Stone, followed in 2002, and An Unfinished
Life in 2005. He's working on a third novel.
"I think I'm able to do some things with dialogue now that I wouldn't
have been able to do had I not spent so many years trying to convey
stories simply through dialogue. But do I wish I would have spent that
10 years continuing to write prose? In many ways, I wish I had, but
Š," he says, his voice trailing off, the thought unfinished.
"I'm glad I'm able to write what I do now and hopefully, given
a long enough life, will make up for that."
Courtesy of Batavia Newspapers Corporation