The Oregonian
Sept. 4, 2005
Review by Jeff Baker
ERASING LINES BETWEEN ART AND LIFE
Craig Lesley buried his father during a forest fire. The fire roared in the hills above the cemetery and smoke stung Lesley's eyes as his brother Ormand read from the Bible. In the rugged country around Monument, the flames burned through many of the juniper fence posts that Lesley's father had punched into the hard ground years earlier.
Rudell Lesley abandoned his family when Craig was 8 months old. He said he had to go to Molalla to get a flashlight and never came back. Craig didn't see him until he was 15 and in the hospital after being run over by a mint chopper; the visit sent him into deep shock. He saw his father only a few more times before he was 40 and never really knew the man who gave him his name and left him.
It's no stretch to say that Lesley's conflicted feelings about his father have colored his life and driven his art. He circled the subject in his four novels and now tackles it head-on in "Burning Fence: A Western Memoir of Fatherhood" (St. Martin's Press, $24.95, 357 pages). It's honest and explicit and pushes at the limits of what Lesley knows about himself, his family, and the hard, beautiful land where he grew up.
All of Lesley's novels are autobiographical, written "close to the bone," as he puts it. "The Sky Fisherman" (1995) is about growing up in Madras around his uncle's sporting goods store. "Storm Riders" (2000) is about his experiences raising Wade White Fish, a Native American cousin of his first wife who suffered from the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome. Instead of relying on his memory, Lesley would interview his relatives, go back to the Eastern Oregon towns he lived in and do research, "get out in the field and poke around and eat pie."
He was building toward something.
A beloved teacher at Clackamas Community College and Willamette University and now Portland State, a winner of three Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Awards, a mentor and friend to dozens of aspiring writers, Lesley is the bright side of Oregon literature. He studied with Raymond Carver and shares Carver's clean, open style and empathy for those who live and work in the small towns of the Northwest. He knows everyone, never turns down an invitation to read or speak, and keeps any unkind thoughts about others to himself.
Eight years ago, he wrote an article for Men's Journal about a murder in Monument that had parallels to the 1919 murder of Martin C. Lesley, his uncle and namesake (Martin is Craig Lesley's first name). Here he was in the town where his father spent much of his life, ready to poke around and armed with a lifetime of questions. Something had to happen.
"It was the logical next step," Lesley said about "Burning Fence." "The memoir informs the novels. It makes sense. I wanted my daughters to see that half of the family, the Eastern Oregon half, and of course I wanted to know what my father was like. He's always been something of a mystery and an enigma and also something of a relic of the vanishing west, of a way of life that doesn't really exist anymore."
It's also a great story of Eastern Oregon. Craig Lesley grew up in The Dalles, Pendleton, Baker City and Madras, raised by a single mother who worked at the Umatilla Army Depot and the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. There aren't a lot of writers from Eastern Oregon and not a lot of books about the people who live there. It is Lesley's obsession, one he hides behind his genial nature, to do right by them in his books.
"It's a hardscrabble place with a lot of difficulties and unemployment, but the people there face their problems with real generosity and humor," he said. "A lot of people in Portland and the valley, and certainly a lot of people who've moved here from New Jersey or somewhere, don't know what it's like. I know when I read 'Winter in the Blood' by James Welch that I wanted to write about Eastern Oregon the way he wrote about the Montana High Line."
It's easy to forget that Oregon was settled only a few generations ago and much of the state didn't have electricity or indoor plumbing until well into the 20th century. The recent history of the state can be traced in one family. Craig Lesley's daughters grew up in Portland and went to an Ivy League school. Newton Lesley, Rudell's father and Craig's grandfather, was a miner and tavern owner who fled Idaho after some trouble with vigilantes and wound up in Tillamook, where he married 15-year-old Anna Jackson when he was 40. They had seven children before moving to Monument, then had five more while Newton traveled up and down the West Coast in the grip of gold fever. Anna wrote in her diary that she had a baby at home for 29 years straight.
Rudell did a little mining, too, and worked as a security guard at the Umatilla Army Depot. He served in the Army during World War II, fighting the Germans across France, "a genuine war hero," said his son. His real talent was for building fences and poaching game, though. He spent most of his time in the woods, trapping coyote and hunting elk without regard for the season. A crack shot, he once killed five elk with five shots and another time said he ran into Bigfoot.
After he left Craig's mother, he married a 15-year-old, too, and had four children with her. Like his father, he left them in a cabin while he went to bars or to his elk camp. His son Ormand dropped out of school and built fences with his father, who worked him to the bone and wouldn't buy him new shoes. "I don't need a horse, I have Ormand," Rudell would say, then laugh.
Craig Lesley's mother took Craig back to her parents' house in The Dalles after Rudell left. They took in a boarder who soon became Craig's stepfather and who sexually abused him. It's one thing to write novels based closely on your life and another to reveal your personal history in a memoir, but Lesley didn't hesitate.
"I didn't linger on it," he said. "It wasn't repressed, I knew about it all along, and it was short-lived, really part of his controlling personality. It was the psychological abuse that was really damaging -- he had a way of undercutting you that was really harsh."
Lesley's mother had a daughter with her new husband but left him soon afterwards for a better life in Madras and then Woodland, Wash., where Craig finished high school. He went to Whitman College and to graduate school in Massachusetts before returning to Oregon to begin his teaching and writing career.
His first marriage ended in divorce, but he kept Wade White Fish, determined to raise the boy at a time when there was no knowledge of fetal alcohol syndrome and its corrosive effects. After Wade stabbed a dog, Lesley took him to Monument, thinking the quiet life would do the boy good and would help him connect with his father. Wade set a pile of Rudell's fenceposts on fire and ran away; Rudell used his tracking skills to find Wade the next morning and gave Craig a gun when he went into an abandoned building after Wade.
Wade grew into an unpredictable, difficult teen who stole more than 70 cars without regard for the consequences. Craig eventually gave up Wade to a family that dealt with troubled youths and remains in contact with him. Rudell got a little closer to Craig's family as the years went by but resisted attempts by Craig, the son he called "the professor," to find out why he abandoned his family all those years ago.
"I was never going to get an answer," Lesley said. "Whether that was from complete indifference or lack of communication on his part, I don't know."
Lesley is 60, old enough to remember Madras before it was a bedroom community for Bend and Baker City when it was just plain Baker. Eastern Oregon is changing, he said, and people are moving in and buying up land. There are seven millionaires in the Monument valley now and big-time hunting outfitters who charge thousands of dollars for what his father used to do at an elk camp on Sunflower Flat. Some counties in Eastern Oregon don't have too many more people than they did 50 years ago, and the people who live there, or used to live there, haven't changed much, either.
"I wanted to take down the firewall between my fiction and my life and say, 'This is who I am,' " Lesley said. "A lot of people know me as a community college teacher, a writer, someone whose books they might have read, but they don't know the back story. I wanted to bring that to life."
Lesley reads from "Burning Fence" at a publication party at 7 p.m. Sept. 13 at McMenamins Kennedy School, 5736 N.E. 33rd Ave.; at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 18 at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St; and 7:30 p.m. Sept. 21 at Annie Bloom's Books, 7834 S.W. Capitol Highway.
Jeff Baker: 503-221-8165; jbaker@news.oregonian.com.
Sept. 4, 2005
Review by Jeff Baker
ERASING LINES BETWEEN ART AND LIFE
Craig Lesley buried his father during a forest fire. The fire roared in the hills above the cemetery and smoke stung Lesley's eyes as his brother Ormand read from the Bible. In the rugged country around Monument, the flames burned through many of the juniper fence posts that Lesley's father had punched into the hard ground years earlier.
Rudell Lesley abandoned his family when Craig was 8 months old. He said he had to go to Molalla to get a flashlight and never came back. Craig didn't see him until he was 15 and in the hospital after being run over by a mint chopper; the visit sent him into deep shock. He saw his father only a few more times before he was 40 and never really knew the man who gave him his name and left him.
It's no stretch to say that Lesley's conflicted feelings about his father have colored his life and driven his art. He circled the subject in his four novels and now tackles it head-on in "Burning Fence: A Western Memoir of Fatherhood" (St. Martin's Press, $24.95, 357 pages). It's honest and explicit and pushes at the limits of what Lesley knows about himself, his family, and the hard, beautiful land where he grew up.
All of Lesley's novels are autobiographical, written "close to the bone," as he puts it. "The Sky Fisherman" (1995) is about growing up in Madras around his uncle's sporting goods store. "Storm Riders" (2000) is about his experiences raising Wade White Fish, a Native American cousin of his first wife who suffered from the effects of fetal alcohol syndrome. Instead of relying on his memory, Lesley would interview his relatives, go back to the Eastern Oregon towns he lived in and do research, "get out in the field and poke around and eat pie."
He was building toward something.
A beloved teacher at Clackamas Community College and Willamette University and now Portland State, a winner of three Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Awards, a mentor and friend to dozens of aspiring writers, Lesley is the bright side of Oregon literature. He studied with Raymond Carver and shares Carver's clean, open style and empathy for those who live and work in the small towns of the Northwest. He knows everyone, never turns down an invitation to read or speak, and keeps any unkind thoughts about others to himself.
Eight years ago, he wrote an article for Men's Journal about a murder in Monument that had parallels to the 1919 murder of Martin C. Lesley, his uncle and namesake (Martin is Craig Lesley's first name). Here he was in the town where his father spent much of his life, ready to poke around and armed with a lifetime of questions. Something had to happen.
"It was the logical next step," Lesley said about "Burning Fence." "The memoir informs the novels. It makes sense. I wanted my daughters to see that half of the family, the Eastern Oregon half, and of course I wanted to know what my father was like. He's always been something of a mystery and an enigma and also something of a relic of the vanishing west, of a way of life that doesn't really exist anymore."
It's also a great story of Eastern Oregon. Craig Lesley grew up in The Dalles, Pendleton, Baker City and Madras, raised by a single mother who worked at the Umatilla Army Depot and the Warm Springs Indian Reservation. There aren't a lot of writers from Eastern Oregon and not a lot of books about the people who live there. It is Lesley's obsession, one he hides behind his genial nature, to do right by them in his books.
"It's a hardscrabble place with a lot of difficulties and unemployment, but the people there face their problems with real generosity and humor," he said. "A lot of people in Portland and the valley, and certainly a lot of people who've moved here from New Jersey or somewhere, don't know what it's like. I know when I read 'Winter in the Blood' by James Welch that I wanted to write about Eastern Oregon the way he wrote about the Montana High Line."
It's easy to forget that Oregon was settled only a few generations ago and much of the state didn't have electricity or indoor plumbing until well into the 20th century. The recent history of the state can be traced in one family. Craig Lesley's daughters grew up in Portland and went to an Ivy League school. Newton Lesley, Rudell's father and Craig's grandfather, was a miner and tavern owner who fled Idaho after some trouble with vigilantes and wound up in Tillamook, where he married 15-year-old Anna Jackson when he was 40. They had seven children before moving to Monument, then had five more while Newton traveled up and down the West Coast in the grip of gold fever. Anna wrote in her diary that she had a baby at home for 29 years straight.
Rudell did a little mining, too, and worked as a security guard at the Umatilla Army Depot. He served in the Army during World War II, fighting the Germans across France, "a genuine war hero," said his son. His real talent was for building fences and poaching game, though. He spent most of his time in the woods, trapping coyote and hunting elk without regard for the season. A crack shot, he once killed five elk with five shots and another time said he ran into Bigfoot.
After he left Craig's mother, he married a 15-year-old, too, and had four children with her. Like his father, he left them in a cabin while he went to bars or to his elk camp. His son Ormand dropped out of school and built fences with his father, who worked him to the bone and wouldn't buy him new shoes. "I don't need a horse, I have Ormand," Rudell would say, then laugh.
Craig Lesley's mother took Craig back to her parents' house in The Dalles after Rudell left. They took in a boarder who soon became Craig's stepfather and who sexually abused him. It's one thing to write novels based closely on your life and another to reveal your personal history in a memoir, but Lesley didn't hesitate.
"I didn't linger on it," he said. "It wasn't repressed, I knew about it all along, and it was short-lived, really part of his controlling personality. It was the psychological abuse that was really damaging -- he had a way of undercutting you that was really harsh."
Lesley's mother had a daughter with her new husband but left him soon afterwards for a better life in Madras and then Woodland, Wash., where Craig finished high school. He went to Whitman College and to graduate school in Massachusetts before returning to Oregon to begin his teaching and writing career.
His first marriage ended in divorce, but he kept Wade White Fish, determined to raise the boy at a time when there was no knowledge of fetal alcohol syndrome and its corrosive effects. After Wade stabbed a dog, Lesley took him to Monument, thinking the quiet life would do the boy good and would help him connect with his father. Wade set a pile of Rudell's fenceposts on fire and ran away; Rudell used his tracking skills to find Wade the next morning and gave Craig a gun when he went into an abandoned building after Wade.
Wade grew into an unpredictable, difficult teen who stole more than 70 cars without regard for the consequences. Craig eventually gave up Wade to a family that dealt with troubled youths and remains in contact with him. Rudell got a little closer to Craig's family as the years went by but resisted attempts by Craig, the son he called "the professor," to find out why he abandoned his family all those years ago.
"I was never going to get an answer," Lesley said. "Whether that was from complete indifference or lack of communication on his part, I don't know."
Lesley is 60, old enough to remember Madras before it was a bedroom community for Bend and Baker City when it was just plain Baker. Eastern Oregon is changing, he said, and people are moving in and buying up land. There are seven millionaires in the Monument valley now and big-time hunting outfitters who charge thousands of dollars for what his father used to do at an elk camp on Sunflower Flat. Some counties in Eastern Oregon don't have too many more people than they did 50 years ago, and the people who live there, or used to live there, haven't changed much, either.
"I wanted to take down the firewall between my fiction and my life and say, 'This is who I am,' " Lesley said. "A lot of people know me as a community college teacher, a writer, someone whose books they might have read, but they don't know the back story. I wanted to bring that to life."
Lesley reads from "Burning Fence" at a publication party at 7 p.m. Sept. 13 at McMenamins Kennedy School, 5736 N.E. 33rd Ave.; at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 18 at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St; and 7:30 p.m. Sept. 21 at Annie Bloom's Books, 7834 S.W. Capitol Highway.
Jeff Baker: 503-221-8165; jbaker@news.oregonian.com.