Novelist Ron Hansen explores how literature answers questions at Landiss Lecture

“Writers are meant to be out in the world,” Ron Hansen, best-selling author of novels and short stories, told the audience gathered Tuesday, March 23, for the annual spring Landiss Lecture. There are too many “interesting people to ask questions of” to cloister oneself in full-time writing, he advised.

 

Hansen has been asking questions, especially about historical people, for years, resulting in his novels Atticus, (a finalist for the National Book Award), The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award), Mariette in Ecstasy, Desperadoes, and Isn't It Romantic?, along with a collection of short stories and a book for children.

 

Hansen said he usually begins writing a novel with one question he thinks he knows the answer to and one question he is trying to solve. But often by the time the novel is done, he realizes he’s answered a question he didn’t even know he was pondering.

 

The public may be most familiar with the 2007 movie, “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” based on Hansen’s novel. His books Mariette in Ecstasy and Atticus have also been made into movies.

 

Hansen told the audience that he enjoyed working with filmmakers and admired how hard they work at their craft. For “Jesse James” he was involved in casting and a few rewrites.

 

Hansen's most recent book, Exiles, tells the story of a tragic shipwreck that prompted Gerard Manley Hopkins to break years of "elected silence" with an outpouring of dazzling poetry. The New York Times Book Review called the book an "astonishingly deft and provocative novel, one that dramatizes the passionate inner search of religious life and makes it accessible to us in a way that only great art can do."

 

Hansen is the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S. J., Professor of Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University. His education was at Creighton University, the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and Stanford University, where he held the Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship. He has also received fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lyndhurst Foundation.