Michael Collins perfects the art of looking back while moving forward.
Collins, who teaches fiction for the Field’s End writing community this spring, is a marathon runner who specializes in “extreme” races like his recent Himalayan sprint at 15,000 feet. He’s also an author who has distilled fiction from every home he has left behind.
Collins acquired both his regard for physical stamina and his literary bent in the Irish rural community where he grew up, a place where farmers worked into their 70s, and TV took a back seat to literature.
“Books and education were very, very important,” Collins said. “Everyone was pushed toward books and reading.”
At 16, Collins left to come to the United States, living here illegally for a year before returning home.
His next foray Stateside was officially sanctioned; Collins attended college on scholarship at Notre Dame University in Indiana.
During the summer he ran races, Collins says, and, because he couldn’t work legally, “lived rough.”
Collins ran 16 miles a day, ending his run in a small town with a Studebaker factory. Collins noted the decay of the run-down place, and the contrast between the rich school and the rust belt entropy lodged in his imagination.
Later, Collins pursued a doctorate at University of Illinois in Chicago by day, and worked in a computer lab at night. Propinquity to the computers was all Collins needed to teach himself to program, a skill he parlayed into a job at Microsoft in Seattle in 1997.
“I moved out here telling no one I was a writer,” Collins said.
Like other Microsoft workers, Collins made money, but refused to let the standard 14-hour workday destroy his health.
He trained harder, running 15 miles a day on the Redmond hills near the corporation. He wrote freelance articles for “Gentlemen’s Quarterly” that paid for extreme runs in exotic places.
“It was a great experience to pick out faraway lands and have it all paid for,” Collins said.
In 1999, a book he had published in Europe about his illegal sojourn in the United States, “Emerald Underground,” took off and Collins was invited to speak at the Sorbonne.
“I went over and did a few events,” Collins said. “I told no one at work I was going. But it gave me a sense of purpose, that I was not losing something that meant a lot to me.”
Collins, still working full-time but energized by the European success, penned “The Keepers of Truth” in four months of writing at night.
“It was a reaction to finding that part of myself again,” Collins said.
“The Keepers of Truth” – on the short list of the 2000 Man Booker Prize for contemporary fiction – was set in a small industrial midwest town in the 1970s, as is his most-recent work, “The Resurrectionists,” just named Pacific Northwest Bookseller’s Association Novel of the Year for 2003.
With the perspective of distance, Collins reconstructed the seamy landscapes he ran through during his college years, towns studded with used-car lots and strip malls, dying places afflicted with post-industrial malaise.
He wrote about about the inhabitants, picking intelligent losers for protagonists in both books.
Making the working people he writes sound credible when they roll out words like “genesis” and “circumscribe” is a problem with which Collins admits he grapples.
In “The Keepers of Truth,” Collins resolved the difficulty by making his protagonist a reporter who had had a breakdown.
“I wrestled with it,” Collins said. “I gave him the mental trauma that made him achieve less in life than he might have otherwise.”
Finding his way through the fictional landscapes he has constructed gives him insight into how to help other writers read their own road maps, Collins says.
The workshop he gives this spring at Field’s End, the writing community affiliated with Bainbridge public library, is crafted to help writers lost in an unfinished manuscript articulate what their story is about and then assist them with revision.
Collins notes that his distance from the students’ work gives him helpful perspective, not unlike the advantage he enjoys as a writer in his double remove from the psychic landscapes of his adopted country – first as an Irishman, second as a mobile American.
“It is precisely because you are displaced that you can see,” Collins said. “Displacement may be the best lens.”
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Field’s End, a nonprofit writers’ community, opens registration for the spring session at an open house 7 p.m. Feb. 27 at the library.
Upcoming classes include:
• “Strategies to Unmask the Conscious/Subconscious Theme in Your Short Story or Novel,” taught by Booker Prize nominee Michael Collins
• “Dangerous Sentences,” a day-long workshop led by O.Henry winner David Long on the essential business of crafting sentences
• “Coming to Terms with the Place We Call Home,” a two-day workshop on writing compellingly about place led by Robert Michael Pyle, author of “Wintergreen.”
• “The Art of Poetry,” which brings six award-winning Northwest poets to present a session each on poetic craft. Teachers include Richard Kenney, Linda Bierds, John Willson, Colleen J. McElroy, Roger Fanning and Sam Hamill.
Spring classes run April-May. For more information, see www.fieldsend.org or call 842-4162.
