Story by Ruthie Wood
Newport’s indie bookstore, Charter Books, is celebrating the release of Float Up, Sing Down, the new collection of short stories from Laird Hunt, in an evening with the author on February 6 at 6PM. Set in the same rural Indiana town as his 2021 novel Zorrie (a National Book Award Finalist), the collection of fourteen stories takes place on one continuous day in 1982, the year that Hunt first set foot in Indiana.
Laird Hunt has called many places “home.” Born in Singapore, he spent his childhood living internationally, spending time in London, the Netherlands, and France. As an adult, he spent time as a United Nations press officer and continued traveling worldwide. Now, he is an award-winning author and teaches in Brown University’s Literary Arts Program in Providence.
Although Hunt has led a life steeped in rich cultural experiences with a wide variety of human interaction – perfect character fodder for an author – his time spent in Indiana is the one chapter of his story that Hunt can’t seem to escape.
Indiana is Hunt’s troubling siren song. After his parent’s divorce, he was sent to live with his grandmother on the family farm in the state. “I arrived there at sort of a critical age,” Hunt recalls. “I was coming into myself, into my imagination at 13, and it was a great system shock, going from South Kensington, London, to Indiana.”
He took to becoming a Hoosier with the “zeal of a convert,” connecting to the landscape through deep family roots (the family farm existed since the mid-19th century) and to the community through his grandmother’s insistence that this was where he belonged.
Looking back on his past, Hunt is drawn to the “idea of return.” He recognizes that when he visits that rural country, he is now a stranger in a strange land; the politics have swung to extremism – a deep crimson red that had once been moderate in the 80s – and having ties to the heartland presented the author with the opportunity to “bearing witness” to people who are often neglected.
“I know the coasts, and I know the disdain and the disinterest for the Midwest,” Hunt says. “If you’re not mocking it, or your characters aren’t cooking crystal meth or involved in criminal activity – or if it’s not the urban part of the Midwest – then there’s just no interest. And I’m curious! A part of me wants to try and write my way into that space that’s been ignored – willfully ignored, I would say – by people I have spent a lot of time in the literary world.”
For Float Up, Sing Down, Hunt draws on inspiration from his life – memories, impressions, and the landscape of Clinton County, Indiana – but created a fictional town (Bright Creek) to separate his commentary and liberties taken within fiction from history and reality. Like chance meetings in real life, the character Zorrie from the namesake novel and a few others make cameo appearances in this collection.
For new readers, this means that these stories can be used as a good introduction to the world of Bright Creek and Zorrie, or the collection can be a standalone treat for those who have read and will recognize the characters from the novel. RSVP here for the Charter Books event. If you miss him at Newport, catch the author at Barrington Books on February 28.
