I first met Robert Olmstead in January 1987. He was the teacher of my introductory fiction workshop at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Back then you were allowed to smoke cigarettes in class, and if you were a person like me, you not only smoked cigarettes in class, you chain-smoked cigarettes in class.
I should explain what it meant to be a “person like me”: a person like me was a person who tried too hard. And I was the worst kind of person who tried too hard: I was the kind of person who didn’t know what person I was trying too hard to be, and so I tried too hard to be a lot of them. And one of the people I tried too hard to be was Robert Olmstead.
At that point, Olmstead had written two books—the short story collection and the novel —and soon after he would publish his novel . These three books were, and, as far as I’m concerned, still are, among the very best fiction to come out of northern New England: they are tough, wise, terse; they are violent of deed and lovely of phrase. They are, like the winters in Olmstead’s native New Hampshire, fearsome.
As was Olmstead himself: with his big red beard and his flannel and his taciturnity, he seemed to me the quintessential northern American writer. Which is to say, he was what I wanted to see, and what I wanted to be. Which is to say, I wanted to be authentic, just like Olmstead.
As everyone knows—well, apparently not —you cannot try to be authentic. I mean, you can try, but you will fail. And wh.