Award-winning Writer Scott Blackwood Visits DU
Linda Tate

Fiction writer Scott Blackwood visited the University of Denver on Wednesday, October 3. The author of an award-winning collection of stories and a forthcoming novel, Blackwood serves as the Program Coordinator of the Undergraduate Writing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. His visit was cosponsored by the University Writing Program and the Department of English. Blackwoods forthcoming novel, We Agreed to Meet Just Here, received the 2007 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Award Series in the Novel. It will be published in 2009 by New Issues Press. The novel draws from the same set of characters portrayed in Blackwoods 2001 short story collection, In the Shadow of Our House, published by SMU Press. Blackwoods fiction has also been published in the Gettysburg Review, Boston Review, Southwest Review, Gulf Coast, Other Voices, and Whetstone.

As part of his visit, Blackwood presented his work in a reading at Evans Chapel. After sharing selections from his forthcoming novel, We Agreed to Meet Just Here, Blackwood answered questions from the audience about his fiction and about his writing process.

Both the short story collection and the novel are set in Austins Deep Eddy neighborhood. The novel is told in what Blackwood calls plural first-person voicethe collective voice of the neighborhood. Originally a wilderness area, the Deep Eddy neighborhood has a unique history. Once home to the Tonkawa Indians, it eventually became a camping and carnival site, an edge-of-civilization streetcar destination. A huge boulder in the river was a source of fascination for many visitors and residents until it was dynamited. Now, after these many chapters in its past, Deep Eddy is a close-in urban neighborhood. All of this history, says Blackwood, is shimmering in the background of his novel, a water that runs under that, another kind of reality running underneath the surface.

A longtime resident of Austin, Blackwood says he sets his fiction where I live and know best. One of the things about Austin, says Blackwood, is that it embodies all the contradictions of Texas. Austins population has doubled since Ive lived there. Its high-tech. There are new ideas of livingpeople coming in from the West Coast, many Californians. At the same time, says Blackwood, you have myths of Texas and the history of Texas as a frontier. This creates a kind of friction between the land and the people.

Blackwoods work on the novel was supported in part by a prestigious Ralph Johnston Memorial Fellowship at the Dobie Paisano Ranch, just west of Austin. The 2004-2005 fellowship allowed Blackwood to spend six months at the 254-acre ranch, formerly owned by author J. Frank Dobie. Blackwood says it was a challenge to get used to having so much time and quiet to write. You come in with a lot of furniture in your head, he notes. You need to unpack this furniture and get down to what you wanted to do. Ultimately, Blackwood found that the ranchs geography forced him to buckle down and write. When the creek got high enough, he says, I wasnt going anywhere!

While at DU, Blackwood also met with the staff of DUs Writing and Research Center (WRC). In conversation with the WRC staff, Blackwood noted that, in his nine years at UT-Austins very busy Writing Center, he has been successful in changing its image as a place associated with crisis to one that promotes positive writing experiences. Writing studios designed to help people submit their writing to publications and writing workshops on a variety of topics are held across the campus. Under Blackwoods leadership, the Writing Center has become a cool place to work. Eliana Schonberg, the director of DUs WRC, worked with Blackwood at UT-Austins Writing Center and was very pleased that he was able to meet with members of her staff.

Though Blackwoods visit was brief, the DU response to his work was enthusiastic. Books were available for sale after the Evans Chapel readingand they very quickly sold out, disappointing a number of audience members who werent able to leave with a signed copy. But all left with rich stories ringing in their ears and the certainty that theyll be hearing more from Scott Blackwood in the years to come.

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