‘If you are going to find grace anywhere, it is going to be in art’

The Idaho Panhandle, where Emily Ruskovich grew up, is so isolated that it is in a different time zone from the rest of that state. The author, similarly, was hardly on the radar of most Irish readers until her debut novel, Idaho, became the surprise winner last week of the €100,000 International Dublin Literary Award.

Now the world in which she grew up, a physical wilderness which echoes the emotional wilderness in which her characters are forced to live, is set to become much more familiar territory.

“I lived in a beautiful, wild, dangerous place. Pine trees and wild phlox,” she says. “Honeysuckles and dust.” But just as good and evil, love and its opposite, co-exist in her novel, her world was also one of coyotes, ravens and garter snakes, smashed cars and dumped furniture left to rot in the woods.

Idaho is the love story of Ann and Wade, whose world fell apart when his first wife Jenny inexplicably murdered their daughter May and their other daughter June went missing in the confusion. Now Wade is losing his memory and his world is fragmenting again. Ann out of love is seeking to keep his past alive, terrible though some of it is.

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That the mysteries at the heart of the book are not resolved is not a deliberate withholding, says the author. “Why Jenny did what she did is not a secret that I’m intentionally keeping from readers. I feel that it is an action that has no explanation and that is the truth. There is not any reason that could be a reason for killing a child. It is just a mystery to me and I think to Jenny herself. So the secrets the book keeps aren’t from readers, they are things I wanted to be honest about not knowing or understanding fully myself.”

‘Deeply unsettling’

The novel began with a feeling, she says. When she was 23 she went with her parents to a remote mountain clearing to collect firewood. “As we were working, I had a feeling that something terrible had once happened in this clearing. It was a sunny day, and the air smelled sweet, and yet I felt something deeply unsettling, and I began to imagine what it could be.”

There is not any reason that could be a reason for killing a child

A child who went missing locally was another trigger. “Even though I never knew her, once she was gone, I felt her absence deeply in myself. We all did. We saw her face everywhere on the missing posters, and her face is a part of my heart still, imprinted there. I will never, ever forget her.”

Alice Munro’s short story Dimensions helped her find her story’s shape and structure. Munro and fellow Idaho author Marilynne Robinson, one of her college tutors, were the biggest influences on her writing.

“I love the quiet intensity of their scenes; I love the infinite complexity of their characters. I like that the most intense moments I’ve ever encountered in fiction take place inside of seemingly mundane moments and common places.”

It felt like an extra gift to her that Robinson’s Housekeeping was about Idaho. “It was such a sacred experience to me that I wanted to read all of it outside in the mountains.”

Unlike Robinson, she is not religious, but some things are very sacred to her, she says. “The novel is about a lot of things that a religious writer might be interested in exploring – redemption, forgiveness. I believe very deeply in the idea of a soul. A lot of my novel is about Wade is losing his identity but is he still Wade? Yes, he is. He survives in Ann.”

Path to redemption

Ruskovich believes in art as a force for good. As a path to redemption it is a recurring motif in Idaho. “I think of art as a saving force. I just think that is a truth – art is the best of us. If you are going to find a bit of grace anywhere it is going to be in art.”

Female friendship and sisterhood are other saving graces in the novel. “I think that the love and comfort Elizabeth and Jenny find in each other is very inspiring to me, and I feel that Ann’s kindness toward Jenny in the end is a very hopeful thing.”

I think of art as a saving force

Idaho’s path to the world’s richest prize for a novel written in English was as steep and narrow and twisting as a mountain road. It took six years to write. Long before a single librarian in Bruges nominated it, making it eligible for the judges to consider, the story was almost published in embryonic form as a novella in a short story collection.

Almost at the last minute, at the copy editing stage, her editor asked her if it might not have the potential to be expanded into a novel. Two years before, her creative writing professor had said the same thing, but crucially now she had the confidence in her writing to accept the challenge.

“I realised that ever since that time, I had been writing the novel in my mind. I thought, oh my goodness, we have got to stop publication of this book, I have got to write this novel. I would have had all of these people inside of me, all these voices that would not have had a way out.”

Debt to family

If it takes a village to raise a writer, Ruskovich owes her greatest debt, she says, to her family. The song at the novel’s heart was written by her father, a secret she managed to keep from him until the final draft.

“My parents were my second readers, second only to Sam, my husband. I could not have written the novel without them. Not only because they gave me the childhood and experiences that encouraged my imagination, but also because they read my novel so many times and helped me through so many passages. I owe everything to my parents.

“They built me a ‘hovel’ in secret once. A little space in the woods where I could write. It was probably the greatest gift I had ever been given, that room of my own . . . When they gave it to me, they had just picked me up very late from the airport in Spokane, and driven me home to the mountain, so it was maybe 2am by the time we arrived. I had spent the first part of the summer away, and I had been having a difficult time in my life. And, strangely, out in the woods, I could see a light where there should not be a light. I didn’t understand what I was seeing.”