Author, Author New Projects Keep Crutcher Busy

Before you read another word, there’s something you need to know: If you don’t get out of bed and head for the Children’s Corner Bookshop RIGHT NOW (actually, before 10 a.m.), you’ll miss an important literary event.

That’s where and when Chris Crutcher will be reading from his new novel, “Ironman” (Greenwillow, 192 pages, $15).

Then again, if you don’t make it, Crutcher may not mind all that much. For if anyone should be able to understand the notion of slowing down, it’s this Spokane-based counselor-triathlete-novelist/ budding screenwriter.

After all, doubling as a family therapist and best-selling novelist for the past dozen years has been a trial. Only now has he finally taken the step that most writers merely dream of: quitting his day job.

That happened three months ago.

Of course, understanding a notion isn’t the same thing as living it. These days, Crutcher is as busy as ever.

“Ironman,” his seventh young-adult novel (and eighth overall), is on the stands, and he is on the road in support of it. He’s busy at work on a second adult novel, a non-fiction study of therapy and a screenplay for his novel “Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes.” Plus he’s been meeting with the producers who, even before it saw print, wanted to film “Ironman.”

In addition, a movie based on a story from his short-fiction collection “Athletic Shorts,” and which stars George C. Scott and Kathy Bates, will premiere sometime this summer.

On top of all that, Crutcher still keeps his hand in the therapy business that, all along, has fueled his work.

“Actually, I resigned so that I could get the paperwork side of it out of there,” he said over coffee last week. “I can still work with clients, and I can still work with DSHS (the Department of Social and Health Services) on the Child Protection Team. And I probably will always have a few clients, although I may not do it for hire. I have kids I see just because they get referred to me by some teacher I know.”

His point is simple: He likes being a therapist; he just doesn’t like the incidental stuff that goes along with the job.

Both attitudes show up regularly in his work. From his first effort, the 1983 novel “Running Loose,” to “Ironman,” Crutcher has explored the world of adolescence and all its parts.

Common themes have included domineering authority figures, rebellion, physical and emotional abuse, sexuality, self-reliance and self-hate and all the other emotions that come up as teens try to assert themselves in this experience we call life.

At the top of the list lies anger. In “Ironman,” anger containment is a key, maybe the key, issue. Crutcher’s protagonist, Beauregard “Bo” Brewster is locked in a fierce struggle with his father over who has the more appropriate take on survival. Bo’s dad is convinced that a person has to bend to the demands of life, while Bo is willing - indeed he’s anxious - to fight for what he wants.

So when Bo quits the football team, incurs the wrath of the neanderthal football coach (a favorite Crutcher target) and seeks to prove himself by competing in the local Ironman triathlon, his father decides to teach him a lesson. Losing, so goes the older man’s specious reasoning, will be good for Bo.

And both come at the battle with their anger in full bloom.

The path to health - for Bo, anyway - is revealed when he is forced to attend an angermanagement class facilitated by a Zen-cowboy teacher named Mr. Nakatani. As a member of “Nak’s Pack,” Bo begins to see what it’s taken an entire lifetime for Crutcher himself to see.

In fact, the image of the angermanagement group, and how that group was representative of the work he himself has done, served as Crutcher’s entry into Bo’s world.

“I think that came from years and years of doing anger management and real in-depth work, probing the depth of men who have been in shameful situations and who have always been domestically violent with their kids or whatever,” Crutcher said. The personal tie, he added, came from “always finding that connection to myself, that connection to my own anger, that connection to anything I’ve ever done in my life that I wish I could sweep under the universal rug. And having a real powerful sense of ‘There but for the grace of God…”’

Crutcher’s tie to Bo is heartfelt. As he writes in the book’s preface, “… Bo Brewster’s father is my father to the eighth power; he is unreasonable reason. Bo fights with unreasonable passion.”

In the book, for example, Bo is commanded by his father to open and close a door 10 times quietly. It’s a scene that Crutcher experienced in real life, though with one big difference: Crutcher, teeth clenched, did as he was told. Bo doesn’t.

By writing about it, Crutcher was able to relive, and therefore redefine, the moment. He shows us the event for what it really was: simple powertripping.

“So much of the difficulty between kids and parents is stuff misnamed,” Crutcher said. Yet when that misnaming occurs long enough, it sticks. Which is how, according to Crutcher, fear becomes mistaken for respect.

Crutcher’s messages to that end have earned him awards (he’s a perennial American Library Association favorite), good sales (his books have been translated into German, Dutch, Spanish and Chinese) and positive reviews among critics, the public and even in hardhearted Hollywood.

Dealing with Hollywood is a new experience for Crutcher, who has trouble figuring out just exactly who works for whom. But it excites him, just as writing still does.

Still, he says, no matter how stressful his schedule gets, he’ll never lose the desire to do actual counseling. For one thing, he wants to pay back the field for what it has provided him.

For another, staying personally involved is as good for him as he may be for his clients.

“There’s this piece about staying down, right down on ground level, that’s real important to me,” he said. “There’s a line from ‘Ironman’ about a kid who gets a bike and says, ‘If you want to see how something works, look at it broken.’ That’s what this is all about. You can’t ask for a better 50-yard-line seat to your own life than being allowed into other people’s stories.”

Especially when you have the talent to make those stories your own.