‘Sky’ Writer Portland Author Craig Lesley Earns Growing Acclaim For His Three Novels About The West And Northwest

Craig Lesley is a bit groggy. Although it’s 2:30 in the afternoon, he’s just awakened from a nap.

But the critically acclaimed Portland author recovers quickly enough. After all, he reasons, this is Wednesday, so the town outside must be Boise, this hotel must be the Red Lion Inn, and in just a few hours he’ll read from his new novel “The Sky Fisherman” at someplace called The Book Shop.

That must mean, too, that the caller on the phone is a reporter from Spokane. “I haven’t completely gotten all my energy back,” he admits.

Lesley blames his fatigue on those late nights that are so much a part of any book-reading tour, including the one he’s on now, the latest leg of which will bring him to Spokane on Wednesday. But he blames his recent hip-replacement operation, too.

Which begs an obvious question: A hip replacement seems like a strange ailment for a 50-year-old author and college literature professor, whose work boasts a prominent place among contemporary Northwest writers; aren’t such procedures more typical of professional ballplayers and senior citizens?

“But I was run over by a peppermint chopper,” Lesley explains. “I think I’m the only … I hope I’m the only writer in America who’s ever been run over by a peppermint chopper.”

Hard to say. But this reporter knows a natural segue when he hears one. For the reference to peppermint recalls a scene from “The Sky Fisherman,” a coming-of-age story that is Lesley’s third novel. And it is a scene that echoes Lesley’s own life.

The book’s protagonist, a high-school junior named Culver, is traveling with his mother from one small Northwest town to another. Driving the truck is Culver’s Uncle Jake, the brother of the boy’s late father.

Jake stops alongside a field and directs his nephew’s attention to the expanse of dark green stems and leaves.

“Smell that,” he says. “Mint. Right in this country we grow half the peppermint in the whole damn United States.”

That Lesley did not write a scene in which a peppermint chopper - a machine that is towed behind a tractor - runs over anyone shouldn’t surprise those familiar with the first rule of literary criticism: Never confuse the plot of a novel with the author’s actual life.

Still, Lesley admits that he included numerous autobiographical references in “The Sky Fisherman.” Among them:

“The Sky Fisherman” is set in an area that might be Oregon, Washington, Idaho, northeastern California or even Montana. Only a couple of references to the Deschutes River are evidence that the setting is, indeed, Oregon. In real life, Lesley was born in The Dalles and raised in a series of smaller Oregon towns, including Pendleton, Baker, Madras and Hermiston.

In the book, Culver is raised by a woman who, though briefly married, carries herself like a single parent. Lesley’s own father deserted his family just two weeks after Craig’s birth, leaving his mother to raise him alone.

Jake’s character is a man’s man, owner of a hardware store and a river guide. Lesley’s real-life uncle, Otto Lange, owned a store and ran river trips. “He was a legendary fishing guide on the Deschutes River, and he was like a father to me,” Lesley says.

One of the book’s key sequences involves a tragic mill fire that threatens to engulf the whole town and ends up killing two men. Lesley based the fire on a killer industrial fire in Madras. Yet he admits that he could have used any one of several similar disasters.

“When I was doing newspaper research, I was amazed at how many fires there have been,” Lesley says. “At one time or another, it seems the whole West has burned - and been rebuilt, of course.”

The fact is, despite the book’s more obvious biographical sources, Lesley was after something bigger than mere memoir.

“I was trying to make it, in a sense, more universal than the other books,” he says.

Those books, “Winterkill” and “River Song,” are a two-part exploration of contemporary Native American life. They involve a Nez Perce rodeo rider who drifts from job to job, rodeo competition to Columbia River fishing site, and are geographically specific to the Northwest.

Lesley’s aim with “The Sky Fisherman” was to make it representative of the entire West, in some respects the entire country. And, at least for some readers, his efforts have worked.

“The copy editor even thought that the book took place in New Hampshire, which I thought was real interesting,” he says. “That it could be Eastern Washington or Idaho, eastern California or Montana was exactly the idea that I wanted to give it.” He wanted the setting to be “any place that celebrated the vitality of small towns and the people who make up the backbone of those towns.”

And to Lesley, one of the hallmarks of the Western experience is the pride that Westerners have in their small-town roots.

“When I was in the Midwest and the East, people were apologetic about coming from small towns,” he says. “And I think out here, people will say, ‘Look, I come from such-and-such a town and our girls just won the state softball tournament.’ I think that people cling to those small-town, bedrock values in a way that they don’t in other parts of the country.”

His other intent was to celebrate the working class, those people who toil in relative anonymity yet who are “the quieter heroes or heroines” of everyday life.

“Too often I think working people are regarded by writers as, ‘It’s a six-pack of beer and depression,”’ he says.

Lesley’s ambition may be greater than his ability, and “The Sky Fisherman” could disappoint some fans of his first two books. Then again, his honoring of small towns and the people who live there, not to mention his way with a phrase, is already earning the book a fair amount of book-blurb praise.

“‘The Sky Fisherman’ is rich in the way working people seek meaning in their lives - in their friends and families, their culture and tradition, and in the work of their hands,” wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Robert Olen Butler (“A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain”). “Craig Lesley is one of our most generous writers, giving us a clear prose and a sense of everyday grace,” added Ivan Doig (“This House of Sky”).

However you view “The Sky Fisherman,” Lesley, who has taught English at Clackamas Community College for the past 20 years, remains a major voice in the literary movement that, intended or not, is redefining the new West.

Along with the likes of Ivan Doig and James Welch, Mary Clearman Blew and Deirdre McNamer, Sherman Alexie and Terry Tempest Williams - just to name a few - Lesley is telling stories that provide a more comprehensive view of western history.

“The new literature, I think, includes people who represent other cultures,” Lesley says. “The difference is that we’re beginning to understand the diversity and the depth of the West as opposed to the stories of the lone hero. And I think a lot of the literature of the new West celebrates a sense of community.”

Both the community that exists and the one that we remember.

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