‘Beauty in those difficult lives’: Willy Vlautin, Jess Walter to take center stage for annual Get Lit festival

Writing is a bug Willy Vlautin caught at an early age. It’s a “sickness” even, he said.

The Reno-raised novelist did not come into his own along a traditional path. At 11, he started writing songs, although none of them were any good, he said. He just liked putting pen to paper and telling a good story.

Vlautin kept with it nonetheless, and had a few runs in what he describes as bad bands. Those who know the longtime author as a musician may be surprised to know performing his ballads, as elaborate and narrative as his books, did not come naturally. He was “almost clinically shy,” but he became a performer because no one wanted to learn all the words to his songs, he said.

“It killed me to be in front of people like that,” Vlautin said. “And so I started writing stories about 17, 18, because it was so private, and I didn’t bother anybody.”

When you are in a bad band, you are often bothering someone, Vlautin said. Practice in someone’s basement drives the parents upstairs mad. When you play at a bar and folks start leaving, no one is happy.

“Writing a story, it’s all work, and it’s peaceful, and you can fail in private,” Vlautin said. “And I loved it: I loved the rhythm of it, the work ethic of it. So I just kind of kept it to myself.”

Gone are the days of keeping it to himself. On Saturday, Vlautin, a longtime Portland-area resident, will join Spokane author Jess Walter for a Northwest Passages conversation about their craft, and Vlautin’s eighth novel, “The Left and the Lucky.” Their 7 p.m. chat at Bing Crosby Theater is the marquee event of this year’s annual Get Lit festival, and tickets have been going fast.

Vlautin is still a songwriter; he found success overseas with the alt-country band Richmond Fontaine, which released 11 studio albums and two EPs before its end in 2016. He now writes his deeply rich songs depicting everyday life and hardship in America for the Delines, which just wrapped up an eight show run in the United Kingdom.

It was an earlier tour in the UK with Richmond Fontaine that led him to meet his agent at 35. A few years later, Vlautin published his first novel, “The Motel Life,” following a pair of drifting, hard-knocks brothers in and around his hometown. Entering the publishing world was a challenge, he said. He had written a handful of novels at that point, but only ever showed them to friends here and there.

“I got off the road and I had to go home and decide if I wanted to be a failure at writing,” Vlautin said. “I had such a good time writing just for myself. I’m not worrying about good or bad, and no one likes trying too hard at something they’re not good at.”

Vlautin said he is looking forward to speaking with Walter, who he has known for years now. His nontraditional path meant he has not known many writers, and the two mostly talk music when they touch base.

“He writes great stories,” Vlautin said. “He writes about the working class, and writes about the West, which are things that I love writing about.”

Walter shared the sentiment; he is looking forward to learning more about Vlautin’s process, discussing the latest novel and of course, chatting music. He was a fan of Richmond Fontaine when he first came across Vlautin’s books, and Vlautin’s ability to capture in song and on the page that special something that makes both aspects of his work shine.

“It’s the same kind of hard lives, and for me, the more disadvantages someone has, the more hurdles in front of them, the more I kind of care about what happens to them as characters,” Walter said. “He just writes those kind of people so well.”

“The Left and the Lucky” is a story about hard lives. It follows 8-year-old Russell and his chaotic family life in Northeast Portland, where he forms an endearing relationship with his neighbor Eddie, a 40-something divorced house painter. Eddie’s a kind-hearted cut-the-chaff character grappling with his own afflictions, and the pair end up being a formative part of each other’s growth.

It is a story of the left behind, and the lucky breaks that can come one’s way, Vlautin said. It is also an exploration of how kids navigate hardship, and how men handle hard childhoods, their adolescence and rage, which is where Russell’s older brother 15-year-old Curtis enters the picture.

“Russell, maybe because he was a little brother, lived his life being able to kind of check his way out of a situation, or tried to; he was more pragmatic,” Vlautin said. “Where his brother, like so many young men, gets consumed by rage.”

The book is a bit of a love letter to the city Vlautin has spent much of his life in, with much of the setting spanning the St. John’s neighborhood and North Portland. It is littered with current and long gone shops and restaurants, like the now-closed Overlook diner, the Twilight Room and the St. John’s Theater.

“St John’s, it reminds me of Reno, where I grew up,” Vlautin said. “It’s still kind of Portland: It’s got some mom and pop stores, still a little ragged. It’s got old school Portland people, which I love.”

Walter said Vlautin makes the area come alive, and for Spokane readers, it may be a treat to revisit the Portland they may remember from 10 to 20 years ago. He found the book moving, noting it is a bit happier than most in Vlautin’s repertoire, “believe it or not.”

“Sometimes, the grimness, you can’t quite escape it, but even then, I love it,” Walter said. “I think there’s beauty in those difficult lives sometimes, too. It’s one thing I strive for in my writing, too, to not paint over the fact that there’s hardship in life.”