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Pulitzer Prize winner visits UH

New York Times bestselling author and 2015 Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Doerr visited campus Monday for a craft talk and question and answer session in the Honors College Commons, followed by a reading at the Cullen Theater.

Doerr’s prize-winning novel, “All the Light We Cannot See,” was a finalist for the National Book Award and was named best book of 2014 by NPR, The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Doctoral student Joshua Polster introduced Doerr at the craft talk.

“Reading Anthony Doerr’s work is like reading a National Geographic photo exhibit titled ’empathy,'” Polster said. “His writing is the travelling channel of the human heart. All the Light We Cannot See contains his hallmark style of characters (and is) probably the reason why so many of you are here today.”

Doerr started the craft talk by asking audience members to write about and describe a noun that they have used within their day without using the first five words that come to mind. This activity quickly turned into a lesson of the importance in describing words and challenging the average reader.

“It forces us to look at objects and practices in different ways, and hopefully in the larger context, the whole idea of narratives and lives and human beings,” Doerr said.

Doerr continued the talk by taking the research of other publishers and referring to several texts by acclaimed researchers and writers to entertain and create a positive learning experience about writing.

He spoke of clichés and how avoiding clichés could lead to a lasting piece of art — a better story, poem, essay, and many other forms of writing.

“To speak personally, the very reason I write is so that I may not sleepwalk through my entire life. But it is easy to admit that a sentence makes you wince; less easy to confront the fact that for many writers there will be paragraphs, whole characters, whole books through which one sleepwalks and for which inauthentic is truly the correct term,” Doerr said in reference to Zadie Smith’s essay “Fail Better.”

Doerr had the audience finish the lines of various clichés such as “bent out of shape,” “apple of my eye” and “out of the blue,” proving the very point that he was trying to make.

“When crafting a piece of writing, or any form of art, creating the unpredictable and avoiding the use of clichés could make the piece better,” Doerr said.

As the craft talk came to a close, Doerr answered audience questions about writing, characters, and his journey as a writer. Many of the audience members attended the event due to their curiosity in writing.

“I came because writers are especially curious about what other writers have to say,” English sophomore Will Burns said.   “One part of Doerr’s talk that I particularly liked pertained to entertainment. Being entertaining is very important. Entertaining yourself as you write is important as well,” he said.

Others joined to learn more about connecting words and their meaning, like English sophomore Michele Nereim.

“I really liked his talk because I’m a big fan of brain stuff,” Nereim said. “I like understanding how art interacts with the human mind and I think it’s actually important that whatever you’re writing not only makes sense on the surface level, but actually does resonate to the subconscious; it forms connections that before hadn’t occurred to people.”

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