David Vann describes himself as "very lucky." But his life as an author, teacher and adventurer seems a testament to the fact that luck can be a wide-swinging pendulum.
Growing up in Alaska, Vann went fishing and hunting with his father from an early age; thus began a lifelong love of the outdoors. He remembers spending up to 18 hours at sea fishing for king salmon. ("One jumped 15 times.") But James Vann experienced financial reversals and his second marriage failed. When David was 13, his father shot and killed himself while talking to the boy's stepmother on the telephone.
The suicide was "the event that most shaped who I am," says Vann, '90, sitting in his office at the University of San Francisco, where he is an associate professor of creative writing. He has written, in essays and fiction, about his Northern California teenage years in which he was a straight-A student by day and a vandalizing wanderer by night.
KETCHIKAN: David, 3, with his father, James. (Photo: Nathan Perkel)
Things have often been topsy-turvy in Vann's life. His stepmother's family was blindsided by murder and suicide—circumstances he transmuted into a novel, Caribou Island (Harper). In his 30s, he literally lost everything at sea—twice. But he emerged from the disasters with the loyal girlfriend, Nancy, to whom he is now happily married, and an entrée to documentary-film adventures about seafaring history. Long struggles to get published have resolved into a growing international reputation.
Author and playwright Michelle Carter, '80, MA '82, thinks good fortune that has come Vann's way can be attributed to his "hard work and sweet, good nature." Carter, formerly a Jones lecturer, remembers Vann the undergrad as an open-faced kid "who laughed at every possible opportunity." But she says the depth and complexity of Vann's personal struggles were evident in his writing even then.
Landing at the Farm and being mentored by professor and author John L'Heureux paved one of the best paths of Vann's life. "He took my writing seriously and made me see that this could possibly be my life," Vann recalls. "I came from a family with no connections and was crossing into a completely different world."
Vann, who rode a unicycle around campus and sang with Mixed Company, took advantage of a stable of writing teachers that included Carter, Grace Paley and Adrienne Rich. After graduate studies at Cornell, Vann returned to Stanford as a Stegner fellow in 1994. He finished a novella and stories based on his father's suicide, but publication eluded him.
In desperation Vann pitched ideas to magazines: He suggested being a "hurricane hunter" for Outside and a solo circumnavigator for Esquire. Neither project panned out, but he got other assignments. Without a book publication, Vann found it hard to find a teaching job. To create one, he began captaining educational sailing charters off the coasts of Turkey and the San Juan Islands and on the Caribbean and the Sea of Cortez. Stanford Continuing Studies signed on for courses at sea.
Vann charmed investors and got faculty lined up, but bad weather, the war in Kosovo, pirates and other circumstances foiled his plans and sank his boat. The harrowing stories became fodder for his first published book, the 2005 memoir A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea.
Vann had not given up on his fiction. The novella and stories won the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction—an honor made more poignant because it was named for a former teacher—and were published as Legend of a Suicide by University of Massachusetts Press. "I had finished it at 29," says Vann, who was 42 when the book came out in 2008. "It was a very long wait."
Legend got some good reviews that did not translate into sales or much further attention in the United States. But in 2010, its novella, Sukkwan Island, won literary awards for foreign fiction in France and Spain.
Caribou Island, published earlier this year to wide acclaim and frequent comparisons with Cormac McCarthy, is about a long-married but mismatched couple's attempt to build a little cabin in the wilderness. Alaska, the New York Times noted in praising the book, is "a blank slate onto which characters project their dreams," although some might call them nightmares. As with Legend, Vann revisited family tragedy. "What I love about fiction is it's redemptive. You can take an ugly story and get a second chance at the family history."
In Last Day on Earth, to be published by the University of Georgia Press in October, Vann's dark past and familiarity with guns helped him delve into the notorious campus shooting in 2008 at Northern Illinois University. Vann says investigating killer Steve Kazmierczak was "grueling," and that he has no intention to do anything like it ever again. "It's an American right to go buy as many guns as we want," Vann says. "It's insane."
In April, Vann won a Guggenheim Fellowship to support his next project, a novel, Dirt, set in one hot summer of California's Central Valley. "There's no suicide, no father, no repeated characters, no Alaska," Vann says. "A very different kind of story, and it's very compressed, happening in about 10 days, in two locations, with five characters."
His good luck—which some define as what happens when talent meets opportunity—is holding.
Bridget Kinsella has covered the book business for Publishers Weekly and other media. She is the author of a memoir, Visiting Life.
