For North Idaho’s Emily Ruskovich, debut novel stirs up memory of home

Emily Ruskovich is ready to come home. Even though she really feels like she never left.

The North Idaho native is one of the headliners at this year’s Get Lit Festival, reading with award-winning poet Jamaal May on Friday night.

She was raised on HooDoo Mountain, up near Blanchard and Athol in Idaho’s Panhandle. She graduated from Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy in 2004, and left to pursue higher education, first in the creative writing program at the University of Montana, then at the University of New Brunswick, in Canada, and finally at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop in Ames, Iowa.

Still, she came home every summer and school holidays. And it was during one of those summers where her debut novel, “Idaho,” was born.

She was helping her parents load firewood for the coming winter on another mountain, she said in a phone interview last week.

“When we were up there, it was really beautiful, but it was so far removed from everything that it was eerie. It was so far away. Way up these rutted dirt roads in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “I just had a sense that something had happened in that place, even though it was so beautiful. I had this feeling that this place had a memory, and trying to figure out what that memory was the process of writing the book.”

Memory is one of the key components of “Idaho.” The novel, which has won praise from critics across the country, is an exploration of memory, of tragedy, of love and of female friendship.

“Idaho” tells the story of Ann, who tries to piece together the details of a tragedy from her husband’s past. Wade’s life was torn apart the day his wife, Jenny, killed their younger daughter, May, and their older girl, June, went missing as the family was gathering firewood in a place not unlike the one Ruskovich visited with her parents. The novel jumps back and forth in time as Wade begins to succumb to dementia, causing him to lose his memory, as Ann seeks to get at the truth of what happened that terrible day.

“When Ann marries Wade, she’s marrying his story, and his story is slowly being lost,” she said, “so it’s an incomplete story to Ann. She’s trying to put these pieces together, but there is no way for her to access the moment that is disturbing her so deeply. Because it’s only through memory or speculation that she’s able to piece things together. She does come up with a reason why, because she has to have a reason why, and she sees herself in that reason. Maybe that is why it happens. It’s the closest the novel comes to giving that answer. I think that’s a really natural and heartbreaking and also beautiful thing we tend to do is take other people’s stories and find ourselves in them. Even if they’re terrible stories.”

Ruskovich’s novel offers few clear answers, something she acknowledges can leave some readers frustrated. It’s a challenging read, and uncomfortable at times. In the end, she said, despite the sadness, she sees a lot of hope in the novel.

“The story makes me very sad, about what happened to this little girl and a whole family that is shattered,” she said. “What I ultimately feel about my book is that it is about endurance and love and redemption.”

She later added, “I try to tell people about the novel before they’ve read it, I tell them, don’t read this like it’s a mystery. Read this like it’s somebody’s life, and you’re going to like it a lot more.”

In 2015, she won an O. Henry Award for her short story “Owl,” and has a story collection in the works for Random House. She’s been teaching at the University of Colorado in Denver since 2012, but for awhile now she’s been teaching online classes and living in Alsea, a small community about 30 minutes inland from Waldport, on the Oregon Coast. Colorado was too far way from their families, and Oregon seemed like a good temporary location, Ruskovich said. This summer, they’re preparing to make one more move – to Boise, where she’ll teaching at Boise State’s creative writing MFA program.

“I was so thrilled when I got the job to get to come back to Idaho,” she said. “I knew I wanted to teach somewhere closer to my family and my roots, and I was so excited when that happened to be in Idaho itself.”

Her parents sold their mountaintop property about three years ago, and now live in Grangeville. Ruskovich will be only four hours away when she starts at Boise State this fall. “I do miss our mountain very much,” she said. “Even though it’s not our land anymore, it’s still such a huge part of who all of us are.”

“And it’s not just part of the novel. It is the novel.”