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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Get Lit! lures Pulitzer-winning writer Richard Russo for Saturday’s headlining act

Richard Russo

Back in the 1990s, Get Lit! headliner Richard Russo decided he wanted to become a full-time writer.

His career as an English literature professor at small regional universities was taking up too much of his time.

“So I thought, if I write a novel like ‘Straight Man,’ where I just riff (on the foibles and turf wars of academia), it will be tantamount to burning all of my academic bridges,” said Russo, by phone from Massachusetts.

“It’ll force me to be a full-time writer, because I’ll never get invited back again.”

The plan backfired. Spectacularly.

“The exact opposite has happened,” said Russo, laughing. “The book has been embraced. I’ve never gotten so many invitations to academic venues.

“I went back and gave the commencement speech at the branch campus of Penn State University, a fictionalized version of which is the setting of ‘Straight Man,’ and toward the end of my talk, which I hoped people would find funny, they began howling with laughter. More than they had in other parts of my speech.

“I didn’t realize until I turned around that everybody, all the faculty on stage behind me, had donned those rubber nose-and-glasses masks that Hank wears when he holds up the goose.”

Holds up the goose? Yes, in “Straight Man,” the main character, Hank Devereaux Jr., holds a goose hostage in a miscalculated attempt to influence the departmental budget process. (Nobody ever accused Hank, or most other Russo characters, of carefully thinking through their schemes.)

Yet one part of Russo’s own scheme worked out fine. He became a full-time writer – one of America’s most acclaimed.

Not long after “Straight Man,” Russo emerged as one of the nation’s most respected novelists and the winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for “Empire Falls.” HBO turned that epic story into a popular miniseries starring Paul Newman.

His two post-Pulitzer novels, “Bridge of Sighs” (2007) and “That Old Cape Magic” (2009), have been critical and popular hits.

So landing Russo was a coup for Get Lit!, Eastern Washington University’s annual literary festival.

The festival begins Wednesday and runs through April 21, with a number of workshops, panels and ticketed readings. For the complete schedule, go to www.ewu.edu/getlit.

The festival’s main event is “An Evening With Richard Russo and Jess Walter,” Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Bing Crosby Theater.

In fact, we can thank Walter, the National Book Award finalist from Spokane, with helping to land Russo.

“Jess and I have been buddies for a while,” he said.

Russo said he and Walter will read some excerpts from their books and “have a conversation about all manner of things that interest us.”

They’ll probably talk not only about novel-writing but also about adapting books for the screen.

Russo said that when it comes to screen adaptations of his novels, he has been uncommonly fortunate. Screenwriting teachers would do well to study director Robert Benton’s Oscar-nominated adaptation of 1994’s “Nobody’s Fool,” which starred Paul Newman.

“You could take the better part of a semester looking at what Benton did to a really big novel, cutting out more than two-thirds of the book, and still coming up with something that was absolutely faithful to the spirit of the original,” said Russo.

“The way he condensed and built new bridges between old scenes – it’s just a masterwork of screenwriting. If only the screenwriter had been quite as skillful on ‘Empire Falls.’ ”

And who wrote that screenplay?

“I did the screenplay for ‘Empire Falls,’ ” admitted Russo. “I’m very proud of that HBO miniseries. I think the cast was astonishing and I think the director, Fred Schepisi, did his very best work on that.

“If I have any regrets, it’s that I got talked into doing the screenplay. I think fresh eyes and a fresh take would have been better.”

Russo has been working for years on the screenplay for Walter’s “Citizen Vince” – a novel that he said he “absolutely adored.”

“I have four or five (screenwriting) projects in various stages of … sometimes I think of them as development, and sometimes I think of them as life support,” Russo said.

Yet his main occupation remains the novel. On Saturday night, he’ll probably read from “That Old Cape Magic,” which hearkens back to the academic themes of “Straight Man.”

“Those were the two shortest of my novels and academics are lampooned in both of them,” Russo said. “There is the same sense of a middle-aged man sort of circling the drain for a while, until he finds his way out.”

Many of Russo’s main characters are middle-aged men – some blue-collar, some Ph.D.s – who are stubbornly making a mess of their lives. Yet these characters also tend to be a heck of a lot of fun.

Sully, the ornery-but-lovable construction worker in “Nobody’s Fool,” lives a freer life than most of the denizens of tiny North Bath, in upstate New York.

Russo was also born and raised in small towns in upstate New York. The 2002 Pulitzer Prize changed his life, but he said he was able to avoid any kind of post-Pulitzer slump.

“The very best thing about getting the Pulitzer kind of late in the season – having finished ‘Empire Falls’ and delivered it when I did – was that I was already 150 pages into ‘Bridge of Sighs,’ ” he said.

“So I didn’t have to say to myself, ‘How do you follow a Pulitzer Prize? What should the next book be about?’ I was already cranking and already in love with the characters.”

Recently, Russo heard that he had achieved another literary tribute, of sorts, from some of his fans. A young Washington couple recently named their new baby Sully after the “Nobody’s Fool” character.

“How about that!” said Russo.

He said he hoped the child wouldn’t become a “ne’er-do-well” like the fictional Sully.

“But maybe,” Russo said, “he’ll be just a lot of fun.”