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Rick Attig

 

Rick Attig is a Portland essayist, fiction writer and former member of the Editorial Board of The Oregonian, where he shared two Pulitzer Prizes, including the 2006 prize for editorial writing and the 2001 prize for Public Service. He has an MFA from Pacific University. His essays and short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies and magazines. He was recently inducted into the University of Oregon School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement.

On your nightstand:

The New York Times Book Review’s top ten books of 2015, which were a Christmas gift from my wife. Over the past couple weeks I’ve read Magda Szabo’s surprisingly moving novel The Door, set in 20th-century Hungary, Paul Beatty’s hilariously crude satire The Sellout, the stories of mouthy, hard-drinking women in Lucia Berlin in A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories, and Ta-Nehisi’s sad, powerful letter to his son in Between the World and Me. It’s all such great writing.

If you could spend a day with an author, who would it be?

If I could spend a day with any author, I might choose Richard Ford, who tells the kinds of stories I want to write, with flawed but appealing characters from messed up families and broken rural towns struggling against forces they don’t quite understand. I particularly admire the stories in Ford’s collection Rock Springs, which are set in the rural West, many told by narrators looking back at events that shaped their lives.

Who or what inspires your writing?

I’m inspired by many of the places and people, injustices, acts of courage, small victories, and painful losses I witnessed during the thirty years I worked as an Oregon journalist. I’ve spent all my life in Oregon, and watched its economy and culture change dramatically. There’s a lot of heartbreak and humor, and bravery and drama in the stories of how people confront these changes.