It's the way I understood life, the way I connected with people.
I never really considered doing anything else. I feel like I was writing before I could actually write," Ruskovich says. "I don't feel like I ever got into writing. Through all of this, Ruskovich was always writing, a hobby her parents encouraged, dictating the poetry she would recite to them. "And before we had a barn, we lived in tents." "For a while we didn't have a house we lived in a barn," Ruskovich says. At one point, Ruskovich recalls her parents supporting a family of six on an annual salary of just $25,000. Her mother stayed at home with the children when they weren't attending school in Coeur d'Alene. Her father, now retired, was an English teacher at Lake City High School, which required an hour-long commute every day. Ruskovich grew up on Hoodoo Mountain in Bonner County, and much of her fiction is set in the same ruggedly gorgeous terrain she associates with her childhood. "It's not like I ever decided that I was going to write a novel about a mother who killed her child." "It wasn't so much a premise or a concept it was just a feeling I needed to pursue," Ruskovich says. And it all came from the ominous aura of a warm summer day on a desolate mountain road. That novel, simply titled Idaho, unspooled over the next few years, developing into a tapestry of crisscrossing lives that spans half a century. "I was quite intimidated about writing a novel.
You can't return to it,'" Ruskovich says. Don't publish this with your stories because then it'll be over. "One of my professors had told me, 'You've got to turn this into a novel. But there was more to their story, more than could be contained within the margins of a short story collection. What she imagined had happened on that mountain, just a few miles away from where she grew up, soon became a 70-page novella about a family torn apart by a senseless death. Even though it was so beautiful - it was golden and there were grasshoppers and crows everywhere - but it was a very unsettling feeling." "I had this sense that this particular place held a memory, and it was not a good memory. "It was so far removed from the world, so far away from everything," Ruskovich recalls. They were driving along a seemingly endless dirt road, winding their way up into the hills, to purchase some pre-split cords. Ruskovich's father had always chopped his own firewood, but this year, she remembers now, he was recovering from back surgery. It was several years ago, on a tranquil afternoon in rural North Idaho, when Emily Ruskovich was struck by a kind of premonition, unexplainable and fleeting, that would eventually inspire her first novel.
Author Emily Ruskovich is one of this year's Get Lit! festival headliners.
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