Background

Ron Carlson was born on September 15, 1947, in Logan, Utah, the United States, to Edwin and Verna (Mertz) Carlson. He grew up in Salt Lake City.

Education

Ron Carlson received a bachelor's and a master's degree in English from the University of Utah.

Career

Carlson taught at The Hotchkiss School in Connecticut, where he began his first novel. He became a professor of English at Arizona State University in 1985, teaching creative writing to undergraduates and graduates, and ultimately becoming director of its Creative Writing program. Carlson then moved to the University of California, Irvine. Carlson was the director of UCI's Creative Writing program when sexual assault allegations from his tenure at the Hotchkiss School emerged, leading to his subsequent resignation.

Although Ron Carlson’s fiction has ranged from a coming-of-age novel to stories dealing with families, all of his work is marked by witty observations that range from reflective to humorous. For example, Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the story of a young graduate student’s self-discovery, “is written in a serio-comic vein, flecked with apt observations, often very funny, though more successful on the comic than it is on the serio side,” observes Richard R. Lingcman in the New York Times. In Truants, his second novel, Carlson develops the theme of how “most families, and their surrogates, wretchedly handle the business of nurturing and succoring,” comments New York Times Book Review contributor Barry Yourgrau. Yet Carlson “presents all of this in an affecting manner, with a very decent heart and a tart tongue,” adds the critic. “He practices a kind of wit that is at once tender, canny and vivid, capable of burnishing a passing moment with a quick touch.”

Like Truants, Carlson’s story collection The News of the World also deals with family relations; “the subject is domestic life, whose secrets (Carlson] tracks like a hunter, flushing them out with paranoid intensity,” described Nancy Forbes in the New York Times Book Review. Washington Post Book World contributor Alida Becker similarly remarked that the collection is “an exuberant, wise and wonderfully inventive evocation of the kinds of love and longing that never really go out of style, no matter how much they’re threatened by sentimentality on the one hand and cynicism on the other.” Despite this opportunity for the over-emotional treatment of "family” subjects, Carlson is “a writer who has acquired the technique to depict such values and situations with absolute integrity,” asserted Alan Cheuse in Chicago Tribune Books. Richard Eder of the Los Angeles Times Book Review also saw a tendency toward “an outpouring instead of evaporation of spirit, in Carlson’s work, even though the outcomes of some stories are discouraging.” The critic elaborated: “Carlson wants to find a design in things, even though this goes against the spirit if not the evidence of the times. Yet in his best stories, he does find it. And he finds it by a kind of magic, by a credo quia absurdum in which the will to believe is suddenly snatched up and transfigured.” When this occurs, concluded Eder, “we experience a vision touched by wildness sometimes, by audacity sometimes, and sometimes by the sheer plea-sure of inventiveness.” It is this “blend of tragicomedy, sheer optimism, sharp perception, and almost manic energy that makes Carlson’s work so distinctive - and so appealing,” remarked Becker. Carlson is “a meat-and-potatoes writer,” added Becker, “a man who’ll entertain you even as he’s tricking you into swallowing that extra spoonful of understanding. And he’ll never ever let you go away hungry.”

Continuing to write about average Americans in not so average situations, Carlson produced Plan B for the Middle Class, a collection of short stories tempering the conflicts of just living with the hope that everything will turn out all right after all. His characters are predominantly middle class but lack a sense of comfort or purpose. According to Mark Bautz’s review of Plan B for the Middle Class in the Washington, DC Times, Carlson is “a master of the quirky, bittersweet domestic story.” Maxine Chernoff of the New York Times Book Review called him “a brilliant comedic writer; in his best stories, he captures the ability of people to adapt to the worst situations and still see the results as triumphant.” Writing about the combination of the love for life but disdain for the ordinary in Plan B for the Middle Class, Debra Spark of the Washington Post Book World commented, “In the past, the effect has been entertaining and intelligent but, until this collection, only occasionally magical or profound.”

The Hotel Eden, Carlson’s third collection of short stories, features both the comedic and the tragic, side by side. The reader watches a young American couple in London fall under the spell of an older American who finally seduces the young woman, then is quickly hurled into a nonsensical account of medieval villagers trying to protect themselves from marauders by developing a way to pour boiling oil on the heads of their enemies. “You can laugh out loud at these stories,” wrote Judith Freeman for the Los Angeles Times, “and then a few minutes later find yourself deeply moved by a character’s pathos.” She also commented, “Taken together, they represent the idiosyncratic vision of an original writer who does only what good writers can do: make us see and feel what his characters see and feel and draw us into their world as if we had been born there.” Margot Livesey, in the New York Times Book Review, made a similar assessment: “This ability to include a reader, long a hallmark of Carlson’s work, has reached new heights in The Hotel Eden, his third collection.” “Every character has been caught on the cusp of epiphany,” wrote a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, “and the imperfect shine to the sentences reveals just how precarious those moments of true revelation can be.”

Carlson’s short story “On the U.S.S. Fortitude,” first published in July of 1990 in New Yorker, was broadcast as a radio play by Symphony Space in New York City in 1993 and 1996, and by National Public Radio in 1993 and 1996. “The H Street Sledding Record,” a short story first published in 1992 and featured in both magazines and anthologies, was produced as a radio play by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1994 and broadcast by Symphony Space in 1996. “The Chromium Hook,” first published as a short story in Harper's in 1995, was first staged at Emerson College in 1997, was filmed by Allgood Productions in 1999, was adapted into a one-act musical by Norman Noll and performed in New York City in 2000. “Towel Season,” first published in Esquire in 1998, was recorded by actor William Hurt for the Symphony Space Selected Shorts Audio Tape Series.

In 2003 Carlson published his first young adult novel, The Speed of Light. The story revolves around twelve-year-old Larry, who is the first-person narrator of this coming-of-age story. Along with his friends, Witt and Rafferty, Larry recounts his summer playing little league and other games but also reveals the darker side of his life, which includes his abusive father who beats both Larry and his sister. One way that Larry deals with the problem is to take a scientific perspective to life, which leads to numerous child-like experiments.

Noting that The Speed of Light "has many potential audiences and defies easy categorization," Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy contributor James Blasingame added: "Young adults, either those just past the protagonists' ages or teens old enough to have turned nostalgic about their childhoods, will enjoy it. It will also appeal to adults, conjuring up memories of the last summer between childhood and young adulthood." Todd Morning, writing in the School Library Journal, commented that the "narration … is beautifully written, yet manages to seem like the genuine voice of a boy." Booklist contributor John Green liked the book for its "understated, beautiful writing and the nostalgia."

A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories, is a selection of thirty-five of Carlson's stories, which previously appeared in the collections The News of the World, Plan B for the Middle Class, and The Hotel Eden. Writing in the Library Journal, Patrick Sullivan called A Kind of Flying "among the finest collections of short fiction you will likely encounter." Becky Dickie, writing in Booklist, commented: "These are stunningly artistic stories." A Kirkus Reviews contributor noted that the author's "best tales will endure."

The short story "Keith", from The Hotel Eden, was adapted into a film by Todd Kessler (2008). The independent movie starred, among others, Jesse McCartney and Elisabeth Harnois.

Achievements

• Carlson and his work have been featured multiple times in The Times, and he wrote nearly a dozen book reviews for the newspaper between 1992 and 2010. Carlson has received a number of honors and awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, a National Society of Arts and Letters Award, and the 1993 Ploughshares Cohen Prize.

Works

More photos

• book

  • At the Jim Bridger

    (Welcome to the short stories of Ron Carlson, where strang...)

    2002
  • Betrayed by F. Scott Fitzgerald

    (In this tender, comic novel, Larry Boosinger - graduate s...)

    1977
  • The Signal

    (The Signal follows the story of Mack and Vonnie, a marrie...)

    2009
  • Room Service

    (How did one of America’s most gifted fabulists come to wr...)

    2012
  • Five Skies

    (Beloved story writer Ron Carlson's first novel in thirty ...)

    2007
  • Return to Oakpine

    (In this tender and nostalgic portrait of western American...)

    2013
  • A Kind of Flying

    (Ron Carlson's stories, sometimes wicked or bittersweet, o...)

    2003
  • Plan B for the Middle Class

    (In The News of the World, Ron Carlson's celebrated last c...)

    1992
  • Ron Carlson Writes a Story

    (Ron Carlson has been praised as "a master of the short st...)

    2007
  • Truants

    (This book is about the innate hunger of the human heart t...)

    1981
  • The Hotel Eden

    (Prepare to be amused, moved, disturbed. These stories by ...)

    1997
  • The Speed of Light 2003
  • The News of the World 1987

Religion

Carlson once commented on religion: “It is philosophically impossible to be an atheist since to be an atheist you must have infinite knowledge in order to know absolutely that there is no God. But to have infinite knowledge, you would have to be God yourself. It's hard to be God yourself and an atheist at the same time!”

Views

Quotations: “I always write from my own experiences, whether I've had them or not.”

“The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live.”

“We live in a society that doesn’t offer any support or appreciation for ventures that aren’t clearly articulated and aligned for a goal. A writer gets past this. It’s going to be a mess before you’re finished, and you may not have a name for the mess or understand its utilitarian purposes. There aren't words for everything. For now, we’ll call it the draft of a story.”

"It never ceases to amaze us that when we were in kindergarten they taught us that a frog turning into a prince was a nursery fairy tale, but when we got to college they told us that a frog turning into a prince was science."

"Key to all fiction, long or short, is to remember that the wolfman did not want the moon."

“I'm not trying as a writer to be smart or to understand the inner workings of my narrator, I'm trying to survive the typing of this story.”

“When you step out onto the ineffable fabric of your own invention, it is key, essential to act just like that character in the cartoons who steps off the cliff onto the absolute air. Do not look down. You wrote it; you can stand on it to reach for the next thing.”

“All of the valuable writing I have done in the last ten years has been done in the first twenty minutes after the first time I wanted to leave the room.”

“It is not my job to explain the story or understand the story or reduce it to a phrase or offer it as being a story about any specific person, place, or thing. My job is to have been true enough to the world of my story that I was able to present it as a forceful and convincing drama. Every story is a kind of puzzle. "

"My writing, tenor and approach, changed after the arrival of my two sons. Many of my characters grew up, which was a relief, and I found myself suddenly doing a lot more work. Also, I took a job at Arizona State University, which was good in the way regular employment is good and bad exactly the same way. Right now I have several projects lined up and am quite optimistic about the future. My boys are [young]. Optimism seems a natural choice."

Personality

In August 2018, Carlson was named as one of a number of former teachers at the Hotchkiss School against whom credible evidence of having committed sexual assault on a minor student was found. The report to the board of Hotchkiss was prepared by the respected law firm of Locke Lord who conducted a wide-ranging investigation.

Interests

• Music & Bands

  David Lee Roth

Connections

Ron Carlson married Georgia Elaine Craig (a teacher and editor) on June 14, 1969. The couple has two children named Nicholas and Colin.

Father:

Edwin Carlson

Mother:

Verna (Mertz) Carlson

Spouse:

Georgia Elaine Craig

Son:

Nicholas Carlson

Son:

Colin Carlson

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 189
  2001