Articles

Breeze-Courier Article

This article by Marylee Lasswell appeared in the Breeze-Courier (Taylorville, Illinois) on Sunday, July 25, 1999. Used with permission.

“Words Are Precious, New Author Says, They’re To Be Treasured and Enjoyed”

by Marylee Lasswell, Breeze-Courier Writer

TAYLORVILLE—“He cried, as a child, when he finished the book Watership Down,” his mother said. “Of all the books in the world, there was nothing left to read.” He had just finished “The Book.” There could never be another.

But, young Fred Durbin did continue to read. After exploring the hierarchy of life in rabbit warrens in Watership Down, he went on to other underground adventures with J.R.R. Tolkien. The writings of H.P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood and Clark Ashton Smith followed as other favorites among the many authors in Durbin’s world.

And now, the 33-year-old writer and teacher has earned his own title as published author. Durbin’s novel Dragonfly has just been released by Arkham House Publishers, and Durbin is home from Japan visiting family and promoting his first published work.

Little surprise, Durbin’s novel tells a tale of underworld escapades just as some of his favorite, influential early readings did. “As to the below ground element that shows up in quite a bit of what I write,” Durbin says, “that’s from Mammoth Cave, Kentucky. My parents took me there when I was in elementary school, and so far I’ve made it back at least once every ten years of my life. That place strikes some deep chord in me. It has a scale, a grandeur, an age, a beauty, and a mystery far beyond anything human beings could ever produce. There is a place in Hokkaido which the Ainu, the aboriginal people of Japan, call Kamuikotan, the village where God is. Mammoth Cave is like that for me. If the National Park Service would let me, I’d like to have my own writing room down in the cave,” he says.

But for now, the Taylorville native who teaches creative writing at Niigata University must settle for his laptop at the kitchen table in his home.

“I usually start a project with some scribbled notes on paper, and then I do just about everything else on a computer. When I was younger, I tried to write outdoors whenever I could—on yellow legal pads when I was a kid, and later with battery-powered word processors. I even bought a 75-foot extension cord one summer so I could set up a card table and word processor out in the shady corners of our yard in Taylorville. Fresh air, sunlight, and whispering breezes in the leaves are all conducive to imagining. But I found that I spent more time carrying tables and chairs and winding up cords than I actually spent writing. So now I write mostly indoors, though I alternate between the big computer in my room and a laptop at the kitchen table,” he said.

Durbin’s novel is described as a Halloween fantasy. That conjures the likes of Stephen King and the very darkest depths of human imagination. Not so in Durbin’s writing. Dragonfly is more aptly a classic, epic action, adventure fantasy, chronicling the struggle between good and evil, with good prevailing. Durbin cleverly explores a world of underground hobgoblins through the eyes of a child who narrates the adventure after having successfully navigated through it.

“Dragonfly,” Durbin says, “is essentially about childhood, about the fears some children have and their struggles to face and overcome them. I’ve lived through childhood and can see it now with some objective distance; I’m still too close to the experience of being a young man in Japan, but I expect that within the next ten or twenty years, God willing, I’ll be ready to tackle writing fiction about that. Certainly even now, elements of Japanese life and culture color my writing in ways that are not obvious or direct. The thousand subtle aspects of being an outsider, a visitor, an observer of a different culture have helped me write more convincingly about imaginary beings and cultures outside the realm of human experience.”

While Durbin’s underworld fantasy is imaginatively dark with gruesome creatures, the novel is illuminated always with the reader’s knowledge, from the start, that the innocent child called Dragonfly has not only survived to tell her adventure but has somehow flourished because of it. Durbin’s writing is a thoughtful compilation of hope and strength and light and dark, told eloquently and descriptively in the context of a child’s imagination.

“If I had to look for sources of this story, I’d say the obvious one is Halloween,” Durbin says. “I’ve always loved that holiday, with its chance to dress up in a costume and shiver at the rustling of bare branches. I’ve always wanted to write a story about Halloween the way Charles Dickens wrote one for Christmas. I’m talking, of course, about the Halloween of thirty years ago, or even farther back, before all the depravity and the chain saws that have gone a long way toward ruining a wonderful holiday.”

Durbin writes in pictures, his imagery near cinematography, his narrative acute and full, with subtle distinctions. Is the October that Durbin draws in Dragonfly the one he knew as a child living in rural Taylorville?

“I always marvel at October, how it can be so full of opposites. It’s as if, since the leaves are doing something so dramatic and carefree in changing all those colors, the Earth thinks it can get away with  anything, and runs around irresponsible and mad for a month or two before it goes to bed. It’s positively primal—full of wild rituals and cunning, changes and smoky figures dancing around fires, faces peering around trunks of trees. October is the owl season—the long shadow season.

“Take that smoky smell: you don’t see all that many people actually burning things, but that smell is everywhere, drifting behind the rarity of the air like hidden darkness pooling behind the light, like Earth makes it somewhere in secret and slips it into the scheme of things, thinking no one will notice. The leaves come twirling down, and the wind waltzes them round and round, blowing from every direction at once. Black cats come east, come south, who knows from where, just for this season, just to see it. The days are warm yet cold, clear yet hazy; the world lives but dies. And the sun, pretending that it’s not losing its grip, that none of this is happening, pours down more and more light that’s all the while thinner and thinner. By All Hallow’s Eve there’s just nothing left of reason or fatness or gold—there’s nothing but dark music—and the trees gasp naked and frail into November. Who wouldn’t be worn out after a month like October?”

The quality of Durbin’s writing makes it difficult to believe that Dragonfly is his first published novel. It’s far easier to understand, though, why Durbin was destined to write.

The son of Joe and Mary Anne Durbin of Taylorville, Fred says, “I grew up surrounded by books and people who treasured them. My dad owned a small bookstore where I went every day after school, and my mom was the librarian at our four local public elementary schools. They read to me from Day One—Mom would have delivered me in the library if she could have, but her principal made her go to the hospital.”

Durbin graduated from Taylorville High School in 1984 and went on to graduate summa cum laude from Concordia College, River Forest, where he majored in classical languages and edited the fine arts section of the college newspaper. Shortly after graduating from Concordia, he became a Lutheran volunteer missionary teacher in Japan. It is there, among the pine groves and pounding surf of Japan’s northwestern coast, that Durbin’s publisher says he began to see the faces and hear the voices that became Dragonfly.

Durbin says, “There were snatches and hints of Dragonfly floating around in my head for years. They began to coalesce into a story on the sunny afternoon of Sunday, October 21, 1990, when I was outdoors, strolling across the campus where I teach.” But some of Durbin’s mind drift must come from the dust of his Central Illinois roots, the smell of October in the air that he describes and the very first scene he sets.

As Dragonfly opens, the child wanders down a shadowy alley, past the back portico of the bank and Kohn (Cohn) Furniture, an alley all too familiar to Durbin and anyone else who ever haunted Taylorville’s alley ways. Durbin’s wanderings, as a school child, from Memorial School to his father's book store downtown took him daily down that terrain.

Durbin draws, too, on personal intergenerational family relationships when developing similar ties in Dragonfly. His first published work is dedicated to his grandmothers, Emma Wilhelmina Adams and Julia Craggs, both early influences in Durbin’s life. “As a toddler, I jabbered away telling stories to my mom while she hung laundry or worked in the garden. My parents, aunts, uncles, and grandmas were a wonderful, supportive audience. They taught me to use God’s gifts, which must not be taken for granted,” he said.

“I’ll never forget what it was like as a kid to travel in the worlds of imagination. In the dusty back room of our bookstore, or in the shade of oak trees, I loved the weight of the book in my hands, the smell of ink and paper, that gritty, rough quality of a paperback’s pages. I loved the adventures you could have in those things, those worlds of people and monsters that you could go back to again and again. My dream as a writer is to pass along that same experience to some other kid. I don’t care if he notices my name on the cover or not. But if something I wrote, some ideas that passed through my keyboard, can bring a smile to his face and good dreams to his head, then I will have done something worthwhile.”