In the fall of 1992, George Saunders, a 33-year-old technical writer who lived in Pittsford, walked into the Village Green bookstore on Monroe Avenue.
He was there to buy several copies of the Sept. 28, 1992, New Yorker magazine. Inside the magazine was his short story “Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz.”
Why several copies? Saunders needed them to send to family and friends, as it was his first story published in the New Yorker. The publication was a breakthrough, in effect a launch for what has been a brilliant career.
So far, Saunders has been the author of six story collections and three novels, the most recent of these, “Vigil,”published this year.
He has written two nonfiction works and a children’s book. There have been lots of short stories, many in the New Yorker.
There also have been many awards. In 2006, he was received a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship. In 2017, he was named winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize for his novel “Lincoln in the Bardo.”
But when he was a Village Green customer, Saunders was far from famous. He was working for Radian International, an environmental engineering company in Brighton, where he was also a geophysical engineer. He was there from1989 to 1996.
He came to Radian after earning an M.F.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University in 1988. Previous to that, he had graduated from Colorado School of Mines with a B.S. degree in geophysical engineering.
Saunders left Pittsford and returned to Syracuse University in 1996, where he remains on the creative writing faculty.
Syracuse certainly can claim Saunders as one of its own, but, given his seven years in the area, so can Rochester.
“Rochester was where I learned to be a writer, or, as they say, ‘found my voice,’” he wrote me in an email.
“We were living in Pittsford village, and I was riding my bike into work in Brighton, Corporate Woods,” he continued. “Our kids were little, money was short, the dream of being a writer was fading – but it was all very sweet, with the new family at home waiting for me.”
Keeping his day job, Saunders kept his dream alive, working when he could on his fiction.
“The conditions – stealing time from work, the larger project of keeping the family afloat – all made it a period of real sentence-to-sentence focus,” he wrote. “And the light, finally, came on.”
The light has come on for lots of other writers who spent time in Rochester.
Cornelius Eady grew up in Rochester, not far from the Rundel Library, where, as a teenager, he read, wrote and found inspiration.
Since then, Eady has published several books of poetry and received many awards. On Jan. 1 of this year, he performed the inaugural poem for the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York.
Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney is another writer with solid Rochester connections. She grew up here and has just published a Rochester-rich novel, “Lake Effect.” It follows her two other highly successful novels, “The Nest” and “Good Company.”
“Lake Effect” takes as its starting point a very real Rochester moment, a 1977 divorce and remarriage that involved two well-known Rochester families.
For Sweeney, the Rochester of her youth, when Kodak and Xerox were still dominant, provides rich material.
Given Saunders, Eady and Sweeney, and I’d add Nicholson Baker, too, it’s not immodest to say that Rochester has been a good place for writers to find their voices.
The work can pay off. They will walk into a bookstore, look on a shelf, and there they are, published. What a joy that must be.
Book It
Don’t forget to answer my call from last week to recommend a book that you think people should be reading. It’s early days, but “Theo of Golden” by Allen Levi is at the head of the pack right now. Write me at jmemmott@democratandchronicle.com.
Remarkable Rochesterian
Having made the case for George Saunders as someone with solid Rochester credentials, let’s add his name to the list of Remarkable Rochesterians that can be found at https://data.democratandchronicle.com/remarkable-rochesterians/.
George Saunders (1958 –): A native of Texas, he lived in Pittsford from 1989 to 1996 and worked as a technical writer and geophysical engineer for Radian International in Brighton, all along writing fiction and eventually getting published. He holds a B.S. degree from Colorado School of Mines and an M.F.A. from Syracuse University and is the author of six story collections and three novels, including “Lincoln in the Bardo,” which received the 2017 Man Booker Prize. He received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2006 and has taught creative writing at Syracuse University since 1996.
From his home in Geneseo, Livingston County, retired senior editor Jim Memmott writes Remarkable Rochester about who we were, who we are. He can be reached at jmemmott@gannett.com or write Box 274, Geneseo, NY 14454.
This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: How Rochester helped a bestselling author find his voice
Reporting by Jim Memmott, Special to Rochester Democrat and Chronicle / Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
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