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3. The Big Rock Candy Mountain Etulain: A good friend tells me that when she read The Big Rock Candy Mountain, she felt as if she were prying into your private life. She thought the writing of the novel must have been a painful experience, especially since you revealed so much about your family in your early years. Is she correct in assuming that it was a painful experience and yet a cathartic one? Stegner: Oh, sure it was, although she may be wrong in assuming that everything in it is autobiographical. You know, the imagination does work; though there was a good strong basis of autobiography in the book, it isn't by any means all autobiographical. Some parts of it were painful-I wrote some of it through tears-but other parts were like anything else. You put things together, and they come out either satisfactory or unsatisfactory, depending upon how well you put them together. The whole experience of writing that novel was, in a sense, cathartic, because I had to recreate a lot of my past, and it was a long way past. Times do change and you get into other areas and you forget about the past. When I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa, Steve Benet came through, and I told him I wanted to write a three-volume peasant novel. I'd been reading a lot of Scandinavian novels because I had a couple of Scandinavian professors, and my background was Scandinavian, and somehow or other I was reading a lot of those. I thought if an American could write a Growth of the Soil, I could. I had discovered just about then, as a graduate student in Iowa, when I was twenty, or barely twenty-one, that my experience was different from that of [41] 42 CONVERSATIONS WITH WALLACE STEGNER almost anybody that I talked to. It seemed interesting to them, and that's a temptation to any writer, even a budding writer. You know, if what you talk about seems interesting to people, you instantly talk about that and nothing else. So that's the impulse I started out with a long time ago, the impulse to write a peasant novel about Saskatchewan homesteaders. It was about nineteen thirty, 'thirty-one, something like that, a long time back. Had you thought of writing this book before you actually started in . .. ? I never did until Iowa. I began to think about it then because I got the impression that somehow my life, which had seemed to me very dull and unimpressive, was different enough so that other people took an interest in it. I of course never wrote any part of it for a long, long time after that, but that was where it first came on. You once told two interviewers, ((I don't believe you can write about anything . .. without drawing deeply on your own experience.m The Big Rock Candy Mountain seems the best illustration of this credo among your early works. Well, possibly. Because I did recreate all the places where we had lived in a wandering life around the West, and I recreated some people, fairly realistically, in the book. I was drawing on my own experience a lot, but also let me repeat what I've said here, that the book isn't by any means all personal experience. And even when you do draw on your experience you don't have to write autobiography. Somewhere or other, I think in Recapitulation, that most recent novel, I remark that the memory can be an artist as well as a historian. You draw on it, but you don't draw on it literally. You draw on it all the time. I don't suppose you can do anything else but draw on your own experience, in the same way that you can imagine only what you have seen. You can't imagine creatures you haven't seen. The only thing you can do is put together some monster made up of pieces of the creatures you have seen. When I said that you can't write out of anything but experience, I certainly didn't mean literal experience. The Big Rock Candy Mountain is by no means literal experience. Some of the father-son stuff is of course pretty literal: I was exorcising my father. But a lot of the rest of it is invention , and I would have to insist on that. Then...

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