Writers and readers: a world apart but brought together by LO Reads
Vera Vos shares her thoughts about reading compared to how an author writes

I was on the edge of my seat listening to Emma Pattee talk about her book, Tilt. Her Author’s Presentation was the last event of this year’s Lake Oswego Public Library’s LO Reads Program on Sunday, April 26. After hearing Pattee talk, I realized that an author's perspective can be very different from that of a reader's. 

After listening to Pattee explain her hilarious journey into Tilt, I realized that all writing is preceded by real life experiences that strike a deep chord within. In Pattee’s case, her obsession with disasters, intensified by watching Zombie movies, fostered fear of being in an apocalypse kind of event.

For a few minutes Pattee was at the epicenter of a disaster. Yes, the big one, a subduction zone earthquake in Portland. Or at least, that’s what she thought. She was six months pregnant in IKEA when suddenly the floor started shaking. Already off balance with a baby belly, she stumbled, knowing this was the end.

Of course, it was not “the big one.” It turned out to be some heavy machinery causing floor vibrations. But it sparked an idea. What would an actual earthquake look like in IKEA and all over Portland? Tilt became a seed incubating in her imagination.

A survivalist-like neighbor, the real experience of isolation and fear resulting from the COVID pandemic, and a lot of hard work, took the incubating seed to book form. From that point, Tilt wound its way to me, in the fourth row of the Lakewood High School Theater, joining author and reader together, to marvel, laugh, and wonder at our different perspectives of the story.

Both writing and reading are, mostly, solitary endeavors. I picture Thoreau, alone at Walden Pond, outside or by a window while he wrote. Creative forces must have been awakened by having only nature, his muse, in sight.

When engrossed in a book, I’m alone with the story, even on a crowded plane, a busy beach, or my side of the bed, my own imagination at work.

I am grateful and, I think, Pattee and the entire audience that evening are too, that the LO Reads program brought together the isolated worlds of a writer and reader, fostering kinship and appreciation of both. I hope all of you had an opportunity to experience this integrating of writer and reader in the many LO Reads events generated by Tilt, sponsored and organized by our Lake Oswego Public Library.

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