Larry F. Slonaker
 | The topic of this article may not meet Wikitia's general notability guideline. |
Larry F. Slonaker | |
|---|---|
| Add a Photo | |
| Born | November 17, 1953 Great Falls, Montana, United States |
| Occupation | Novelist, essayist, journalist, newspaper editor |
| Citizenship | American |
| Education | Bachelor of Science |
| Alma mater | Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University |
Larry F. Slonaker is an American novelist, essayist and former newspaper editor, reporter and columnist. He is the author of two novels, published 36 years apart: Voice of the Visitor and Nothing Got Broke.
Early life
Slonaker was born in Great Falls, Montana on Nov. 17, 1953. He attended public schools there and graduated from C.M. Russell High School in 1972. The following year he enrolled at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1976.
Career
Following graduation, Slonaker worked as a reporter and editor at two small newspapers in the Northwest United States, the Idaho Falls Post-Register and the Tri-City Herald. He left the Herald in 1982 to work on a novel originally titled The Rose is Dead, which is a line from the Shelley poem Music, When Soft Voices Die.
Slonaker later distanced himself from the book, saying, “I undertook the writing with the breezy aim of doing a horror novel, ala Stephen King. But the ‘horror’ story turned into a horrible-relationship story, which is what I was in at the time.” [1] Nevertheless, Avon purchased the manuscript, retitled it Voice of the Visitor and published it in paperback. Psycho_(novel) author Robert Bloch wrote a blurb for the cover, calling the novel “a diabolical delight.” [2]
In 1983 Slonaker joined the news staff of the San Jose Mercury News, where he worked for over 20 years as an editor, columnist and reporter. He was a member of the news staff that won a Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting [3] in 1990. In 2001 he took a year’s leave of absence from the paper to teach Language Arts at a public school. When he returned, he wrote a five-part series [4] on the experience that was nationally honored.[5]
In late 2005 Slonaker joined some 50 other journalists who took a buyout in a cost-cutting effort by the Mercury News. [6] “You could already see the damaging effect the Internet was going to have on those big ambitious papers with huge staffs,” he later said. “We were dinosaurs watching the asteroid fly at us.” [7]
He eventually took a position in communications at Stanford_University, and it was at that time—while commuting by train three-plus hours every day[8]—that he wrote Nothing Got Broke, which is set mostly on the Hi-Line_(Montana) area of northern Montana. The novel depicts an ex-journalist named Rossiter who lives in a secluded shack on the plains. His solitude is disrupted by Thao Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American reporter who suspects he once committed a homicide. A cat-and-mouse exercise ensues, in which she tries to determine if Rossiter did commit the crime, and at the same time crack his fatalistic and seemingly hopeless world-view.
“The basis of the idea for the story came from reading reviews about protagonists who were seeking redemption,” (Slonaker) said. “I thought, what if you had a character who wasn’t really interested in being redeemed?”[9]
A subplot of the novel deals with the historical plight of Native Americans, and explores the possibly apocryphal speech supposedly given by Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce at the Battle of Bear Paw in Montana.
Author Craig Lancaster, who has written extensively about Montana, praised the book, saying, “That (Slonaker) gets Montana comes shimmering off these pages—what it is, what it was, what it might still become. It's a place unlike anywhere else, and Slonaker reveals it with appropriate measures of reverence and unflinching candor.”[10]
The book lists the author as Larry F. Slonaker. He started using his middle initial as his byline when he found out another Larry Slonaker (no relation) had self-published a novel.[11]
Personal life
Slonaker and his wife live on a small horse ranch in the Central_Coast_(California) area of California.
Works
Novels
Voice of the Visitor (Avon, 1986)
Nothing Got Broke (Cirque Press, 2022)
Selected Essays
Reclaiming the flag: Patriotism belongs to no party The Hill, June 20, 2024
Pondering the 'Me' in Dementia The Guardian, Sept. 29, 2023
Dan Cushman and Stay Away, Joe Cirque Journal, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2022
What the American Flag Means to Me San Jose Spotlight, Jan. 20, 2021
SJ2020 Was to Close SJ Schools’ Achievement Gap, But It’s Absent San Jose Inside, Nov. 11, 2020
References
External links
This article "Larry F. Slonaker" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical. Articles taken from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be accessed on Wikipedia's Draft Namespace.