A man of many tales

Nov 4 2009 - 12:34am | Ty Hall

Spectators began sitting in the aisles of Alkek Libary’s seventh floor Tuesday as people trickled in and the rumbling murmur of the crowd rose and fell in anticipation of the guest speaker.

David Norman, graduate student in the MFA program, introduced Tim O’Brien, telling audience members the author’s work offers a “fully imagined experience.”

Imagination was the theme of O’Brien’s lecture.

All eyes were on O’Brien as he took the stage in his red cap and black v-neck sweater.

O’Brien began speaking of his two heads, saying he would read an essay with “one head” and speak of “heavier things with the other head.”
O’Brien read from his essay “Telling Tails” featured in The Atlantic.

The crowd was in an uproar as he told the story of how Batman grew a tail, or how Jack abandoned Jill on a sinking cruise liner as she “took in more than a pale of water into her lungs.”

Aside from the laughter, only the occasional cough interrupted the audience’s focus on O’Brien as he spoke candidly about his father, children, wife and the importance of creativity.

O’Brien emphasized the magnitude of imagination and the necessity to embed description into the story dynamics.

“In the world of imagination, we feel things we did not feel in the real world,” O’Brien said.

O’Brien became overwhelmed when he spoke about imagining his father being able to talk to him again.

O’Brien said the inspiration to become a writer came while lying in a Vietnam sewage ditch in 1969, begging God to let him live amidst the crying, dying and gunfire.

“Somewhere a writer was being born in me,” O’Brien said. “I didn’t feel any other option … you can’t be something without first imagining it. We get paid to lie. Good, powerful, solid lying.”

Jordan Day, finance freshman, took the opportunity to hear O’Brien.

“I’m here for my university seminar class,” Day said. “My dad and roommate are pretty big fans, and my English teacher told me to listen to him if I ever had the chance. I’ve never read him, but I’m sure I will after I meet him.”

Nonstudents visited the campus to hear O’Brien speak.

Charles Blankenship, San Marcos native, said this was his third time to hear O’Brien.

“His use of the English language is better than any writer I’ve ever read, but the pictures he paints in his stories are incredible,” Blankenship said.

O’Brien has written eight books and has won numerous awards, including the National Book Award in fiction for Going after Cacciato and France’s Prix du Meiller Livre Etranger for The Things They Carried. He was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

“I’m in a weekly workshop with O’Brien,” Norman said. “Everything he said speaks to the fiction writer, but it also has a universal appeal. You don’t have to be a fiction writer to appreciate what he was saying.”