I was just trying to get some friends of ours down where I could understand them. These people just rang so true. About that: Stegner told VQR magazine in 1991 that he began the book as a memoir. I wasn’t yet in the grip of creative nonfiction when I first read it, but even then I suspected it was more than a little autobiographical. Here were four people-six possible relationship dyads-and Stegner developed them all. This was the first time I noticed how character drives a story forward. Early chapters take place in Madison, Wisconsin, where I live, and perhaps that’s the “hello” it had me at on that first reading.īut more, it was that not-always-easy friendship that gripped me. It’s a novel about “a long, not-always-easy friendship between two couples,” the back jacket of my first-edition paperback states. This was just as I was returning to my childhood writing ambitions, and Crossing to Safety was the book I wished I were author enough to write, the book written in just the literary style I hoped someday to master.

I recall reading it three times over, in quick succession. I first discovered this book early in the early 1990s. I have the same edition on my bookshelf at home, and once home, I picked up where I left off. I began reading it again, and noted the page on which I stopped when departure day came.

While staying at Windhorse Farm leading a writing retreat in Nova Scotia in May, I ran into an old friend- Crossing to Safety,Wallace Stegner’s 1987 novel and one of my favorite books of all time.

Wallace stegner crossing to safety