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Banks writes about life's survivors By BILL VARBLE If Russell Banks' fictional characters are working-class losers bent on turning their lives into wreckage, readers nonetheless feel the pathos, and even humor, of their situations. Chautauqua Who : Russell Banks. What : Author talk in the New Chautauqua Lecture Series. When : 7:30 p.m. Wednesday. Where : The Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater in Medford. Tickets : $15 at the box office. Call 779-3000. Although characters like Bone in "Rule of the Bone" (1995) and Bob Dubois in "Continental Drift" (1985) are fictional creations, Banks dips deeply into real life for their circumstances. Prominent among those circumstances, Banks believes, is what people do to make a living. "I don't know them unless I know something about their work," he says in a telephone interview. "How they spend their days and years. American writers often leave that out." Banks is the author of 13 books of fiction, including "Success Stories" (1985), "The Sweet Hereafter" (1991) and "Cloudsplitter" (1998). He's won Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, O. Henry, Pushcart and Best American Short Story prizes, an American Book Award and a Pulitzer nomination. The film version of "Hereafter" took the Grand Prix at the 1997 Cannes Festival, and movie adaptations of several of his other books are in development. Unlike the articulate, affluent characters favored by many writers, Banks' people often live week to week in a world in which the issue is survival. "It's not as though it was a choice," he says. "I grew up in that kind of world." Banks was born in 1940 and grew up in New Hampshire and eastern Massachusetts. His father left his mother and the couple's children when Banks was a boy. "The adults I knew were deeply affected by the Depression," he says. "That was a primary fact, an emotional and daily fact. When I began to write, that was the ground I stood on." He didn't have the lonely childhood claimed by so many writers. "Our home was noisy, boisterous," he says. "My mother is a gregarious person. They tell me I was a storyteller from the start. They called them lies, now it's fiction." Banks worked as a plumber ("not a very good one!") and didn't go to college until he was 24. He was starting to write when he met Nelson Algren, the author of "Man With a Golden Arm," at a workshop he was teaching. "He took me under his wing," Banks says. The two were friends until Algren's death in 1981. "He was a gruff, rough-hewn, tender-hearted man," Banks says. "The first grown-up writer I knew. He was a storyteller in the world. I thought boy, that's how I want to be." Banks put down his pipe wrenches and went to the University of North Carolina aided by an inheritance in his wife's family, then got a job teaching. "That was nice," he says. "No heavy lifting." He taught at Columbia, New York University and in the creative writing program at Princeton until he retired several years ago. Unlike those who say that academia ruins writers, Banks thinks it was a great choice. "Teaching let me organize my time," he says. "It's one of the few jobs in which you can control which 40 hours you use." He'd write in the morning and teach afternoons. For "Rule of the Bone," about a disaffected young man, he collected alternative rock CDs ("My kids started borrowing my Nine-Inch Nails albums") and hung out in a tattoo parlor. "I knew about being a 14-year-old kid in trouble, but not in the '90s," he says. "I like kids anyhow. So many of those kids we meet in the malls we just avert our gaze, but they are us." For "Cloudsplitter," a novel about the radical 19th century abolitionist John Brown and his son Owen, Banks studied 19th century journals. "He's buried near my house in North Elba, N.Y. He kept coming up. He was connected to the Transcendentalists, who meant a lot to me, so he was a radical figure but connected to writers, a guy whose life in some important ways is at the center of American conflicts, starting with racism but also where religion and violence intersect. I thought I might be able to deal with those questions." Banks has a book of short stories, "The Angel on the Roof," coming out in June from HarperCollins. He's working on a new novel, some essays and a screenplay." He's training for his annual mountain-climbing trip, this year to 23,000-foot Aconcagua in Argentina. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA