Author Tim O'Brien both reads from and discusses his writing

Tiffany Sawyer, a senior human development major, gets a copy of the novel The Things They Carried (her favorite book, she said) signed by the author, Tim O'Brien, following his reading from the book Oct. 22 in Schwartz Auditorium of Rockefeller Hall.

Baseball might be America's pastime, but last week more than 500 people skipped the early innings of the World Series opener to catch a reading by author Tim O'Brien. A standing-room-only crowd packed Rockefeller Hall's Schwartz Auditorium Oct. 22 to hear the National Book Award winner read selections from his 1990 best-selling book The Things They Carried.

The event marked the inauguration of the James McConkey Reading Series, sponsored by Epoch magazine and the Cornell English department's Program in Creative Writing, with a generous grant from alumnus Fred Parkin '63.

Michael Koch, editor of Epoch, delivered salutations in honor of McConkey, the Goldwin Smith Professor of English Emeritus, and read an excerpt from McConkey's classic Court of Memory.

Dressed in a T-shirt, jeans, sneakers and trademark ball cap pulled snug over his brow, O'Brien mesmerized the audience with a relaxed, but nonetheless gripping, recitation of passages from his collection of linked stories about Vietnam.

Earlier in the day, O'Brien, 52, fielded general questions about fiction writing and his work during an informal colloquium in the A.D. White House's Guerlac Room. About 50 students, graduate and undergraduate, attended the colloquium. O'Brien set the tone for the hour-long session with a candid account of his obsession with writing, which stemmed in part, he said, from his miserable skills as a shortstop for the Kiwanis little league team in his hometown of Worthington, Minn.

Dogged by his failures on the baseball diamond, O'Brien retreated to the local library, he said. There he found a book that changed his life called Larry the Little Leaguer, about a kid who could do everything O'Brien could not. "I finished the book ... and still in my dirty uniform began my own first novel called Timmy the Little Leaguer," he said.

"I think most of us who become writers [do so] because of the stuff we read as kids. ... Many years later [it was] the intersection of the dream of being a writer with Vietnam that put me on the road to being a professional writer."

Since his return from Vietnam in 1970 until now, O'Brien has written professionally, including a stint as a Washington Post reporter. He is the author of eight books, including Going After Cacciato, In the Lake of the Woods and his most recent novel, Tomcat in Love.

A gifted storyteller as well as writer, O'Brien shaped many of his colloquium responses within the framework of a tale. But O'Brien, who is a writer-in-residence at the University of Texas at Austin, has no patience for would-be writers who think "the story" is more important than good grammar.

"What I do for a living is try to make decent sentences, caring about commas and caring about the difference between a proper and a regular noun," he said. "What I think about on a daily basis is language, trying to put sentences down that I can live with. As writers, all we have [is] language and nothing else. We've got these 26 letters of the alphabet and some punctuation marks -- that's it. And out of those 26 letters you can make Ulysses or you can make 'Cosmo.' You can make pure crap or you can make great art."

O'Brien said he follows a strict schedule, rising early and working the entire day. He considers the crafting of a single paragraph a productive day's work, he said.

At Friday's reading, more than 400 souvenir copies of the program were distributed by Epoch staff in a shrink-wrapped package that included a free edition of Cornell's award-winning literary magazine.