PORT HADLOCK — Novelist Adrianne Harun will give a free reading Wednesday from A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain, her story of a band of teenagers contending with life in rural British Columbia.
Harun, a longtime Port Townsend resident who has crisscrossed the country on book tour since Mountain’s release earlier this year, will step up to read at 6:30 p.m. at the Jefferson County Library, 620 Cedar Ave.
Real events drove Harun to write her novel: the disappearances of girls, mostly from First Nations families, from a stretch of B.C. Highway 16 between the towns of Prince George and Prince Rupert. It’s known as the Highway of Tears.
Harun heard of these disappearances years ago in a public radio report. She could not forget these girls: the stolen sisters.
Yet Mountain is not an investigation of the Highway of Tears. No, the story follows five friends, and how good and evil — the devil, personified in various ways — come into their lives.
Leo is our first storyteller, introducing us to his world.
“The five of us — Jackie; Bryan; Bryan’s sister, Ursie; Tessa; and me — had been oddball friends since swaddling days,” he says, “and as soon as we started school, that friendship had been cemented.
“Part Kitselas, part Haisla, part Polish and German, Ursie, Bryan and me fit with neither the white nor the Indian kids, who spurned us in different ways.
“But Jackie, who held her whole generous nation in her blood, adopted us … We’d ridden all the way to our seventeenth year together, holding one another in sight as best we could.”
Harun is also the author of The King of Limbo, a book of short stories — some set in a Port Townsend-like place. Limbo was a Washington State Book Award finalist.
The writer also teaches in the Master of Fine Arts-Rainier Writing Workshops program at Pacific Lutheran University and at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn.
For details about Harun’s appearance, visit www.jclibrary.info or phone 360-385-6544.
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
