Richard Ford visited UMF.
By Chuck McMahon
Special to the Sun Journal

FARMINGTON – Pulitzer Prize winning author Richard Ford spoke before a packed crowd of students, faculty and fans Feb. 4 at the University of Maine at Farmington.

As this year’s first guest for UMF’s Visiting Writers series, Ford spoke about his journey into the field of writing and read one of his short stories titled “The Communist.”

Now living in East Boothbay, Ford spends the little time he has writing and reading.

When asked about what advice he’d give to young writers, Ford responded, “Try to talk yourself out of it.

As a life, it’s much too solitary, it makes you obsessive, the rewards seem to be much too inward for most people, and too much rides on luck. Other than that, it’s great.”

No stranger to publication, Ford is the author of eight books of fiction, as well as many stories and essays published in The New Yorker, The New York Times and Esquire. His novel “Independence Day” received both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. It was the first novel to receive both prizes.

His stories are considered by critics to have deep American themes and has received many awards. After reading his short story “The Communist,” Ford answered questions. Asked what it was like to win the Pulitzer Prize, Ford said, “It’s good. I was shocked to find out that somebody out there liked my book and wasn’t in my family.”

Growing up he suffered from mild dyslexia, but actually believed that it helped him as a writer, he said.

“Being a slow reader admitted me to books at a very basic level – word by word. That doesn’t seem like bad preparation to me, if writers are people who essentially live sentence by sentence,” said Ford.

Ford then went on to the U.S. Marine Corps and after a medical discharge, he went on to study literature at Michigan State University. He also commented on his struggle to get published and actually credited his mother with making him decide what he was going to do with his life.

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