Living on the family ranch outside of Pocatello, Tom Spanbauer felt he needed to get away: to hideouts in the family barn or in grain silos, places he could read and think.
He kept a journal, called his “Truth Book,” taped to the underside of his sock drawer, in which he wrote confessions and secrets, according to Sage Ricci, Spanbauer’s domestic partner of more than 20 years. His feelings and observations were made real when written down, an alchemical feat that brought with it a wrenching freedom: truth.
Writing was iconoclasm, and could be perilous.
One day when he was a young man, his mother found the journal, and when Spanbauer arrived home in the dark, his furious parents confronted him about the “filth” he had written and told him to apologize to his mother and get down on his knees and pray for his soul, Ricci told the Idaho Statesman.
The confrontation prompted Spanbauer to leave home and enroll at Idaho State University. Years later, he left the state and committed to further dangerous excavations written in ink. A literary son of Eastern Idaho, Spanbauer wrote five published novels and became a revered creative writing instructor in Portland, the city he lived in for the final decades of his life.
He died on Sept. 21, at 78, from heart failure, Ricci said. He had been sick with Parkinson’s disease for years.
In his Portland basement, Spanbauer hosted his “Dangerous Writing” workshop, where he pushed aspiring writers to “bring your inner life out of the closet and read it aloud to a group,” according to his website .
Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the novel “Fight Club,” which was made into a revered film of the same title, took Spanbauer’s workshop in the 1990s and has credited him with starting his writing career .
“The last thing Tom wanted to hear was nice, polite stories,” Palahniuk wrote recently in a blog post remembering him .
The New York Times called Spanbauer an “edgy novelist.”
“In his life, writing always had stakes, always was very transgressive,” Ricci said. “When he finished a book, I had to scrape him off the floor for a few weeks. He was full of shame and guilt, like he had exposed all the secrets that he wasn’t supposed to ... He liked to think about philosophy and what the world means and what our place in it was. And the only way he could answer that was to go to his own story and write about it.”
In 2015, Spanbauer won a lifetime achievement recognition from the Oregon Book Awards .
‘Idaho: such an enigma. But isn’t that what home is?’
A farm boy who witnesses a murder. A half-Native American prostitute who grows up at a hotel in the fictional town of Excellent, Idaho. A young man from the West who moves to New York City and observes the horror of the AIDS epidemic.
All were characters in Spanbauer’s books, which included “Faraway Places” in 1989, “The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon” in 1991 and “In The City of Shy Hunters” in 2001. “I Loved You More,” his last book, was published in 2014.
Born in 1946 into a family of German “dirt farmers,” as he once put it, Spanbauer grew up on a 160-acre cattle and sugar beet ranch outside Pocatello. He studied English at Idaho State University before spending two years in Kenya as a Peace Corps volunteer. Upon his return to the U.S., he married a woman whom he later separated from.
He left Idaho in 1978, living in New Hampshire, Vermont and Key West, Florida, before moving to New York, according to a news release about him. In 1988 he received a master’s from Columbia University, having studied under famed editor Gordon Lish, a minimalist writer who taught him to “carve his sentences down to the bone,” Ricci said. He moved to Oregon in 1991.
As a gay man raised in a Catholic family in a largely Mormon area on a farm that bordered the Fort Hall Reservation, Spanbauer was fascinated by “nested relationships of otherness and being an outsider,” Ricci said. His third novel, “In The City of Shy Hunters,” focuses on the devastation that AIDS caused in gay communities in the 1980s and 1990s. He himself contracted and survived the disease.
“For the longest time I felt selected out and put upon and why me,” he said of having AIDS in an interview with the magazine Nailed . “Now I just understand that I’m just a part of human suffering … It’s hard growing old. All of it’s suffering, and I just feel blessed because I’m a part of this humanity thing.”
Though he left Idaho as a young man, the state’s small towns and rural history remained a theme of much of his fiction, as did racism and sexual taboos. He returned to Idaho often, visiting towns like Atlanta in the summertime, before he became ill with Parkinson’s, Ricci said.
“Just about every piece I’ve ever written has something to do with Idaho,” Spanbauer once wrote.
Though his parents told him not to, in the 1950s he befriended the children of Mexican migrant workers who lived near his home, he wrote. While he grew up on the border of a reservation, it was not until he returned from his stint with the Peace Corps that he began to “notice” the Indigenous people around him: members of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes who had been pushed to the periphery.
“You can’t talk about Idaho and not talk about racism,” he wrote in the same essay , in 2013. He added:
“Given all the weirdness of being raised in rural Idaho in the 50’s, though, I’ve got to say that walking the mile home after changing the water (irrigating) on a summer evening — that long solitary walk at sunset down the dusty roads through the sugar beet fields, the alfalfa fields, the barley and wheat fields, was something close to a miracle. Really the connection I felt to the sky and to the earth and to the water created in me a feeling of being connected to an abiding deep mystery.
Idaho: such an enigma. But isn’t that what home is?
The dreaded place where your heart sings.”
Local News
