By Clare Duffy
The lights had been turned out, his parents gone to bed.
The streets outside were quiet, but Anthony Doerr's room filled with voices from New York or from Toronto, the faraway stories reaching him all the way in Cleveland. His radio was tuned to a broadcast about baseball, probably about his favorite team: The Cleveland Indians.
"The magic of hearing these stories that were taking place in these places far away, and the voices would travel through walls and into my bedroom," Doerr, 43, now of Boise, says, "it was addictive."
While baseball was Doerr's fascination at the time, the power of radio stuck with him.
Years later, a similar scene appeared in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "All the Light We Cannot See": "Werner likes to crouch in his dormer and imagine the radio waves like mile-long hard strings, bending and vibrating over Zollverein, flying through forests, through cities, through walls. At midnight he and Jutta prowl the ionosphere, searing for that lavish, penetrating voice. When they find it, Werner feels as if he has been launched into a different existence."
Doerr is scheduled to speak at the University of Portland on Feb. 27 in an event that is free and open to the public. Doerr will also be one of the professional writing mentors at this summer's Tin House Writer's Workshop.
"All the Light We Cannot See," published in 2014, is the story of a young German boy who gets pulled into the Hitler Youth and a blind French girl who joins the French resistance - and their unlikely meeting during World War II thanks to the magic of radio.
"Very early on, I knew I wanted the book to be about radio," Doerr said. "I knew I wanted to set the story in a time when it was relatively new technology and it was used both as an instrument of power and oppression, and as a thing of beauty."
Communication technology continues to fascinate Doerr. In the book, he writes about how the Nazis gave German families cheap radios so that it was like having "the voice of the Fuhrer in every home" - and Doerr says he sees some resemblances in how technology is being used today.
"For example, YouTube can be used to learn Farsi or do calculus, and that's miraculous, but at the same time YouTube can be used to recruit people for fundamentalist groups," he said. "And now the new president is using Twitter to humiliate people or to shape the way the media works and that's really scary. It's still about narrative and who can tell stories. There's a lot of power for whoever controls the narrative."
Ultimately, Doerr wanted the book to be an exploration of the humanity on both sides of the World War II conflict, a theme that's effected by telling the story through main characters who are children for much of the novel.
He started writing the novel in earnest during the year his twins, now 12, were born. He and his family were spending the year traveling throughout Europe to promote another one of his books and so that he could do research for "All the Light We Cannot See." His sons provided inspiration for Marie Laure le Blanc, the book's audacious French protagonist.
"Marie is a really intellectually curious persona and I think, in a lot of ways, my kids are inside of her," Doerr says. "Getting to watch the kids explore the world, watching a 3-year-old learn what a butterfly is and discover the world really helps awaken your own imagination."
At the University of Portland event, Doerr looks forward to sharing the story of how the novel came together, including showing photos from his trips to Paris' National Museum of Natural History and sharing stories of reading through transcripts of interviews of German citizens done just after the end of the war. He also hopes, he says, to get young people hooked on reading and writing.
He's doing some writing himself these days - working on a new project, though he says he can't share details just yet.
"Every day I can, I just keep going further along," Doerr says. "The most amazing gift about being a novelist is that you get to pursue your curiosity everyday."
--Clare Duffy, for The Oregonian/OregonLive
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Anthony Doerr
When: 6:30 p.m., Monday, Feb. 27
Where: Buckley Center Auditorium, University of Portland, 5000 N. Willamette Blvd.
Admission: Free
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