Fort Collins: Author Ann Patchett Announces She'll Stop Touring

FORT COLLINS, CO -- Prizewinning Nashville author Ann Patchett used a Fort Collins Reads event to announce that she will no longer give lecture tours, which she compared to "doing Vaudeville," and focus on writing. A crowd of more than 1,200 people packed the Fort Collins Hilton Hotel ballroom Nov. 5 to hear Patchett speak about her career, including her breakthrough novel, 2001's Bel Canto, which won the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Prize, and her 2016 novel, Commonwealth, which was chosen by the Fort Collins Reads program.

"I was on the road as if I was doing vaudeville for four years," Patchett said. She explained that giving paid talks about writing helped raise money for her father's medical expenses. "It became this huge machine and I got to be really good at it, so I kept going."

She chose the Fort Collins speech (for which she was not paid) as the finale, she said.

For more than an hour, Patchett shared the secrets of her craft, including her realization that she was often writing the same novel again and again about strangers from different milieus trapped together by circumstances and how they built relationships under pressure. In Bel Canto, set in Lima, Peru, an opera singer, the Japanese Ambassador and others are held hostage for months in the Japanese embassy by revolutionaries. In State of Wonder, a group of botanical pharmacologists in the Amazon jungle seek ingredients for a miracle drug.

Patchett also said that a fear of hurting her family members led her to never write about her own experience growing up in a divorced household, one theme of Commonwealth. But the death of her father was accompanied by a realization that turning 50 meant "you just don't care anymore," she said.

Owning an independent bookstore in Nashville allowed her to interview celebrities and authors such as Tom Hanks, Patchett said. She dropped some gossip about camaraderie among female authors she's gotten to know including Barbara Kingsolver, Zadie Smith and Donna Tartt.

As for her retirement from the lecture circuit, the decision was made more than a year ago, Patchett said.

"I made a pledge to myself on New Year's day last year that I was going to stop. And this is my last talk," she said, to gasps from the audience. "I’m so excited about the idea that I’m going to stop talking about writing and write, so goodbye!"

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Image: Ann Patchett signs books at the Hilton Hotel in Fort Collins Nov. 5, 2017. Patchett announced she was giving up the lecture circuit to write more. Image via Patch.com