She tops her brown frizz with a white canvas hat, buttons her raincoat and brings her iPhone. "One thing about traveling, I have been taking pictures," says the Great American Novelist.
She tilts the phone to the horizontal to display a postcard-crisp aerial of Mount Hood that she'd caught that morning on the plane from Seattle. But mainly, the phone carries the comforts of home.
"When I get lonely," she says, "I look at my cat." She drags over a few frames to a blurry close-up of a sweet little gray face, and she smiles.
Oates is 72, and for nearly all of her lifetime, she has inhaled air and breathed out words ... 56 novels, more than 30 collections of short stories, eight volumes of poetry, plays, essays, book reviews.
She came to Portland this week to read at the Powell's in Beaverton from her most recent work, "A Widow's Story," a memoir of the six months in 2008 after the sudden death of her husband of 48 years, Raymond Smith.
She aimed at that piece of time, she says, hoofing at a brisk clip to Tom McCall Waterfront Park, because it was defined by an unrelenting siege of insomnia: The brain spins to process data that simply will not compute.
"I've never really solved the problem of it," she says. "It went away after about six months. I didn't really have insomnia ever before. I'd had some sleepless nights, but the insomnia of a widow, the whole body is kind of awake."
She crosses Southwest Naito Parkway into the park. "Oh, this is nice where we're walking!" She looks about her as Portland puts on its full sunny-day show of bikes, dogs, homeless folks, tats, Frisbees, walkers, runners, lovers.
She says her work, writing and teaching at Princeton University, brought her through the acute siege of widowhood.
"Having a job, putting your clothes on, going out driving, that really saved my life," she says. "You're involved with other people, and you're not just deteriorating."
Listen: Joyce Carol Oates talks about her next novel on her Portland walk. (:46)
She stops near the Salmon Street Springs fountain to flick through the iPhone library again. Here are some frames of her second husband, Princeton neuroscientist Charles Gross, whom she married a year after Smith died. She remarried, she said, to have someone to walk with.
"Ray and I had been together forever. We sort of grew up together. But Charlie is a wonderful companion. He likes to walk. And companionship is what you need, somebody to be by your side."
The Hawthorne Bridge looks extra tough against the sky blue and river green. "Gorgeous!" Oates declares, turning the iPhone to capture the scene.
At the walk's turnaround, she says that in widowhood, she saw how friends and family struggle to ease the pain but get freaked out by their own fears. Oates counsels:
"If it's a close friend, you offer time and your friendship. If you're going to dinner or a movie, ask the person along," she says. "If you're not a close friend, don't send all those flowers."
No flowers? But people love to send flowers.
"If Ray had been alive, and we'd gotten some nice flowers or some fruit for an anniversary, it would be so wonderful, a celebration. But with him gone, it felt so mocking and cruel."
She crosses Southwest Naito Parkway on the way back to her hotel; does she have any guilty pleasures? She and Charlie are catching up on "The Wire." She's thinking about getting a dog but doesn't want to be on dog duty all the time. She worries more that her cat would disapprove.
She pulls out the iPhone again, flicks through more frames. She stops on one: the White House. She was there in March to receive a National Humanities Medal.
"We were in a room with about 20 people, just waiting for the ceremony to begin, and we heard this voice in back of us: 'Well, this is a fancy gathering!' We looked around, and it was Obama!"
When she shook his hand upon receiving the medal, "He said he liked my writing."
Oates turns a corner back onto Southwest Broadway and enters the hotel. She pulls off the white canvas hat and smiles. She says thanks for the walk; she really enjoyed seeing Portland.
-- Anne Saker
Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2011/04/writer_joyce_carol_oates_comes.html
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