SUMMER 2009 / Volume 8 - Issue 4
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BY PAMELA R. ANDERSON, A.A. '89, M.A. '94
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or a time that he could only measure in heartbeats, Covenant hung in the darkness. The red, impaling light was the only fixed point in a universe that seemed to seethe around him. He felt that he might behold a massive moving of heaven and earth, if only he knew where to look; but the blackness and the hot red beam on his forehead prevented him from turning away, and he had to let the currents that swirled around him pass unseen.
So begins Thomas Covenant’s fateful awakening in Lord Foul’s Bane, the first book in Stephen R. Donaldson’s acclaimed epic fantasy series The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.
When the first two trilogies in The Chronicles were published between 1977 and 1983, Donaldson, M.A. ’71, did not know that more than two decades would pass before he would write and publish books seven and eight. With a ninth volume scheduled for publication late in 2010, Donaldson has spent much of his adult life stepping into (and out of) a place known simply as “The Land.”
The Land has special healing powers; however, it and its people are perilously close to being destroyed by Lord Foul, the Despiser. Transported inexplicably into this tumultuous place and time is anti-hero Thomas Covenant: leper, pariah, unbeliever. Covenant’s white-gold wedding band is the source for wild magic in The Land, and it earns him undeserved awe and respect. But it also places him in the position of unwilling savior for this magical place, a position he rejects and fears. His constant grappling between hope and despair is a backdrop to the series.
Donaldson created Covenant from memories of his own childhood in India, where his father, a medical missionary, worked extensively with lepers in the hospital where he practiced orthopedics. The lepers often were shunned by other people in their communities, and Donaldson remembers feeling similarly isolated when he returned to the United States at age 16. It was the 1960s, and U.S. citizens were struggling with issues that included the Vietnam War, exploding drug culture, changing musical influences, problems with segregation and integration, and much more. Making Covenant a leper was one way that Donaldson could express his own culture shock and feelings of alienation from that time in his life.
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lthough those feelings powerfully shaped his writing, Donaldson notes that Kent State University was equally (albeit more positively) transformative when it came to achieving his goal of becoming a writer. He studied some of the great writers — Joseph Conrad, Henry James, George Meredith, Sir Walter Scott, Shakespeare, and others — while honing his craft at Kent State. He recalls that the University’s English department faculty members — particularly professors David Ewbank, Bobby Smith and William Hildebrand, along with Howard Vincent, who was a Melville scholar and Kent State’s first university professor — supported and encouraged him. Fellow students were equally accepting, and he says today that there were virtually no barriers to exploring intellectual ideas. The open-minded attitudes on the Kent Campus allowed him to find himself. Former Kent State English professor and longtime friend, Dr. David Ewbank, remembers Donaldson as “a conspicuously bright and creative student. I did not realize, when he was a student of mine, that he would become a famous author, read and loved by people around the world — but I am not surprised. Even as a young man, Steve displayed remarkable talent and exceptional promise,” he says.
Donaldson came to Kent State after earning his bachelor’s degree from the College of Wooster; however, midway through his master’s program, he was drafted as a conscientious objector and had to take night classes while working at Akron City Hospital during the days. He was in Akron on May 4, 1970, the seminal moment in Kent State’s — and, indeed, the country’s history — when students were shot by National Guardsmen during a protest against the Vietnam War. It was an unforgettable day for Donaldson, who remembers the aftermath of the shootings as an “intense time” at Kent State, even as it contributed to our national story.
This idea of stories and storytelling has profound meaning to Donaldson, who believes that “storytelling is our number one survival skill (and is) how we face life and the future.” According to Donaldson, “We cannot be who we are without stories.”
This is not to say that he easily or quickly found his own way to tell stories. He wrote for many years before he discovered the kind of story that he was uniquely gifted to tell. “I filled an entire file cabinet with journeyman work — mostly mainstream pieces,” he says. But when he read The Lord of the Rings, he realized that fantasy was a worthwhile writing direction to take. “When I read Lord of the Rings, I was the only person I knew who took it seriously as literature. Everyone else said it was ‘pop’ work,” he says.
At that point, all the things he had been trying to achieve came into focus, and he began to write fantasy in the long, narrative canvas that he eventually realized was his strength. At last, Stephen Donaldson had found his place in the writing world.
Over the years, he also delved into the realms of mystery and science fiction writing, with his science fiction Gap series his personal favorite. As with fantasy, he found those genres to be worthy of serious consideration, and he notes that there are times when reality is so jangling that fantasy and science fiction are our only literatures of hope and optimism. “Even if everything in a book is dark, science fiction presupposes that there will be a future,” he says.
As it turned out, the Thomas Covenant series also had a future that stretched beyond the original dreams of the youthful, idealistic Donaldson. Although somewhat driven by readers who yearned for yet another book in a fantasy series that Donaldson had shelved more than two decades earlier, the first six books paved the way for his release of The Runes of the Earth in 2004 and New York Times bestseller Fatal Revenant in 2007. Yet to be published are Against All Things Ending, due late in 2010, and the final book of the series, The Last Dark, which (if the stars align) will appear in 2013.
In the first two of the final tetralogy, there has been a pivotal shift in characters, and the tone is less bitter and sharp-edged. These are books that benefit from the warmth and maturity of an author who is not afraid to bring all of his life experiences into his writing. They come from a man who has learned to trust that the stories he writes are worth telling.
“Writing is my heart’s blood,” he says. “I learned years ago that I don’t choose my ideas. I perceive myself as being the servant to the ideas that come to me.”
For his fans — some of whom participate with Donaldson in an ongoing dialogue on his Web site, his journey is one that welcomes many travelers and that delights in the discoveries made along the way.
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