Idaho Commission for Libraries

Contemporary writers John Rember, Gino Sky, and Tom Spanbauer draw heavily upon personal experience and Idaho geography in their fiction.

By William Studebaker

Life is opaque and dull compared to fiction. Fiction compresses and dramatizes. Fiction selectively alters what is left of life lived, memories and emotions, creating a synthetic but affirmable reality. Fiction can be as simple as mixing an acid with a base or as enigmatic as quantum physics. It cannot, however, be separate from mind: the writer's mind, the reader's mind. In order to appreciate fiction, minds must share some elemental data that turns what was written into what is read.