L LITERARY ARTS
California is the goal of the whole world – to come here at least once. How can the NY publishers automatically dismiss anyone from California?” Finney’s latest book, Sequoia Gardens – California Stories, takes in a lot of the Golden State, including the Bay Area and the Sierras, as well as the Central Valley. It is a collection of short stories involving characters as diverse as a 17-year-old foster child and a manipulative woman in agribusiness. Some reviewers have said that Finney tends to write about characters that are on the margins of society. He’s not sure where that comes from. “Maybe the majority of all people live on the edge,” he said. “I never look at it that way. I’m classless. I don’t know how you pick out your characters. Something catches your eye.” The story he is writing now came from an article in the newspaper. A family of Russian immigrants with a tow truck service in California used slow times to grab expensive cars off driveways and charge people for “storage.” If they wouldn’t pay, the Russians sold the cars for parts. When they were caught, about 75 members, including the 80-year-old grandmother, went to prison. Finney thought he had it made as a writer when he was in his 20s and a literary magazine accepted his story. “The next thing I know, the story gets in the O. Henry Awards, which is probably one of the better venues for short story writing even today,” he said. “I told myself this is easy. It isn’t easy, of course. You end up paying for those thoughts of success and glory because it took me 20 more years to learn what I had to do to be able to sit down and write for so many hours a day and come up with something that was good enough that they would publish it again.” And he did. He started publishing often in literary magazines such as the Sewanee Review. Eventually, he accumulated enough stories to produce two collections, Bird’s Landing and Flights in the Heavenlies, before his latest Sequoia Gardens. He also has published four novels. In addition to Words of My Roaring, they are The Lady with the Alligator Purse, Winterchill and California Time. Winterchill gained the distinction of convincing a New York publisher that a story about six generations of a San Joaquin family of plum growers held more than regional interest. Not only was the novel published by William Morrow, but a chapter from the book printed under the title “Peacocks” won Finney an O. Henry Award and produced nationwide publicity for the book. Finney’s latest venture is writing a play. The storyline comes from his as-yet-unpublished Gold Rush-era novels, a chapter that has been printed as a short story titled, “Up on the Yuba.” It deals with a woman named Juanita who was hung after being accused of killing a miner. “I’m not sure why after all these years I should try a new genre where I didn’t know what I was getting into,” he said. Maybe it has something to do with his desire to explore areas that are untouched and new to him, the same desire that keeps him travelling to “obscure places” and that brought him to Visalia over 30 years ago.
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LIFESTYLE | SEPTEMBER 2011