There is a temptation to herd writers into literary ghettos: southern, western, nature, historical, regional. These labels are meant to be descriptive, but often become prescriptive, as though geography marks the limits of imagination rather than its beginning. Larry McMurtry once described himself as "a minor regional novelist," a line that has survived because it sounds like a writer mocking the literary establishment's habit of mistaking geography for destiny. McMurtry wasn't writing about Texas. He was writing about people. Texas happened to be where he found them.

I thought about that when I learned of the death of Norman Lavers.

Lavers, who died in June at 91, lived a literary life that rarely attracts much public notice. It was built around reading, teaching, writing and paying attention. He published novels, literary criticism and a memoir, won O. Henry and Pushcart prizes and the Porter Prize, taught creative writing for decades at Arkansas State University and altered the lives of hundreds of students. His obituary reads like a record of sustained curiosity.

Lavers grew up in Berkeley, Calif., when that city occupied a peculiar place in the national consciousness. It was simultaneously a university town, a place of extraordinary natural beauty, and one of the intellectual centers of the Atomic Age. His memoir, "Growing Up in Berkeley with the Bomb," is an attempt to recover what it felt like to come of age in a landscape where ordinary domestic life existed alongside discoveries and anxieties that would define the second half of the 20th century. It understands that memory is never private. We remember places as much as events, and places........

© Arkansas Online