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The Big Idea: Rich Larson
Sep. 3rd, 2025 05:58 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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Stories are there for us through good times and bad times. They can comfort us, perplex us, or connect us. Follow along in author Rich Larson’s Big Idea for his newest book, Changelog, where he seeks to connect us all to his grandmother.
RICH LARSON:
What’s the point?
That’s the only Big Idea that comes to mind as I watch my grandma gasping in her sleep. What’s the point of writing an essay to promote a book full of stories barely anyone will read? What was the point of me writing all those stories in the first place? What’s the point of writing anything?
Changelog doesn’t matter much today, so I’ll tell you about my grandma: not the shrunken, angular version of her on the hospital bed, but the earlier iterations.
She was born in a Mennonite village in Ukraine in 1927. She survived the Holodomor, the artificial famine imposed by the USSR – this bit of history is repeating itself today, both in the Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli government’s starvation of Gaza.
Her sister Mary died of fever, her brother Fritz from tuberculosis of the bone. Her father was arrested for writing religious poetry, and put in a cell so crowded that if one man rolled over, everyone had to roll over. He was released when the Soviets needed more mechanics, but came back white-haired and gaunt.
Her village was liberated by German soldiers, because things are always more complicated than we would like them to be – this is a fact she pared away when she immigrated to Canada. Her journey west was long and dangerous, full of loss and reunion and wild coincidence that would never pass in fiction. The day she mentions most often is the day she swam for her life:
She was seventeen, and a Russian officer, drunken, victorious, was picking girls from the crowd of refugees trying to cross the Elbe River. Her brother John saw a boat close to shore, and whispered for her to swim. She threw herself into the icy water; the officer staggered after her but dropped his pistol in the river. She reached the edge of the boat. Some hands pushed her away, fearing the Russians would fire on them. Stronger hands pulled her in.
A year later she came to Halifax on a cruise ship full of Displaced Persons. The train ride that followed was so long she feared it would carry her all the way around the back of the world and leave her in Siberia. She arrived in Chilliwack instead, on Christmas morning. She remembers twinkling lights and supermarket stalls overflowing with oranges.
She lived with distant relatives and set herself to learning English, falling asleep with th and wh on her tongue. She cleaned houses in Vancouver, where two old British women gave her cold mutton for lunch. Her stomach was unaccustomed, so she wrapped it in a napkin and hid it in the garbage – but then their great big dog came sniffing around, so she had to stealthily transfer it to her bag.
She became a nurse, and years later forgot her nurse’s watch at a relative’s wedding. The young crooked-faced farmer who returned it became her husband. She wrote poetry; he quoted her Shakespeare. They homesteaded twice in rural Manitoba, and paid off the farm just one year before he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. They had three children, one of whom was my mother.
Knowing facts and anecdotes about my grandma is not the same as knowing her. Knowing her is more like this:
You stumble in from playing in the snow, and she yanks off your mittens and claps your ruddy hands to her warm cheeks and yelps in mock-pain and says oh! icicles!
You sleep over at her house and wear your dead grandpa’s pajamas, white with pale blue stripes, and she makes thin pancakes and watches Spider-Man cartoons with you.
You trek to her house in summertime and she meets you halfway, and when you arrive there’s ginger ale – she mixes hers with cranberry juice – and fresh buns, or cinnamon rolls, or the chocolate-chip brownies you now bake whenever you need to befriend new neighbors.
You have your first heartbreak, already in a different city, and she listens, then quietly asks what did she look like, because she knows that’s important, that a person is more than a name and a decision.
You stay with her for what you don’t realize is the last time, and every day you walk around the pond, using momentum – der Schwung – to get down the grassy ditch and up the other side. She teaches you Scrabble and regrets it because it’s then the only game you want to play. In the evenings you watch Jeopardy or Murder She Wrote.
You call her from dozens of different cities, and every time she says Richie! Where in the world are you now? When your mom says her memory is starting to go, you don’t believe it. Your grandma is warm and sharp and funny as ever.
You surprise her with a visit, make plans to see her the next day. When you buzz her door from outside the apartment, she says Richie! Where in the world are you now? and she is not joking. You begin to pre-mourn her.
You pre-mourn her for years, and it still rips your heart out to see her lying here. Her bed is tilted nineteen degrees. Two wild roses sit in a jar of water beside her.
That’s not knowing her either.
Her voice is faint now, and she doesn’t have her teeth in, and she slips between English, German, Plautdietsch, sometimes Ukrainian or Russian. More and more often, her eyes look confused. I try to cherish every last spark – like yesterday, when I said I wish I could see what’s going on inside your head, and she puffed a laugh and said so do I.
And I guess that’s the point.
I’ve been writing stories all my life, and they’ve served me in a variety of ways. When I was a kid, they let me escape sad rooms like this one. As I got older, they became anchors in time, each story reminding me of where I was, who I was, who I was with when I wrote it. They let me try, over and over, to understand things that will never make sense and put endings on things that don’t end.
But the biggest reason I write is this: you’ll never know my grandma, and you’ll likely never know me, but writing stories – whether hewn whole from life or filtered through imagination – feels like closing the gap just a little. I’ve always wanted so badly for someone to see what’s going on in here.
Changelog: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
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