Pultizer-winning author Anthony Doerr brings ‘challenging’ storytelling to Pittsburgh

After the success of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the light we can’t see in 2014, Anthony Doerr could have written anything he wanted. A mystery novel, a suspense thriller, a sequel or a prequel.

Instead, he wrote a book rooted in Greek mythology with three startlingly disparate plot threads, spanning over 700 years.

Doerr admits the scope of Earth Cuckoo Cloud (Scribner) might be difficult.

“I think I’m asking a lot of readers,” says Doerr, who appears Oct. 3 as a guest on the Pittsburgh Arts & Lecture series Ten Evening. “I’m so thankful that people are persevering.”

Avid readers of the Cleveland native’s work realize that Doerr is one of the best and most resourceful storytellers working today. To read Anthony Doerr is to become entangled in hidden worlds, forgotten by history. And in the case of Cuckoo Cloud Earth, to be part of at least one future world.

Although his books are thought-provoking, he is grateful that readers have embraced his work. “I find this appetite for storytelling in humans so interesting, and it’s continuous across cultures and across time,” Doerr says. “You just feel like every time someone says, ‘Rege, the other day, this is what happened to me.’ And your ears perk up. If she’s a good storyteller who uses detail well, she can totally capture our interest.

Doerr has a stubborn belief in the importance of storytelling that informs her new novel. Its cast – Konstance, a young girl who hurtles into space on an expeditionary spaceship; Omeir, a boy with a cleft palate, and Anna, an orphan thirsty for learning in Constantinople in the 15th century; and Seymour, a teenager threatened by the destruction of Idaho’s natural habitat, are fascinated by the wonders of how stories work. Konstance, who writes notes on scraps of paper with homemade ink, and Anna, gifted with copies of rare manuscripts by a professor, are particularly intrigued by the significance of the stories.

“There’s this interesting argument that stories have helped us in our evolution,” Doerr says. “Tell an engaging story about crocodiles by the river and the kids will avoid the river. And these children will have this evolutionary little manager, at least the children who were interested in this story.

As his storytelling palette has expanded, so have Doerr’s novels. The shell collector, his first book, was only 256 pages. Since its inception, it has grown to 432 pages in About Grace544 in all the light …, and Earth Cuckoo Cloud is 640 pages.

His writing reflects his love of large books — Doerr was taking one of Patrick O’Brian’s epic novels on a trip to Paris — and an acknowledgment that he has little time to accomplish his goals.

Knowing that he suffers from “death anxiety” seeing his grandmother suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, there is an urgency in each of his projects.

“Watching this disease eat away at his intellectual capacity gave me this anxiety of ‘do your big, complicated plans now because you never go when you couldn’t.’ I still have a few more years in my 40s and hopefully I can be productive through my 50s, so I want to keep trying to be experimental and try big, bold projects while I still can.