Think Logan (where he was born), West High School (where he went to school), Rose Park and Poplar Grove (where he grew up), University of Utah (where he went to college) and Vernal (where he has a cabin), and you have a collage for the famed novelist Ron Carlson, a Utah boy who returns here often.
Although Carlson is not a member of the LDS Church, he relates to the Mormon culture and considers it "one of the features of the landscape," and in his books he often uses Mormon references.
"I grew up very happily in Salt Lake City," Carlson said by cell phone from California's congested Highway 405.
A prolific author of short stories and novels, Carlson spent 20 years teaching at Arizona State University in Tempe, but he has recently assumed a professorship at the University of California at Irvine, where he heads the graduate writing program.
He said his new novel, "Five Skies," started in the mountains of Vernal several years ago when he was doing chain saw work. "I wrote this little bit about two men talking, and one asked the other if he had made anything that lasted. Three years ago I brought it out again and worked at it steadily.
"It's about all kinds of work, sometimes the ambiguity of work. 'Work' is the meaning of your life, and no one ever writes about it."
Work — in fact, manual labor, as a theme — is unusual enough for a novel, but Carlson's three main characters are all men, and they are all "damaged."
One, Arthur Key, is trying to get away from an affair with his sister-in-law; another, Darwin Gallegos, is grieving over the unexpected loss of his wife; and the third, Ronnie Panelli, is a very young man who is not fond of work but is trying to renounce his life of petty crime.
They come together to build a strange structure by a river gorge in the Idaho wilderness — a huge wooden ramp at the edge of a canyon, designed so that a motorcycle stuntwoman can jump the canyon.
The men are strangers to each other, and while they're together they say relatively little. But they mysteriously bond by the time the job is finished.
It is evident very early that these three are good men who have been schooled by nature and the outdoors, and most of the action takes place at this odd job site.
"A lot of the guys I knew in Salt Lake City were working men who took on various projects. I remember a metal-fabricating firm on 1700 South and 500 West. It was astonishing to go in there. You'd see huge things, and my father, an engineer, was guiding a lot of that work, and it captivated me."
Carlson told his story carefully, using massive detail to describe the tools and the work these men do every day. He admits that he "overwrote the technical stuff. But I wanted to show enough of that work that it would seem real. I laid the pieces of the story together as closely fitting as I could."
In his opinion, if it is in the details, a book's theme will emerge in the writing. "You can tell how a guy treats his tools. When Ronnie, who doesn't like work, erects a tent and is proud of it, I had a start. I knew what Arthur would do with the ramp, but I didn't know what all the other characters would do.
"So I took a walk for about four days. I do that a lot. Sometimes a decision I make in writing is counterintuitive. But I had plenty of time to develop this story."
During the writing process, Carlson sometimes worried about the comparative lack of women in his book (some show up but only as incidental characters), and he realized that it ran counter to current literature. "It certainly wasn't chick lit! I wondered if I needed to prepare my agent, but I never did that."
Carlson said he was looking at friendship among men who face troubles. "Their friendship develops almost reluctantly. They're surprised by it. I know my friends are very important to me. They're my lifeblood. I also wanted to put them in a vast landscape, not a set decoration. I wanted every puff of sand and every touch of wind to be real."
Having written "in many modes — serious and comic," he knows what he's doing. Carlson's writing is mature and as carefully structured as the motorcycle ramp in his story. "I felt on thin ice a lot of times, trying to get beyond what anyone else has done in a novel. I wanted to get out of the way as a writer, with no flourishes."
That's how Carlson looks at teaching, too, a process he loves as much as writing. "Every day is an investigation, so much like writing a short story. You can't announce the theme too loudly. You don't have to sit your characters down at a table, hand them a knife and fork, and put a napkin around their necks."
He approaches teaching in the same way. He works hard, carefully, and tries not to exercise too much control. "When I'm teaching, I don't bring my own work to bear. I talk about the process and the decisions I've made, but every writer has to find her own way."
E-mail: dennis@desnews.com