Fiction made real

To Sarah Stonich, characters come alive with the slightest details.

It could be a phrase she hears, or the way someone looks. She’ll find inspiration in everyday life to create people that feel real to her.

“None of the people in this book are actual real people, but they all feel real to me,” Stonich said of her book, “Vacationland.”

Stonich, this year’s 2015 Austin Page Turners author, stopped in Austin Monday to discuss “Vacationland” with Riverland Community College students and the community at large.

“It’s so great your town has something like this,” Stonich said Monday before she gave a presentation on her writing to residents at the Austin Public Library.

“Vacationland” tells the stories of different people who travel to a resort up north for vacation. It follows Meg at the Naledi Lodge, who grew up under her grandfather’s care a lifetime ago.

Now an artist, Meg paints images that are similar to the stories of the rest of the characters, including a man from nearby Hatchet Inlet who knew Meg years ago, a Sarajevo refugee sponsored by two parishes who can’t afford “their own refugee,” aged sisters traveling to fulfill a fateful pact once made at the resort, a philandering ad man, a lonely Ojibwa stonemason, and a haiku-spouting girl rescued from a bog.

Stonich was born in Duluth and lived in the Iron Range northwest of Duluth. She moved to the Twin Cities in 1986, where she worked as a columnist, editor and freelance writer. She was reading other books from small presses and was inspired to write her own.

Yet she was a visual artist before she was a writer, and so she always loves to write characters who have that artistic experience.

Of course, even places become characters for Stonich.

“I find that to be one of the huge drivers of my writing,” Stonich said of the concept of place.

With “Vacationland,” Stonich hoped to show people Minnesota was more than just the standard Norwegian or Keillor-esque cliches. She wanted people to see the human side of people who have connections to the land of 10,000 lakes.

“We’re so much more than that,” she said.

Stonich marks the 14th author to be chosen by the Austin Page Turners, a volunteer group that picks a city-wide book from a Minnesota author each year.

“It’s so wonderful to have something like this in our community,” Page Turners Co-Chair Bonnie Rietz said to the audience at the Austin Public Library.