After reading from her latest novel Lucky Strike at the first installment of the Main Street Reading Series last Sunday night, Nancy Zafris fielded questions from the mostly Oberlin-student crowd about “being a writer.”

Lucky Strike takes place in the Utah desert in 1954, where a lesser-known element rush — for uranium rather than gold — went on during the U.S. government’s efforts to improve its nuclear program. 

One student asked Zafris about the extent to which researching such a novel affected the book’s fictional qualities. She replied that it was easy to get lost in one’s research, but that ultimately it was more important to ring true in fiction than in nonfiction. 

“In nonfiction, you can always say, ‘It may sound crazy, but it’s true!’” she said. “In fiction, it has to sound true to the reader all the way. So a guy wakes up and finds he’s a giant cockroach — but you can’t go to the store and buy a giant can of cockroach killer. It’s got to be true from that point on.” 

Zafris’s deft detailing of Lucky Strike character Harry Lindstrom, a traveling Geiger counter salesman, demonstrated her commitment to the creation of a fictitious world in which a reader could trustingly suspend his or her disbelief. 

However, it was difficult to get a clear sense of the breadth of the novel — narrated in three alternating voices — from the brief selection Zafris read. Although Zafris said that she read the preface and first chapter to avoid a plot synopsis, without her explanations before and after reading, the audience would have received little more than a colorful character sketch of Harry. 

Zafris is the author of two novels, of which Lucky Strike is the second.  Her story collection, People I Know, received the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction in 1990. 

Zafris’s reading compatriot, poet Isabel Galbraith, showed no less narrative zeal for being a poet. Galbraith is a professor this year in Oberlin’s creative writing department, and holds an MFA from Ohio State University. 

She read from a cycle of nine poems she called “The Nine Lives of Bonnie,” in which the character of Bonnie finds herself in various poetic incarnations, some from classic literature or popular culture. These included “Little Bonnie on the Prairie,” “Bonnie Chaplin” and “Bonnie at Bat.”

Like other cycles of poems centered around a single character, such as Jim Daniels’ “Digger” poems or Langston Hughes’ “Madam to You” suite, the poems Galbraith read created an extremely rich and personal dream-world for Bonnie, even while her use of rhyme and meter created a vocal distance between the narrator and the character. 

Galbraith’s other work drew on diverse material, from a summer spent in a corporate office, to the character of her to-do lists, to the Roman Pantheon. Her formal tendency runs toward the swing of a nursery rhyme, with simple rhyme schemes and strong meter, but she strains the confines of those structures with sharply original imagery and narrative, such as a description from “Sugary,” a poem in which Bonnie finds herself in a frying pan “with eyes fried shut / and shoulders bubbling.” 

This year the Main Street Reading Series, at the New Union Center for the Arts, is organized by professor of creative writing David Young and three Oberlin student interns — College seniors Julia Doctoroff and Caitlin Condell, and College junior Emma Dumain. The anticipated line-up of the series this year includes local and out-of-state authors, to be announced in further detail as the time nears.