Fiction writer Carolyn Cooke has the lithe frame of a long-distance runner, but it's her active mind that requires the daily workout.
"I have a little office in the woods," she said. "I do write every day, sometimes in the morning or at night, but it's the center of my day."
While sitting at an outdoor cafe in Santa Rosa — she's feeling sun-deprived, having lived in Point Arena for the past 20 years — the 52-year-old brunette talked openly about her life but squirmed a bit when asked to give advice to budding writers.
"It takes more time than you would ever think," she said, trying to avoid the usual clich?. "It's not so much about your talent as your willingness to stick around for the work."
Cooke, who spoke at the Sonoma County Book Festival in 2001 after the publication of her short-story collection, "The Bostons," will return to Santa Rosa Saturday to read from her new novel, "Daughters of the Revolution," (Alfred A. Knopf) during the 12th annual festival.
The novel has garnered praise from the San Francisco Chronicle, the New Yorker, the New York Times and the Boston Globe.
"&‘Daughters of the Revolution' is deeply humane, often very funny and always surprising," wrote the reviewer for the Boston Globe. "Cooke writes with such delicacy and control, such luminous warmth, that the only disappointment comes when the book ends."
The story revolves around an all-boys prep school led by an aging headmaster, who sees the school's move toward co-education through the lens of his own prejudices.
More compelling are the three women whose lives unfold in the shadow of the school: the African-American girl who becomes the first female student; Mei-Mei, whose young husband dies in a kayak accident in the first chapter; and her daughter, EV, who rises above her mother's tragedy with a ferocious optimism.
"Optimism boils constantly in me, like one of those endless Sunday stews on the back burner," EV confesses in the book. "The tough cut of my soul, relentlessly tenderizing over a flame."
In "The Bostons," which won the 2002-2004 PEN/Bingham award for a first book, Cooke explored scrappy characters from her native New England who struggle against the confines of class.
"It's really my passion," she said. "It's harder to bridge the divide there. There's a narrow idea of what constitutes a good life."
In "Daughters of the Revolution," which is set from 1963 to 2005, Cooke continues to explore issues of class while weaving in a chronicle of the sexual and political revolutions of the time.
"I feel the women's movement directly influenced me," she said. "People in my family literally went mad because they were living a life they didn't want."
Married to poet Randall Babtkis since 1987, Cooke wrote the novel over the past 10 years while raising two children and commuting to San Francisco to teach at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
In Point Arena, the couple helped found the Pacific Community Charter School, which opened in 1999 and now has 100 students, grades K-12.
"Our relationship to the school is deep," Cooke said. "I missed my deadline for &‘The Bostons,' which was due the day the charter school was supposed to open, because I spent the day putting in electrical sockets."
Cooke was born in Boston to an English-teacher mother with a flair for the dramatic.
"My family were all storytellers," she said. "They had cocktails and told stories from their lives."
One of the stories that Cooke doesn't like to talk about is that of her father, who died in a boating accident when she was 3.
"He was a student," she said. "It was a huge economic disaster."
When Cooke was 10, she and her mother moved to Bar Harbor in Maine.
"It's a lonely, cold, rocky island," she said. "I think it's a great place to think and confront hard truths about life."
After graduating in 1981 from Smith College in Northhampton, Mass., Cooke worked for several magazines in New York, including Penthouse. Those jobs paid for her to get a master of fine arts degree at Columbia University in creative writing. Then she taught at a private school in Beverly, Mass.
In 1987, Cooke and her husband dropped in to visit novelist Denis Johnson, a colleague then living in Gualala.
"It opened up a vision of the life we wanted to live," she said. "We were both drawn to living in a place that was wild."
A few years later, the couple saw an ad for a funky cabin on land overlooking Point Arena. They moved west in 1991.
Cooke is currently working on a collection of short stories, mostly set in California, and continues to limn life's gritty truths.
"I always say writing is too hard not to tell your most difficult stories," she said. "It's too hard not to tell the important stories."
You can reach Staff Writer
Diane Peterson at 521-5287 or diane.peterson@pressdemocrat.com.
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