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The Bright Spark

An acclaimed songwriter, Josh Ritter has now ventured into the world of fiction. He talks religion, writing on the road and words from Stephen King with Craig Fitzpatrick.

Craig Fitzpatrick, 05 Jun 2012

Josh Ritter and I have the image of a Nobel laureate doing handstands in our heads. Chalk it up to Ritter’s way with words. Long a storyteller in his songs, the adopted Irishman from Idaho recently turned fiction writer with his first novel Bright’s Passage. He’s mulling over the challenges of moving into another field.

“If tomorrow,” the American reasons from his Brooklyn abode, “Seamus Heaney decided that he wanted to become a gymnast, there’d be a learning curve there. Or if Nicolas Cage wanted to be a violinist. But whenever you do something in public, that’s what makes it so exciting. And really, the fun of writing the book was just tremendous. It was so important to me.”

As anyone who has heard his narrative-driven, literate folk will gather, putting down the guitar and picking up the pen wasn’t too grand a movement for Josh. A born raconteur, a novel always lurked on the horizon.

“I never really thought that there was much difference between writing songs and writing anything else,” he reasons. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do and thought was a possibility. It just took a little time to get the tools I would need. The endurance was one, and then the belief that you actually have something worth sharing.”

What he shares in Bright’s Passage, a brief and beautifully pared-back fable, are ruminations on religion and questions of destiny and control. We meet Henry Bright, a young soldier from West Virginia who has recently returned from the First World War. In many ways, he’s still there. Upon losing his wife in childbirth, Bright must flee his forbidding in-laws and keep his newborn son safe.

He is aided by a horse, and a guardian angel who claims that Henry Jr. is the future king of heaven. Claustrophobic flashbacks to his time in the trenches (the smell of mustard gas almost rises from the pages) and increasingly dubious directions from ‘the angel’ indicate that Bright is a man in turmoil. Placing it in the era of the Great War was important.



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Craig Fitzpatrick

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