BY DAWN BAUMGARTNER VAUGHAN

dvaughan@heraldsun.com; 419-6563

CHAPEL HILL — Fiction matters, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Elizabeth Strout told a packed house at UNC Memorial Hall in Chapel Hill Saturday night. The reason it matters is the same reason that people emerging from the subway or getting off an airplane flip open their cell phones and tell someone on the other line where they are, she said.

Making those calls, Strout said in the keynote address at the N.C. Literary Festival, is about the deep human need to be positioned, to declare our whereabouts.

“It reflects back that not only does someone care, but we exist,” she said. “Fiction matters because it positions us.” It gives us a sense of safety and mirrors ourselves back, Strout said.

Fiction also gives us a feeling that we’re all in this together, she said. It helps people see an alternate point of view, Strout said, and imagination gives us compassion for others.

“It’s terribly important we keep these aspects of our imagination working,” she said. Strout’s “Olive Kitteridge,” a collection of short stories connected to Olive, a retired teacher, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She read one of the stories in her book written from the point of view of Olive’s husband, Henry, a pharmacist.

Strout took questions from the audience about her work and “Olive Kitteridge.” One reader commented how she enjoyed Strout’s writing cadence that is familiar to how people speak in Maine. Strout said her family goes back several generations in Maine.

Another reader wanted to know why doughnuts are featured in Strout’s work. She wrote “Olive Kitteridge” in a cabin on the beach, she said.

“I ate doughnuts with a fisherman on the wharf. A lot,” she said.

She was also asked how it feels to win the Pulitzer. Strout said that she is still trying to figure that one out. But she is very happy.

“A large part of my brain doesn’t understand something that wonderful happened to me,” she said. Then she’ll be walking across the street to the bank and remember, she said, making a delighted expression. As far as how she will follow it, Strout said, “I’ve always been writing and will keep on writing.” She is already at work on her next book.