Author Bette Adriaanse will discuss her début novel at 7 p.m.  today at Prairie Lights.

By Isaac Hamlet
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Rus has never had to leave his home, save to get coffee. Bette Adriaanse, Rus’ creator, traveled 4,000 miles to share his story.

At 7 p.m. today, Dutch author Bette Adriaanse and local author Cate Dicharry will appear at Prairie Lights, 15 S. Dubuque St. The two will converse about their respective début novels: Rus Like Everyone Else and The Fine Art of Fucking Up.

“[Rus] has five main characters,” Adriaanse said. “They’re all outsiders, people who don’t really have the best skillsets for modern life in the city.”

Over the course of 10 days, the five characters go about their separate existences through a story that tugs them together. Much of the novel was informed by Adriaanse’s time delivering mail.

“I delivered letters to people who were socially awkward or didn’t seem to leave their houses,” she said. “From that experience, these characters emerged. All of them are struggling to keep up in the city and look at things through a more absurd angle.”

While Adriaanse’s book was published little over a month ago, Dicharry’s has been available since April, making her more familiar with such promotional events.

“For the Iowa City Book Festival, I did an ‘in-conversation’ event with an author who writes nonfiction,” she said. “But we both wrote from the place of being from Iowa City and using the flood of 2008 as part of our work.”

Just as Dicharry found overlapping inspiration with an author who shared a location, editor Olivia Smith of Unnamed Press found similarities in the work of Dicharry and Adriaanse.

“[They] are really grappling with the expectations that modern society thrusts upon us, the Kafkaesque absurdities of everyday life and the loneliness of the small worlds we create for ourselves,” said Smith, who edited Dicharry’s work.

It is in the smaller, personal worlds of her characters that Adriaanse hopes readers are affected.

“When I write I hope the stories will seep into people’s daily lives in a way,” she said. “So they might look at a house and wonder what’s going on behind the curtains and they’ll think of the book. That’s my goal. I want the story to live in their mind longer than the reading of the book lasts.”

Though the book’s main character, Rus, had made his home in Adriaanse’s imagination before she began delivering mail, his living condition came from the job.

On her route, Adriaanse spotted a door near the roof of one of the buildings. For a long time she didn’t know if the door was even an apartment, much less if anyone lived there. Then one day someone simply emerged and inspiration took its course.

“That’s when I realized this is the story of Rus,” she said. “He’s someone who’s never had to take part in the real world until he wakes up one morning and gets a tax bill and has to start taking part in it.”

Much as Rus is spurred to explore the outside world, Dicharry hopes people will seize this opportunity to look into Rus Like Everyone Else and books like it.

“It can be daunting sometimes to read something that people say is original,” Dicharry said. “I hope people feel emboldened to seek out original work. There’s so much interesting work and there’s so much great writing, especially in small presses, so I hope people get a window into that.”

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Bette Adriaanse in Conversation with Cate Dicharry

When: 7 p.m. today

Where: Prairie Lights, 15 S. Dubuque

Admission: Free