Pulitzer winner reads at Abbot

MARBLEHEAD – Paul Harding, winner of the Pulitzer Prize a year ago for his first novel, “Tinkers,” loves to read.As he read to a fascinated audience of about 20 Wednesday evening at Abbot Public Library, Harding occasionally interjected a thought. For instance, there was the woman who wanted to buy her “normal soap” from the novel?s peddler protagonist, not the soap in the new package. “That?s my grandmother,” Harding said.The 43-year-old author grew up in Wenham. A drummer with the alternative rock band Cold Water Flat, he was caught flat-footed at the age of 30 when the band broke up and left him jobless. “So I said, ?I?ll go to graduate school,” he told his audience – and that is when he became a writer.Writing classes led him to the Iowa Writers? Workshop, where his work got him a teaching degree. About five years ago he began expanding an early 16-page story into a novel, often writing in a notebook in his car at Beverly?s Lynch Park while taking care of one of his children.At first his novel was “a 250-page catastrophe.”?I was like a robot vacuum cleaner, writing in a non-linear way,” he said. So he cut his manuscript into scenes and spent a weekend moving the scenes around until they were in the order of his published manuscript.The incidents in the story began with stories his grandfather told him as a boy, but that?s as far as reality took him. “I wrote a sentence about each story and imagined the rest,” he said. “Every word is true, it?s just not all factual.”The book received more than its share of rejections. Finally a friend suggested an avant-garde publisher and that publisher referred the novel to Bellevue Literary Press in New York, which published a first edition of 3,500 copies and introduced him to grassroots marketing.One day he logged onto the Pulitzer Prize website and saw his name and the title of his novel – and realized that he had been nominated and he had won. “It was a cartoon moment, my eyes exploded and I fell over on the floor,” he said. The award changed his life. In the past 12 months he has had 150 appearances in the United States and abroad.He is now at work on his second novel, “Enon” (the original name of Wenham), about the same family that appears in his first novel – but it?s not a sequel. In fact, his plans for that novel are part of the reason he nixed a movie offer for “Tinkers” – the studio tried to control his handling of the characters in the second novel.Summing up his approach to writing Harding called himself “a miniaturist” and said in his North Shore people he has found a subject that is “inexhaustible.”