Lunchtime turns literary at Round Table West

Alex Coolman

When Richard Paul Evans was an unknown author carrying around stacks

of a book called “The Christmas Box,” he came to speak at Round Table

West, a lunchtime program of literary presentations held in Newport

Beach. At the time, Evans was so unsure of himself that he thought he

would be expected to give his stories away, said Marilyn Hudson, the

executive director of the program,.

Today, Evans had sold more than 10 million copies of his books --

best-selling works like “The Christmas Box,” “Timepiece” and “The Letter”

-- and been translated into almost 20 languages. On Thursday, Evans will

read again at Round Table West, an event he still enjoys.

“It’s actually a personal thing I do now -- to kind of keep in touch

with my roots,” Evans said. “I actually make time for it.”

Evans will share the spotlight with some writers who are fairly famous

themselves. Also scheduled to speak are Janet Fitch, author of the

best-selling novel “White Oleander,” which was Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club

selection for May, and Diana Douglas Darrid, ex-wife of Kirk Douglas and

author of the memoir “In The Wings.”

Hudson co-founded Round Table West in Los Angeles with Margaret Burk

and the late Adela Rogers St. Johns in 1977. Though it moved to Orange

County after a few years of meeting at L.A. hotels, the format for the

event has remained the same for 22 years: three or four writers speak for

20 minutes or so each, and the lunch audience soaks up the culture.

The events frequently feature very popular writers, people like Dean

Koontz and T. Jefferson Parker, but talented, lesser-known faces, like

the Richard Paul Evans of yore, also make an appearance.

“We’re quite proud to feature beginning authors as well as established

ones,” Hudson said.

Fitch, who comes to Round Table West on the crest of a tidal wave of

popularity, said she was caught off guard by the sudden prominence of

“White Oleander.”

“I’ve been writing for some time, and I was just glad to be published

and to be published by a decent house,” she said. “[Little, Brown,

Fitch’s publisher] were very excited about the book, and that was the sum

total of my dream.

“The rest,” she said, “is completely unexpected.”

Fitch didn’t write her novel with any deliberate plan to make it a

huge best seller. In fact, she said, she wasn’t even sure what she was

writing when she began.

“I don’t plot my novels,” she said. “I just let one thing lead to

another, and what it does is it lets me get to stuff that I didn’t even

know was there. I didn’t know I was concerned with foster children, but

once the mother in the novel goes to jail, I knew that’s what would

happen [to Astrid, the foster-child protagonist of the book].”

Evans professed a similar lack of calculation in his work.

“I write from deep inside,” he said. “I do not know how to write a

best seller, I just know how to write something that connects with

myself.”

Evans says he plans to read his new children’s story “The Dance” at

Round Table West. It takes him only three minutes to recite the tale,

which touches on the cycle of life in a manner reminiscent of Shel

Silverstein’s “Giving Tree,” but Evans says “The Dance” packs a lot of

power into a few pages.

Evans described reading the story to a group of women inmates at a

jail and watching the women bolt out of the room to get rolls of toilet

paper to mop their teary eyes. He has also read the story to gatherings

of banking executives, with more-or-less similar results.

WHAT: Round Table West

WHERE: The Balboa Bay Club, 1221 West Coast Highway, Newport Beach

WHEN: Thursday at noon

HOW MUCH: $40

TELEPHONE: (323) 256-7977