Pulitzer Prize winner and former ISU English professor Jane Smiley returned to Iowa State to promote her new book “Some Luck” on Oct. 6 as part of Iowa State’s lecture program.

Her latest book is the first of a trilogy that is focusing on a single family over a period of 100 years.

The book follows the lives of Rosanna and Walter Langdon, along with their five children, in Denby, Iowa. Each book of the trilogy covers 33 years of the family’s life on the farm and highlights their struggles through significant times in history.

Smiley not only read excerpts from her latest novel but shared her deep fondness for her characters and Iowa, the setting of many of her novels.

“It’s really hard to let [the characters] go,” Smiley said. “On the one hand, I didn’t want them to die. On the other hand, I had to kill them. Is this how God feels?”

Smiley also shared her doubts about her choice of writing style. Chapters are often short, with 10 pages covering a whole year.

“I didn’t know if that was going to work because I had not read anything that tried to do it that way,” Smiley said.

During the lecture, questions were also raised about the novels’ dark subject matter.

“I realized right then, it doesn’t matter if your materials are dark,” Smiley said. “The process of creation, of making something out of these dark things, was a pleasure and felt like play.”

To write the novel, Smiley said she had to do plenty of research. Despite the novel’s farm setting, Smiley had no previous background knowledge of farming before writing her novel. She said she talked to farmers and did research online to aid her writing.

“It does become sometimes like driving a car,” Smiley said. “It’s hard at first to figure out how to make the novel work, but then the problem becomes not, ‘How do I make it go, but how do I make it stop?’”

Steve Sullivan, director of marketing and public relations for Mary Greeley Medical Center, was there to mediate the discussion and provide a conversation for the audience.

“It’s great to bring her here,” Sullivan said. “There’s always an interest in what she’s doing.”

Sullivan believes Smiley returning to campus made perfect sense, as one of the characters attends Iowa State for a period of time.

“This book is particularly appropriate because she’s returning to the farm,” Sullivan said. “She’s returning to Iowa and those are the books that launched her career after winning the Pulitzer for ‘A Thousand Acres.’”

Debra Marquart, professor of English and former colleague of Smiley, says she finds her to be a mentor and inspiration.

“We [writers] tend to live a bit of an isolated life,” Marquart said. “But to have these writers come back is a form of community.”

At the end of the day, Smiley shared something one of her characters learned through his journey at Iowa State.

“There a lots of ways to fit in at Iowa State, and one of them is to not fit in at all,” Smiley said.