Fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss’ gray-streaked beard gives him the look of a wizard, and the crinkly eyes could belong to Santa Claus. To Heifer International, he is both.
In five years, Rothfuss has cheered on, he says - inspired, they say - donations of almost $2 million to the charity that is headquartered in Little Rock.
Once he discovered that people were paying attention to him, Rothfuss says, “I thought, you know, maybe I could do something rather than just stroke my own ego.”
Readers come to him for wonders and adventure, “and I thought maybe I could show them another way to be cool.”
Rothfuss is at work on the last of three volumes in his debut fantasy series, The Kingkiller Chronicles. Book one, The Name of the Wind (2007), and two, The Wise Man’s Fear (2011), tell an epic about the mysterious hero known as Kvothe the Bloodless.
Marvels abound, but hardly a spell to equal the transformation that came over the Wisconsin author’s bank account when his books sold like charms.
Before his best-seller status, “I was was a part-time assistant lecturer,” Rothfuss says, “which means I made slightly less than when I was a graduate student.”
After came the magic moment when he realized he could be one of those people who calls in a pledge to National Public Radio.
“It felt good to actually support this cause,” Rothfuss says, and like a troll who finds one gem, he went looking for another.
His big hands look fit to hold a battle ax, but he is teary-eyed describing the effect that Sarah McLachlan’s “World on Fire” video had on him.
The piece starts with a claim that it cost $150,000, but the money is hard to see in the plain image of the barefoot singer with a guitar. Captions reveal that the video actually cost $15, and that she and the crew volunteered to give the rest of the production cost to charities around the world.
One thing they did was to give a goat - a blink on the screen, but enough to lead Rothfuss to the children’s book Beatrice’s Goat by Page McBrier, with an afterword by Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In the book, Beatrice has milk to drink, her family has milk to sell and everyone in this African village benefits from learning how to raise goats, “all because of a goat named Mugisa.”
“Here’s what a goat is good for,” Rothfuss says. “Wow! I never knew.”
The book points to Heifer.Founded in 1944, Heifer’s mission is to give farm animals and know-how to needy families. Through Heifer, Rothfuss gave a goat in his mom’s name for Christmas.
By this time, “I got published,” he says, “and for the first time in my life, I had what I considered grown-up money. I paid off my credit card that had been looming over me, and I actually had some money left in the bank.”
He challenged readers of his blog (patrickrothfuss. com) to donate to Heifer with the promise that he would match what they gave. And here, as things do in one of his stories, the plot took a surprise twist.
POOF AND CONSEQUENCES
“It was a bit of a trick,” Rothfuss says of his offer. He expected maybe $2,000 or $3,000 would go to Heifer, “and I probably would have donated $5,000, anyway. But this way, I would double my money.”
Instead, the call raised $50,000 for him to match.
“It was all the money I had saved up,” he says. “But being broke was actually a step up from where I’d been. I’d been broke before, and never for a good cause.”
The way a traveling magician continues down the path in Kvothe’s story, Rothfuss followed up with his own, nonprofit Worldbuilders website (worldbuilders. org). The site raises money for Heifer by such means as auctioning signed books by him and other authors, including Neil Gaiman (The Graveyard Book), George R.R.Martin (Game of Thrones) and Arkansan-gone-to-Texas Charlaine Harris (the Sookie Stackhouse novels).
Rothfuss’ visit to Little Rock earlier this month was to show his Worldbuilders team of a half dozen employees the Heifer headquarters building and Heifer Ranch at Perryville.
“I bet they’ve never milked a goat,” he says. “I have.”
Meantime, his concluding book in the Kingkiller series, The Doors of Stone, “is coming along well,” he says - “slower than everyone would like, but it can’t be just right. It has to be perfect. I don’t get a second chance on this one.”
The more people follow Kvothe’s saga, about 1,400 pages so far, the more that might be turned into Heifer supporters. Rothfuss expects this to be especially true of fantasy readers.
“People sometimes perceive fantasy readers as social outcasts,” he says, “and that might have been true once. We used to be 15-year-olds playing Dungeons and Dragons in Mom’s basement. But that was 25 years ago.
“Now, we’re doctors, lawyers, business people,” he says. “I think because we’ve been outcasts, it makes us a little bit more empathetic to other people who have had a rough time of it. “
And with fantasies like his set in rustic, agricultural societies, “it’s a lot easier for us to relate to a goat,” Rothfuss says. A goat that can work miracles “is not a big stretch for us.”
“We’ve visited worlds like that already.”
Style, Pages 49 on 05/26/2013