Boise News

WILL IDAHO AND MONTANA BE LEFT OUT?

With the severe escalation of partisan politics and divisiveness in recent years, it has become basically impossible to pass a Wilderness bill or any other type of public lands or outdoor recreation legislation on its own. Time on the Senate and House floor is so scarce and closely guarded and partisanship so bitter that the only way public lands legislation has any realistic chance is a relatively new invention called the omnibus bill.

As you may remember, Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed S. 22, a massive public lands omnibus bill on March 30, 2009 after a long, heated debate and lots of last-minute maneuvering. The 1,300-page bill was the combination of 170 pieces of legislation creating new national parks and monuments, plus park expansions and national recreation trails, protecting hundreds of miles of wild and scenic rivers, and designating more than 2 million acres of Wilderness.

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Western Book Roundup

Regular New West contributor and Colorado-based travel writer David Frey has been off on a dream trip for several weeks, following in the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway through Europe.  Frey is documenting it all on his blog, Papa’s Planet, which he is turning into a book, tentatively titled “Papa’s Planet: An Ernest Exploration of the Places Hemingway Lived and Loved.”

In a presentation Frey gave last month explaining his interest in Hemingway, he wrote, “In Ernest Hemingway, there’s something we can all claim. He was a freedom-loving, communist-loving, red-white-and-blue, gun-toting nature lover who almost assuredly ate quiche.”

Frey is writing detailed postcards from his Hemingway stops, such as 74 Rue de Cardinal Lemoine in Paris, where Hemingway and his wife Hadley lived, an interlude described in A Moveable Feast.  In Spain, Frey interviewed Maripaz Vega, the country’s only female bullfighter.  He’s also been to Venice, Cuba, Key West, and Ketchum, Idaho, journeys he explains in the essay ”Why I’m Stalking Hemingway,” which was named a Community Keynote in the Travel Blog Exchange annual conference in New York last June.

Frey reports he’s scheduled to have an article on Hemingway’s Sun Valley in the fall issue of Sun Valley Magazine, “looking at the ways Sun Valley has changed since Hemingway’s day and the role he played bringing those changes about.”

Also in the Roundup: A Denver exhibition of 50 prize-winning book covers, a new novel from Daniel Grandbois, and Ward Six’s list of “excellent” names from the Missoula phone book.

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From the Panhandle

The town of Priest River will be holding its Timber Days festival at the end of this week, continuing a ritual that has gone on in some form as long as anyone can remember. The annual event has grown out of the celebration that used to occur after the yearly log drive down the Priest River, when brave and spry “river pigs” cajoled logs down the foaming and rock-infested waterway to its confluence with the Pend Oreille River and the lumber mills there.

Although the last drive was held over 50 years ago and most of the river pigs no longer walk this earth—and most of the mills are no longer with us either—the celebration remains as a commemoration of Priest River’s heritage as a timber town.

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Rescuing creatures: hazards and rewards

It’s official. We are the crazy neighbors.

We’ve made the lunatic list because we take in strays. Okay, mostly I take in strays.  But the family wouldn’t go along as much as they do if they didn’t like it, too.

From time to time, a stray person will live with us awhile and recover from something. One-legged ducks have paddled in our backyard stream, last winter a fox with a cough slept on our front porch at night, and we have to keep an eye on a stunningly stupid mourning dove who sleeps where the dogs could eat her. We’ve raised a duck, rescued baby birds, pulled screaming orphaned baby squirrels out of trees, and had two raccoons run rampant through our house because the dog door was open. A shoe box or cat carrier with some recovering creature in it is pretty normal around our already two-cat, two-dog household.

After it rains, my daughter and I both pick up earthworms from sidewalks and gutters and throw them back in the dirt. I learned this valuable skill from my mother, who learned it from hers.

Which is to say that lunacy is inherited.

I should add here that the mascot of all this is our elderly Welsh Corgi, Sam, who is deaf and demented and not too bright to begin with. Sam staggers around the yard all day wondering what the hell. 

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Western Book Events

Tin House Summer Writers Workshop
Where: Portland, Oregon.
When: Annually, in July.
What: Started eight years ago, Tin House Summer Writers Workshop was an outgrowth of Tin House Magazine, one of the top literary magazines in the country. In 2005, the magazine expanded to include Tin House Books. The summer conference includes writing workshops in fiction (some devoted specifically to the novel), poetry, and creative nonfiction, in addition to seminars on craft, and readings by the writers who teach the workshops. Once participants have been accepted into the workshops, they may apply for mentorships. These include a written critique of an entire book by an available workshop leader or editor and several meetings during the week of the conference.
Food and Lodging: The conference takes place at Reed College, where participants of the conference eat in the cafeteria and sleep in the dorms.  The cost for food and lodging is $575.
Cost: Tuition is $1000-$1100, and applications are due July 10 each year.  Manuscript critiques are $750-$1000.  A pass to attend all the readings and seminars is $250, and tickets to individual events are available for $5-$20.

Bonnie ZoBell, who has participated in five Tin House Summer Writers Workshops, offers her report:

The folks who run the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop in Portland, Oregon, aren’t stupid. I’m at the July 2010 conference now. When they asked me the other day to write an article on the conference for their newsletter, you have to figure they’d noticed I’ve attended five years in a row. They’ve probably seen me rave about the place online. In fact, for years I’ve been trying to convince them they should give me a cut for every new recruit I bring in. They laugh nervously. People who know me, though, will tell you I don’t even have to be prompted to gush. I continue to have a great experience every time I come here, so I have nothing secret to report to you. 

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Transitioning Economy of the Rocky Mountain West

Doubling the exports of goods and services in the next five years would be a “major boon” to metropolitan areas of the Intermountain West.

That’s the conclusion presented by a new study by the Brookings Mountain West Institute which presents a comprehensive collection of quantitative research on how the region can transition to a different economy.

The report says that a jump in exports would bring thousands of good jobs to the region. “Export-related jobs pay relatively well,” the report states. “And for metropolitan area industry clusters and firms, international engagement and competition brings its own benefits of heightened innovation and productivity growth.”

The prospect of such gains is especially attractive in the Mountain zone, moreover, given the present moment of self-reflection in a region that appears faced with the partial breakdown of its traditional migration- and real estate-driven growth machine. With such sources of domestically-driven growth looking less reliable, export-based development holds out one possible new source of sustainable job-creation and broadly shared prosperity.

The Brookings study says there are large overseas markets for US-produced products and services whose potential is not being realized, and that the transformation to a more export-oriented economy will be led by America’s metropolitan areas.

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