Western Book Roundup

Western Writer Follows Hemingway’s European Footsteps

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.

Western Book Events

The Tin House Summer Writers Workshop in Portland, Oregon

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. 

News Bite

Petition Calls for National Wolf Recovery Plan

A petition filed this week by the Center for Biological Diversity asks for tens of thousands of gray wolves to be reintroduced across the United States, including in New England, California, the Great Plains and the desert West.

The gray wolf, which was pushed to the brink of extinction with a mere 500 animals left in existence by the 1970’s, has only just begun to make significant progress in population recovery.  Federal protections have brought the population up to about 6,000 wolves in the United States today.

While environmental groups cite the fragility of these recovery efforts as incentive for further protections, particularly in the Northern Rockies, opposition to increased protection has been vocal, to say the very least

The petition filed on Tuesday asks for a national recovery effort for the wolf, instead of the regional approaches the federal government has taken thus far.

Western Book Roundup

Social Media Uprising at the Jack Kerouac School and Wyoming Writers Band Together

The Boulder Daily Camera recently reported on the social media full-court press launched by current and former students at Boulder-based Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in response to the June layoffs of 23 staff members at the school. 

Posting under the tag SaveTKS on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, the students have released a list of demands, including the desires, as Scott Schlaufman of the Daily Camera wrote, “that the ideals and values of the Jack Kerouac School are retained, that student participation in decision-making at the school is increased, and that the school’s diversity advocate position—cut in the June 15 layoffs—be reinstated.”

Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa founded Naropa in 1974, and he invited Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, John Cage and Diane di Prima to start a poetics program there shortly after it opened.  Because it was founded by such anti-institutional figures, Naropa has always seemed a freewheeling place, but Stuart J. Sigman, the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Naropa, responded to the people behind SaveTKS with a statement written in standard academia speak.

Also in the Roundup: Julianne Crouch reports on Wyoming’s many writing groups, and news about the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference.

New West Book Review

Beaver Tale: Eric Jay Dolin on the Fur Industry’s Role in Western Settlement

Fur, Fortune and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America
by Eric Jay Dolin
W.W. Norton & Company, 442 pages, $29.95

A beaver might be a more fitting national symbol for America than a bald eagle, given the way the quest for that rodent’s fur shaped this country’s history, from its earliest colonial days to its “Manifest Destiny” westward drive and beyond.  In his detailed history of the fur industry in America, Eric Jay Dolin doesn’t suggest that the fur trade is solely responsible for Britain’s eventual triumph over early Dutch, French and Swedish attempts to colonize America, or that it was the primary motivator behind the American Revolution, or that it was the only reason Thomas Jefferson launched Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery mission.  But Fur, Fortune and Empire makes clear that the fur trade played an undeniable role in these and other formative events in America’s history.

Eric Jay Dolin is currently touring the West; he’ll be at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on July 26 (7 p.m.), Powell’s Bookstore on July 27 (7 p.m.), Four Mile Historic Park in Denver on July 29 (7 p.m.), Estes Park Museum on July 30 (6 p.m.), and he’ll make several other stops in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and Colorado.

Western Book Events

Aspen Summer Words Fest: Southern Lit, Secret Hopes and a Surprise Stand-In

Since I’ve already confessed it to her, I don’t mind telling you that I am a little bit in love with Elizabeth McCracken. I eyed her students with jealousy and cornered her on the first day of the festival to blubber something about my affection. Happily there were several chances to hear her speak. During a talk entitled “Stranger Than Fiction,” about what separates fact from fiction, she was asked about the importance of being truthful in memoir. Instead of taking the safe, post-James Frey position of “very,” she offered a more nuanced response:

“You have to be true to yourself, and some people are liars.”

McCracken was joined in the session by Loizeaux, who discussed the hazards of the memoir form. In discussing the nature of memory, Loizeaux noted there are different levels of accuracy and that it is important to let the reader know what level you are operating on. For example, by beginning a sentence, “I imagine this discussion went the way their conversations usually did...,” you tip the reader off to your use of surmisal and informed imagination to describe events you did not witness firsthand. McCracken elaborated on the importance of surmisal, stating that it is suggestive of a mobile imagination, which makes a narration interesting and larger than one person’s point of view. She added that, as a reader, books that get at the nature of memory are as vivid and as meaningful as books written immediately after an event, citing as an example the memoir Firebird by Mark Doty.

In confronting the danger of solipsism, Loizeaux challenged writers to consider “how to write a memoir that opens outward, that is interesting to others.” He encouraged writers of the form to explore big human issues, to offer glints of humor, and to refer to events occurring in the world outside during the private moments recounted in the memoir. Loizeaux also suggested the use of research when available, noting that some of the best of memoir recounts how the writer’s perception changed about a certain event by doing research on it. 

New West Book Review

Ivan Doig Explores Butte’s Copper Mining Heyday in “Work Song”

Work Song
By Ivan Doig
Riverhead, 288 pages, $25.95

The strength of a novel often rests on its voice.  Read a few pages of Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, or The Sound and the Fury and you’ll quickly see how a book’s narrator can make or break the reading experience.  Holden, Scout, and Benjy (along with the chorus of other voices in William Faulkner’s masterpiece) are unforgettable tour guides through their books.

Morris “Morrie” Morgan in Ivan Doig’s Work Song is every bit as charming or, depending on your mood, cloying as those other narrators.  Two pages into the novel set in early 20th-century Montana, he’s telling us:  “The most precipitous chapter of life always begins before we quite know it is under way.  With no belongings to speak of, I gathered what was left of my resolve and stepped outside for my first full look at where I had arrived.”

Ivan Doig is currently on a book tour through Washington and Oregon; he’ll be at Village Books in Bellingham on July 20 (7 p.m.) and at Powell’s in Portland on July 23 (7 p.m.).

Western Book Roundup

Good Summer Reads in Paperback and Colorado Book Awards Announced

In time for economical summer reading, two of my favorite novels of 2009 are out in paperback this month: Vestal McIntyre‘s Lake Overturn (available now), and Jim Lynch‘s Border Songs, which hits bookstores July 13. 

McIntyre grew up in Yampa, Idaho, and Lake Overturn is set in the fictional Idaho town of Eula.  Boy did I gush over that book—I wrote: “Lake Overturn is a Novel with a capital N—it does everything that great novels have always done: entertaining, transporting, edifying, and ultimately satisfying the reader, and McIntyre has written it with incredible heart.” Lake Overturn won several awards and was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, and a Washington Post Best Book of 2009, not to mention one of my top 5 Western books of last year. 

In my review of Jim Lynch’s Border Songs, I wrote, “Strange things are going on around the border between Washington state and British Columbia in Jim Lynch’s rich, imaginative novel…Quirky, funny, fresh, and lyrical, Border Songs will win over just about any reader.” Border Songs was picked as one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post, Toronto Star, St. Louis Dispatch, and New West, among others.  Lynch will be in Missoula at the Montana Festival of the Book in October.

Also in the Roundup: Colorado Book Award winners.

New West Book Review

Distracted: This Is Your Brain on the Internet

The Shallows: What The Internet is Doing To Our Brains
by Nicholas Carr
W.W. Norton, 276 pages, $26.95

Chances are, even though you’ve navigated over to this web page, you’re not actually reading this sentence.  You’ve landed here momentarily, probably because Google’s all-knowing algorithm sent you here.  Your eyes are darting across this web page in an F-shaped pattern, and even if this review happens to interests you, you’ll only read about 18 percent of it. 

My time with you is brief: fewer than one in ten page views lasts longer than two minutes.  And because of people’s impaired ability to transfer information gleaned from “power-browsing” from short-term into long-term memory, you won’t remember any of this in the morning.  This is the news that Boulder-based writer Nicholas Carr brings in The Shallows, a thoughtful book that invites us to reflect on how our lives, attention spans, and brains have changed over the past heady decade of rapid adoption of constant use of the Internet.

Nicholas Carr will discuss The Shallows at the Tattered Cover (Colfax) on Wednesday, July 7 at 7:30 p.m.