New West Theater Review

Holt Prairie Saga Continues in “Eventide”

This month the Denver Center for the Performing Arts is presenting the world premier of “Eventide,” playwright Eric Schmiedl’s faithful adaptation of Kent Haruf’s novel, directed by Kent Thompson.  Two years ago Schmiedl turned Haruf’s beloved novel Plainsong into a winning play, and this time he works with darker material, but nevertheless manages to reveal the abundant humor in Haruf’s dialogue.

“Plainsong” told the story of the McPheron brothers, two old bachelor ranchers living on the outskirts of the fictional prairie town of Holt, Colorado, coaxed into sheltering a pregnant teenage girl, Victoria Roubideaux, who had been thrown out by her mother.  They formed a strong, improvised family, and “Eventide” picks up on their lives a few years later, when Victoria’s daughter Katie is two years old, and the McPheron brothers are reluctantly preparing to see them off to Fort Collins, where Victoria will attend college. 

Philip Pleasants and Mike Hartman return to reprise the roles of Harold and Raymond McPheron, respectively, that they played in “Plainsong,” and they once again prove irresistible, two elderly rural gentlemen adept in cattle rearing chores but startled by modern life, unaccustomed to dancing, socializing, and fielding the amorous advances of women.  Their interaction and dialogue, which closely follows that in Haruf’s novel, is hilarious.

GUEST COMMENTARY

Want to be an Outdoor Writer?

Want to spend a week this summer with some of the nation’s best-known outdoor writers, practicing the craft of outdoor writing in writer-friendly Missoula? 

The Outdoor Writers Association of America (OWAA) will host its first Goldenrod Writing Workshop at the University of Montana in Missoula August 1-7, 2010. Open to both novice communicators and published professionals, the week-long workshop is designed to improve skills in outdoor, nature and environmental writing. 

Western Writers

An Interview with T.C. Boyle

T.C. Boyle will appear at the Boulder Book Store Tuesday for what he calls a “performance” of his two most recent books, his ninth short story collection, Wild Child, and the paperback release of his twelfth novel, The Women, which examines the life of architect Frank Lloyd Wright from the perspectives of the women in his life.  I interviewed Boyle on the phone from his home in California.  We spoke about his writing process, his favorite themes of natural disasters and the animal nature of humanity, and his thoughts on the future of books.

New West: Last time I interviewed you, for Talk Talk in 2007, you described The Women as being part of your “egomanics of the 20th century” series, along with Alfred Kinsey in The Inner Circle and John Kellogg of The Road to Wellville.

T.C. Boyle: I’ll cop to that.

NW: Are you done with egomaniacs?  You said it was a trilogy.

TCB: Well I guess so, at least for now.  For the next novel I’ve returned to my environmental themes.  It’s a novel set on the California Channel Islands about the big fight over the ecological restoration.  It’s called When The Killing Is Done.  Because of Wild Child it won’t be out until March of next year.  But I’m sure there are more egomanicas out there, lurking in the wings.

Western Book Roundup

CU Boulder Professor Helps Publish Novel by the Late Ralph Ellison

Brittany Anas recently wrote in the Boulder Daily Camera about the role CU professor Adam Bradley has played in publishing the second posthumous novel of Ralph Ellison (via Twitter.com/Boulderbooks).  Ellison published his classic novel, Invisible Man, in 1952, and although he worked on several novels for decades, he did not publish another one before his death in 1994, but as Anas notes, he left behind “27 boxes of manuscript for his second novel that included handwritten notes, typewritten pages and 460-some computer files.”

Bradley was born and raised in Salt Lake City.  Anas writes that Bradley became interested in Ellison’s work at a young age:

“As an undergraduate at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., Bradley became intrigued with Ellison, whose father died when he was a child. A character in Invisible Man tells the protagonist: ‘Be your own father, young man.’ The rich theme of father-son relationships struck Bradley, who was raised by his white mother and met his black father for the first time in his 20s.”

Also in the Roundup: Denver’s Bloomsbury Review turns 30, Copper Canyon Press holds a benefit with W.S. Merwin, and “The Montana Place Names Companion” is now up and running.

New West Book Review

Things That Go Bump in Wyoming: Alyson Hagy’s “Ghosts of Wyoming”

Ghosts of Wyoming
By Alyson Hagy
Graywolf Press, 192 pages, $15

Some places feel more haunted than others.  As Alyson Hagy explores in her new collection of short stories, Ghosts of Wyoming, Wyoming is one of those places where the past seems to overlap with the present, where the rough frontier that she writes of in “The Sin Eaters,” set in 1889, seems to have plenty in common with the oil rig-riddled Wyoming of today, in which Hagy sets the story “Oil & Gas.” Throughout many of the stories, details about the Arapaho and other tribes that settled the area first set a somber tone underneath the main narrative.  Some of these stories touch on issues that are also raised in the work of Annie Proulx, Alexandra Fuller, and other contemporary Wyoming writers, but as with all good fiction, Hagy isn’t trying to convey a message.  She’s just telling some first-rate ghost stories.

Only one of the eight stories, “Superstitions of the Indians,” is a ghost story in the classic sense, but they all have ghosts in them in the form of people who have died or characters haunted by the past.  One of the best stories is the lead-off, “Border,” which conceals its ghost until the very end in an effective twist that works as such endings should, not as a “gotcha!” moment but as a revelation that makes sense of and lends gravity to all the prior events.  In “Border,” a young man hitchhiking his way out of Wyoming, aiming for Denver or beyond, pauses in his journey to steal a collie pup in Meeker, Colo. 

New West Book Review

Two New Travel Books Depict the West from Distinct Vantages

The Most Beautiful Villages and Towns of the Southwest (Thames & Hudson, 208 pages, $40) is a welcome coffee table book to peruse in the middle of winter, with its large photos of sun-struck plazas, warm adobe villas, red rock cliffs, and the bright Victorian buildings of old mountain mining towns.  If you’re from this region, there’s a good chance that you’ve visited a number of the picturesque places featured in the book (Breckenridge, Moab, Taos: check).  Written by Joan Tapper, founding editor of National Geographic Traveler and photographed by Nik Wheeler, who has contributed to National Geographic, the book could serve as a fine souvenir for anyone who has traveled the region. 

Tapper accompanies Wheeler’s vivid photos with lively commentaries that describe three-dozen towns in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah, giving a brief history of how the towns sprang up, how they endured, and what tourists can expect on a visit.  It’s a breezy read, intended for vacationers who’ve been charmed by these towns, not those concerned with thorny issues facing the West.

Western Book Roundup

Authors Hustle to Promote Books & Oregon Seeks New Poet Laureate

In her article ”Authors go it alone in new literary landscape” for the Denver Post Sunday book section, Colleen Smith wrote about Tama Kieves and John Thorndike, two authors “with Denver ties” who have thrown themselves into promotion for their books.  (Smith doesn’t mention what those ties are for Thorndike; Kieves lives in Denver, and Thorndike lives in Athens, Ohio).

Tama Kieves originally self-published her self-help book, This Time I Dance!: Creating the Work You Love: How One Harvard Lawyer Left It All To Have It All, and Smith writes: “Kieves keeps up constant efforts, including speaking at conferences and to congregations. ‘I travel like crazy on my own dime because speaking in front of people has been the best exposure for the book,’ she said. ‘I’m the face of that book and the voice of that book. I will usually make money through workshops and book sales, but I’m always taking that risk.’” Smith continues, “four months after self-publishing her book, Penguin Tarcher signed her with a $75,000 advance.”

John Thorndike demonstrated equal hustle, traveling across the country for his last book and contacting hundreds of people he thought might be interested in the topic of his latest book, The Last of His Mind: A Year in the Shadow of Alzheimer’s.

• Smith’s contributor’s note at the end of the article reveals that she’s not a disinterested party to the topic she discussed.  She will self-publish her first novel, Glass Halo, this spring.  What interested me about her story is that according to a Q&A on her website, Smith attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, which seems like it must be the magic ticket to traditional publication.  But not for everyone, apparently.  Smith writes, “I’ve been a flack, a hack, a bluestocking, a blogger, and have done just about every other writerly job in between.” She writes that she decided to self-publish after she began blogging.

Also in the Roundup: Oregon accepts nominations for new poet laureate and Whitefish Review hosts a presentation with author Jon Turk.

New West Book Review

Westerners Speak Up in “Voices of the American West”

Voices of the American West
by Corinne Platt & Meredith Ogilby
Fulcrum Press, 280 pages, $29.95

Photographer Meredith Ogilby and writer Corinne Platt met each other several years ago at the Headwaters Conference, an annual discussion of wide-ranging issues facing the West at Western State College in Gunnison, Colo.  At the time, Platt writes in her introduction to Voices of the American West, she was “considering who the people with enough passion and vision to make a difference in today’s West are.” They decided to embark on a project of interviewing and photographing people “shaped by the geography of the West.”

Platt asked each person they met with a series of questions, including: “How has the West defined you?  Where do you think the West is heading, and what is your role?  Are you hopeful about the future of the West?” They spent four years traveling and meeting with businesspeople, politicians, ranchers, environmental activists, writers, and other Westerners, and the result is this insightful collection of personal stories and black-and-white photographs.

New West Book Review

A White Girl Embraces Mexican Culture in “Gringa”

Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood
by Melissa Hart
Seal Press, 276 pages, $16.95

Eugene-based writer and University of Oregon journalism teacher Melissa Hart‘s new memoir investigates a childhood complicated enough to merit repeated examination: Gringa is her second childhood memoir, after 2005’s The Assault of Laughter.  Both address the defining incident of her young life: when Hart was in third grade, her mother Maggie recognized she was a lesbian, fell in love with her son’s school bus driver, and took her three kids from their father and their “upper-class gated community” in Southern California, moving them to Oxnard, a predominantly Mexican-American community.  “You can’t grow up parented by two women,” Hart’s father declares, “it’s unnatural.” The judge agrees, granting custody of the children to Hart’s father with two weekends of visitation to her mother a month.

A description of these events sounds rather sensationalistic, but Hart’s strength in Gringa is how natural she makes it all seem.  She recreates the world of 1970’s Southern California for the reader, complete with her mother’s blue VW Bus with “red plaid curtains and eight-track tape player,” blasting Peter, Paul & Mary, a symptom of Maggie’s desire to “return to ‘60s bohemia.” Hart’s descriptions of music, clothing, and food ground the book in the changing pop culture of the decades it spans.