New West Book Review
Rigged: Alexandra Fuller’s “The Legend of Colton H. Bryant”
The Legend of Colton H. Bryant
By Alexandra Fuller
The Penguin Press
202 pages, $23.95
In her extraordinary new book, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, Alexandra Fuller does a cruel thing. She makes readers fall in love with a Wyoming boy in the space of a few pages, carries us through his life, which leads inevitably to a dangerous job on an oil rig, and makes us stand as witnesses to his end, however much we wish we could turn our heads away. I still feel heartsick a few weeks after finishing it. Fuller writes with simple grace and a cowboy twang, taking a rather unconventional approach for nonfiction by composing the book of the private conversations and intimate scenes that are the turning points of Bryant's short life, and though she must have spent months with his family and friends, the author stays offstage, disappearing into a bracing, honest voice that is motherly in its tenderness toward her subject.
Fuller will discuss her book at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) in Denver on Monday, May 12 (7:30 p.m.), at Borders in Portland on May 13 (7 p.m.), and in Evanston, WY at the Uinta Library on May 16 (5 p.m.)
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Western Book Roundup
Lynn Rossetto Kasper Visits Boulder & Desert Writing Award Announced
The Boulder Farmer's Market will open for its first Wednesday afternoon of the season today, kicking off with a book signing and talk by Lynn Rossetto Kasper, host of NPR's The Splendid Table. She'll be discussing her new book, How to Eat Supper. (Free, 5:30-6:30 p.m.)
The Bluff, Utah-based Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers announced that this year's winner of their annual award is Joe Wilkins. Wilkins plans to study and write about the eastern front of the Rocky Mountains from Texas to Montana.
Also in the Roundup: Margot Kahn tours behind Horses That Buck: The Story of Champion Bronc Rider Bill Smith, and WyoFile.com excerpts Alexandra Fuller's new book.
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book review
Sirota’s Tour of America: There Are All Kinds of Uprisings
Reading The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Searing Wall Street and Washington, by David Sirota, is a bit like a cross-country road trip with an insistent guy who talks the whole time.
The thing is, Sirota's saying stuff you should probably hear, and he goes to places you need to go, but he's tough to follow at first. He starts in Helena, Mont., with a barrage of information about the partisan political machinations of the state's most recent biannual legislature, and he tosses other stuff in at a dizzying pace and with a good dose of populist outrage: from vermiculite poisoning in Libby to Vice President Dick Cheney's shooting of his hunting companion to century-old labor wars to an aside about how some Helena locals referred to him (Sirota) as a "city mouse."
His story gains traction when it becomes clear that he's not finding a uniform populist movement in America where there isn't any. Sirota reports on the outrage felt by working people, whether it is channeled toward big business or misdirected at Mexican immigrants.
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New West Book Review
Peggy Shumaker’s “Just Breathe Normally”
Just Breathe Normally
by Peggy Shumaker
University of Nebraska Press
267 pages, $24.95
Peggy Shumaker is an English professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the author of several books of poetry, including Blaze and Underground Rivers. Her poetry background is evident in every carefully sculpted sentence of her memoir, Just Breathe Normally. This book is more than just pretty prose, though. It’s a gripping account of one woman’s struggle through a potentially life-ending accident and through her chaotic childhood. The wounds are on the body and in the mind. This is a book I will read again and again to decipher how Shumaker makes her magic happen. Clearly, this is a seasoned writer with an intriguing story to tell.
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Western Book Roundup
Proulx News, Fuller on Wyoming Oil, and Cather Archive Goes Online
Annie Proulx fans can begin the countdown to the release of her next book: Buzz Girl reports that Proulx's "new collection of 9 'stunning' short stories about the people who now inhabit pioneer country" is due out in September 2008. The book, to be published by Scribner, is titled Fine Just The Way It Is.
Another Wyoming writer, Alexandra Fuller, recently wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times, about the recent, massive expansion of the oil and gas industry in Wyoming, and the harm it's caused the environment and Wyomingites' physical and mental health.
Also in the Roundup: A new online Willa Cather Archive, and a former Denver bookseller retires to Harlem
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Western Writers
An Interview with Tara Yellen
Tara Yellen's funny, sharp debut novel, After Hours at the Almost Home, published by Unbridled Books this month, follows the fortunes of the waiters, waitresses, and bartenders at a Denver bar during the hectic night of the Broncos' 1999 Super Bowl win, when a seasoned waitress doesn't show up for her shift. Yellen was born in Fort Collins, grew up in New York, and returned to Colorado to earn a master's degree in Creative Writing from CU, where I met her ten years ago. Yellen went on to earn an MFA from Virginia, and currently lives in the Washington, D.C. area. She says that as she's been revising her novel, over the years she's worked many jobs, including stints as a "nanny, teacher, tutor, freelance writer and editor, and, of course a bartender and waitress." I recently interviewed Yellen via email about why she chose to set her novel in Denver, how the book evolved, and how waiting tables can inspire fiction.
New West: Of the many places you've lived, why did you decide to set your first novel in Denver?
Tara Yellen: I didn’t decide. I was living in Denver, finishing up at the writing program at CU Boulder, when the story came to me. The location just felt right—for the events, for the characters. It was probably a good thing that the book ended up taking me so long to finish. The bulk of my revisions took place after I’d moved away from Colorado. I was sad to leave (and still think I might move back), but for writing, distance always helps.
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New West Book Review
Cave Men: “Kartchner Caverns”
Kartchner Caverns
By Neil Miller
University of Arizona Press
224 pages, $14.95
In 1974, two young spelunking buddies named Randy Tufts and Gary Tenen discovered an untouched cave in southern Arizona, filled with breathtaking formations like nothing they'd ever seen, so impressive and mysterious that they named it Xanadu. Then they did what any self-respecting cavers would do: they told no one about their discovery. Neil Miller's engaging new book, Kartchner Caverns: How Two Cavers Discovered and Saved One of the Wonders of the Natural World follows Tufts and Tenen and the cave that would eventually become an Arizona State Park over a twenty year period in which the men try to determine how to safeguard Xanadu from vandals and eventually advocate it becoming a "show cave" in order to preserve and share it with others.
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Western Book Roundup
Earth Day Books by Boulder Authors
Just in time for Earth Day, several Boulder authors have released ecologically minded books. Read on to learn about Disappearing Destinations, Go Green, Live Rich, and The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw.
Disappearing Destinations: 37 Places in Peril and What Can Be Done to Help Save Them
Vintage, 400 pages, $15.95
Former NewWest contributor and Boulder resident Heather Hansen co-authored this book with Kimberly Lisagor. Disappearing Destinations documents the environmental problems at popular tourist sites around the world. Publishers Weekly calls it a "fact-packed survey of travel destinations endangered by global warming, environmental degradation, predatory logging, mining and fishing and the impact of too many tourists… The authors' accounts of how the world's beauty is being despoiled, based on sharp on-site reporting, are a cautionary call to arms for tourists to fight environmental excesses and, when traveling, to tread lightly." In an email, Hansen noted that the book includes regionally-relevant chapters on " Glacier National Park, Yellowstone and the Cascades."
Heather Hansen will discuss the book at the Boulder Book Store tonight (April 22, 7:30 p.m.) and at the Tattered Cover in LoDo on May 28 (7:30 p.m.).
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Western Writers
An Interview with Dagoberto Gilb
Dagoberto Gilb grew up in Los Angeles and moved frequently throughout the urban West that he depicts in stories and novels in his characteristic incisive and humorous way. After earning a master's degree from the University of California, Gilb worked for many years as a construction worker and carpenter in LA and El Paso. Gilb began publishing stories in literary magazines and eventually books, including 1994's The Magic of Blood, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, and 2003's Gritos, an essay collection that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gilb currently is a professor at Texas State University, and recently published a new novel, The Flowers, which depicts life in an apartment complex as seen by the winning 15-year-old narrator, Sonny Bravo. I interviewed Gilb via email about the quirky characters and organic structure of the novel, and how writing and living in Texas influences his work.
New West: The cast of characters in "The Flowers" is so vivid, from Sonny's nerdish twin friends, to "The Cloyd," to Sonny's beautiful, self-focused mother. How did you create these people?
Dagoberto Gilb: I say I write from physical experience, not just musings or opinions or prescriptions. That is, I run or get into something and there is, call it, a throbbing. I focus on it and I write about that. The characters resemble people I've dreamed, re-invented, re-imagined, re-designed, made mythic in a "realistic" setting. The twins are my comedic Greek chorus. A novel is like a psychic map.
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