Western Book Roundup

“Reading the West” Gets the Word Out About Regional Books

A few weeks ago I wrote about some creative ideas people are coming up with to support books in the midst of this changing media landscape. In keeping with that theme, the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association recently launched the Reading the West program, with the goal of helping bookstores promote books that are set in the West or those written by Western authors. The first featured books are New Mexico writer Rick Collignon's Madewell Brown and Austin-based Jaqueline Kelly's The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. I spoke to MPIBA executive director Lisa Knudsen this week on the phone from her office in Fort Collins about the program.

Knudsen said that the MPIBA started the Reading the West program because "in these troubled economic times, we were looking for projects and programs that are free to our member booksellers and are a potential win win win—for the publisher, bookseller, and author."

"I shamelessly copied from my fellow regional bookseller associations," Knudsen said, noting that the Midwest and Great Lakes Bookseller associations sponsor similar programs. The Reading the West program makes advance copies of the featured books available to booksellers, as well as materials to use in their display and promotion. The authors are also available for readings at regional stores.

The MPIBA board hopes publishers will begin to send them information about relevant forthcoming books to be considered for the program, but for the first selections, the members discussed among themselves what good books of regional interest they knew were coming out.

"Rick Collignon is very popular in our region," Knudsen said, "and the committee was enthusiastic about his latest book. We also wanted to do what we could to promote independent publishers." Madewell Brown is published by Unbridled Books, an independent publisher based in Colorado.

New West Book Review

Multi-Cultural in the Monochromatic West: A Novel For a Contemporary Denver

Children of the Waters
by Carleen Brice
One World/Ballantine, 304 pages, $14

Denver novelist Carleen Brice's second novel is a quick-paced family drama that turns on a secret adoption, told in alternating chapters from the perspectives of two sisters who are unknown to each other, living in the same city but in very different worlds. Trish Taylor is a blond, overweight veterinary technician who came back to her hometown of Aurora, Colo. after her marriage failed, bringing her biracial teenage son Will with her. Trish was told her mother and infant sister died in a car accident when she was a preschooler, and her stern grandparents raised her. Billie Cousins is the cherished daughter of a successful Denver African-American family. Her mother is a Reynelda Muse-like local television anchor, and her father is the dean of the business school at the University of Colorado. Through a newly discovered letter and a visit to an old neighbor, Trish learns that Billie is the sister she thought died in infancy, and tracks her down, disrupting both their lives.

Carleen Brice will discuss her new book at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on July 16 at 7:30 p.m.

WESTERN BOOK ROUNDUP

Urrea at Home Among Western Authors

Author Luis Alberto Urrea doesn’t usually make the list of Western writers. Lately he’s been living in Chicago, after all. But after a teaching stint at the University of Colorado in the 1990s, he says, he still has his stuff in a Boulder storage unit, and he’s afraid to move it, lest it giving up on his dream of living in the mountains.

“As long as my junk is on the Front Range, somehow I’ll find a way back there,” he told the crowd at the Aspen Writers’ Foundation’s Summer Words literary seminar.

Urrea tends to be considered a border writer, maybe a Latino author. His works often straddle the U.S.-Mexico border. But those lonesome deserts are the West.

Western Book Roundup

Montana Bookstore Owners Head to Peace Corps Assignment in Peru

Jean Matthews and Russ Lawrence bought Chapter One Bookstore in Hamilton 23 years ago, and a few weeks ago they sold the store to longtime business partner Shawn Wathen so they could pursue their lifelong dream of serving in the Peace Corps, according to Bess Brownlee of the Ravalli Republic. She writes, "Their work in Peru will focus on small business development and promotion." Lawrence, author of Montana's Bitterroot Valley, told Brownlee that they might write a book about their experiences in Peru. The couple, married for 31 years, will serve in Peru until August of 2011.

Matthews and Lawrence are already keeping track of their experiences on a blog (via Shelf Awareness), and have some nice photos of their recent encounters with Peruvians and llamas. If you've ever wondered what the Peace Corps is like, this blog will give you a good idea. The first entries feature the couple's adventures in packing for the two-year stint ("The Edges Fray, the Duffel Cannot Hold"), their attempts to improve their Spanish, and the orientation classes they began to take once they arrived in Peru. They write:

"The most popular class yesterday was presented by our Medical Officer, Dr. Jorge, on diarrhea. The official estimate of the percentage of Peru’s [Peace Corps Volunteers] who have, umm, 'soiled their pants' is 95%, but he bets it’s closer to 100%."

As of this weekend, they've already hit a rough patch: Russ ended up in a hospital in Panama with "a torn retina of idiopathic origin," but they expect him to make a full recovery.

Back in Hamilton, Chapter One will host a reading by Rick Bass on Monday, July 13 at 7:30 p.m. Watch for my review of his new book, The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana in a few weeks.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, the Rocky Mountain Land Library recently established a Kids Nature Library at the Kassler Center in Littleton. (The photo is of a few youngsters enjoying the library during the first hour after it opened.)

WESTERN BOOK ROUNDUP

‘Edgar Sawtelle’ Has Aspen Homecoming

This is what author Luis Alberto Urrea has to say about the role played by a sense of place in his books, which tend to hopscotch back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I firmly believe there is no ‘them.’ There is only ‘us.’ I also believe that place is not out there. It’s right here.”

Urrea was speaking on Monday at the Aspen Writers’ Foundation’s Aspen Summer Words literary festival. He is among a group of writers from around the planet gathered for the festival, with a theme this year of “World of Words.”

Among the others: Ishmael Beah, of Sierra Leone, author of the bestselling A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, and Colum McCann, who launches his newest novel, Let the Great World Spin today at the festival. (It's Amazon's book of the month for June.)

Monday’s events also included the 18th annual Colorado Book Awards. It should come as no surprise that David Wroblewski won the award for fiction for his breakaway success, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.

“There’s a connection between Edgar’s story and the Aspen Summer Words program,” Wroblewski says. It was the last place Wroblewski workshopped the novel, back in 2005.

New West Book Review

Disappearing Act: Candida Lawrence’s “Vanishing”

Vanishing
by Candida Lawrence
275 pages, $23.95

Candida Lawrence's new Vanishing is a collection of incisive, chronologically arranged personal essays that plunge the reader into vivid moments of her past, beginning in 1942 when Candida is in college at Berkeley and is a reporter for the Daily Cal, and extending into recent times, when she is coping with aging and adjusting to a changed world. Like Mary Gordon, Lawrence writes with great candor, wit, and intelligence about her family. Lawrence lives in Mill Valley, California, and is the author of three previous memoirs. As she reveals in one of the most arresting pieces in the book, "Vanishing: 1965," Lawrence spent years hiding out under an assumed identity after she took off with her children in the wake of a messy divorce which had left her with very limited visitation rights. This is perhaps why, as revelatory as these essays are, they still bear an air of mystery.

Lawrence writes bracing prose, mainly in present tense, replete with precise detail; the effect of this approach is that the reader feels as though sitting right beside her in 1965 when she flies to San Diego with $500 for an abortion in Mexico. "We rent a 1965 Ford Sedan, blue with a white interior, AM-FM radio, and a clock that works," she writes. "I sit primly on the dazzling vinyl and feel small." In Tijuana, they wait in a parking lot for a station wagon that comes to take women to a clinic. Lawrence's descriptions of the people with her on that ride provide a cross section of women in the same situation:

"To my right is Black Woman, calm, dignified. Next to Black Woman is a young girl…dressed in faded jeans…Her eyes are red from recent weeping and seem about to spill over again. Facing Young Girl on the bench opposite, is an older woman in a light-blue pants suit…I would have guessed her to be too old for this trip, but perhaps she has similar thoughts about me."

Western Book Roundup

Creative Survival Tactics for the Printed Word

In my interview last week with Ron Carlson, he touched upon his thoughts about the future of books and printed material, which looks grim at the moment. "It will be very interesting to see what happens with newspapers and all forms of media," he said, "because I don’t think it’s just going to go one way. I think it will settle down and there will be a little bit of reaction, and we’ll end up with hard copy and electronic copy." Although I have no skill with a crystal ball, I think he's probably right--printed material will continue to exist, but those who want to produce it are going to have to get creative. The items I'd gathered for this week's Roundup looked pretty random at first, but then I realized that they all involve writers, readers, and book organizations trying to do something different.

The first of these is Colorado native Todd Shimoda, who will present his new novel Oh! A mystery of mono no aware (Chin Music Press, 310 pages, $22.50) Thursday, June 18 at The Readers Cove in Ft. Collins (6:30 p.m.). Shimoda currently lives in Hawaii, and his previous novel, The Fourth Treasure was a Kiriyama Prize notable book for 2002.

Oh! was recently featured in NPR's "Independent Booksellers Pick Summer's Best Reads." Lucia Silva, the book buyer at Portrait of a Bookstore in Studio City, California, described the book in this way:

"On a lark, 20-something Zack Hara leaves his tepid life in L.A. for Japan. Following tiny shifts of fate, he quickly becomes fascinated by the ancient Japanese notion of mono no aware — an elusive concept that loosely means 'the beauty of sad things,' a sudden, intense moment of awareness that makes us cry 'oh!'

In search of his own moment of mono no aware, and intent on awakening his own emotional life, he becomes captivated by the suicide clubs that meet in the Aokigahara forest. In seamless counterpoint to the philosophical current, Shimoda shapes a delicate mystery that grows darker as the novel progresses. The book itself is a fine work of art, with a gorgeous, embossed cover, rice-paper-thin pages, and textured paper inserts with illustrations that offer clues to Zack's fate — a triumphant kick in the pants for anyone who doubts the future of paper-and-ink books."

New West Book Review

Birdman: Rachel Dickinson’s “Falconer on the Edge”

Falconer on the Edge: A Man, His Birds, and the Vanishing Landscape of the American West
by Rachel Dickinson
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 220 pages, $24

In Falconer on the Edge, Rachel Dickinson gives readers an in-depth look at a subculture that many people may not be aware existed. Falconers are an intense, passionate, tight-knit group of bird-loving hunters, and they subdivide themselves according to the type of bird they fly, from those who favor hunting sage grouse with gyrfalcon-peregrine hybrids ("an überbird [with] stamina and speed and beauty") to those who fly hawks to catch squirrels and jackrabbits. The falconers Dickinson depicts remind me of a more athletic and outdoorsy version of Trekkies, with their conventions, cliques, private jargon derived from Norman French, and the way they are often misunderstood by outsiders.

Although falconry ("a loose term [that] refers to flying any kind of raptor or bird of prey") originated perhaps 3,500 years ago in the Middle East, spread through Asia and Europe, and didn't catch on in North America until the twentieth century, it seems a pastime tailor-made for the American West, as it requires a lot of open space and abundant game. With all the care and training that a bird of prey demands, not to mention the need for the falconer to be in top condition to run through fields after his bird, it might be the most labor and time-intensive variety of hunting, which is why so few practice it. Dickinson writes, "Today there are approximately forty-five hundred licensed falconers in the United States, and two to three thousand of them belong to [the North American Falconers Association]." Judging from the portraits in Dickinson's book, there are no casual falconers.

Western Writers

An Interview with Ron Carlson About “The Signal”

Utah native Ron Carlson has been publishing acclaimed novels and short stories for over three decades, and in recent years he's hit a stride, with two novels, Five Skies and the new The Signal back-to-back. Carlson directed the Creative Writing program at Arizona State University for many years and three years ago became the Creative Writing program director at the University of California at Irvine. The Signal, which Carlson wrote at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, is the action-packed tale of a divorced couple who go backpacking in the Wind River Mountains and run into all sorts of trouble, including some unfriendly meth-runners who poach elk on the side. I recently spoke with Carlson about his new novel, which he started because he "wanted to stand up behind [his] goddamn pickup truck again," and about how "camping is essentially about when things go wrong."

New West: Is The Signal just an elaborate way for you to scare other potential campers off of your favorite hiking trail?

Ron Carlson: You know, it has that. I didn't mean to scare everybody.

NW: In the front of the book, you advise people, "If I was going to go into the Wind Rivers today, I would use the Bears Ears trailhead and I would go before September 10." But after reading about all the perils that Mack and Vonnie face, nobody is going to want to go on this trail.

RC: I just wanted to make sure that no one went after then, because you can run into snow.

NW: I think I'd rather run into snow than some of the things that Mack and Vonnie run into.

RC: I don't want anybody to get snowed in the way I did, and I've written about that. What I really wanted to do was have my vicarious experience and write a little love letter to the mountains, which I'm not in enough. I just got on fire for that and wrote this outdoor book.