Jackson Hole News

Western Book Roundup

Rick Bass’s New Novella, “The Blue Horse,” and a Horse Writing Retreat

By Jenny Shank, 1-06-10

Narrative Magazine, a leading online literary journal, is currently offering some new work by prolific Montana author Rick Bass. Bass has published a number of stories and essays in Narrative, and currently you can hear Bass read his story “Eating” for free, or for twelve bucks you can order The Blue Horse, a new novella available only at Narrative.  It’s 56 pages long, and the price includes shipping.

• Speaking of horses, of blue and different colors, it seems to me that if a book is set West of the Mississippi, it’s fifty percent more likely to have a horse on the cover, whether or not the book contains many horses.  But there are plenty of writers actually writing about horses, and I came across a writing retreat in on the Wyoming Arts Blog specifically geared toward those people: “Literature and Landscape of the Horse” with Page Lambert and Sheri Griffith, at the Vee Bar Ranch near Laramie, Wyoming from May 29 through June 3.  According to the description:

“As we learn more about how a horse communicates with the world, we develop a deeper awareness of how we communicate with the world. During this retreat, not only will we ride across the Vee Bar’s beautiful Wyoming landscape, we’ll also journey into the mysterious dimension between the verbal world and the non-verbal world.”

• Denver novelist Carleen Brice is running a contest to raise money for The Delores Project, which helps homeless women in the Denver metro area.  Brice’s first novel, Orange Mint and Honey, was adapted into a movie for the Lifetime Movie Network, “Sins of the Mother,” starring Jill Scott.  Brice is encouraging Denver-area book groups to donate money to The Delores Project, and she will attend a watch party for the movie on February 7 with the book group that donates the most.  Complete details are on her website, and she also has a contest for non-Denver area book groups.

• Rain Taxi has an interview with Terry Tempest Williams in its Winter issue (Via Twitter.com/JimCarmin).  In the interview, Kevin Smokler discusses Williams’ most recent book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World, among other topics.  She says that her father was a harsh critic of the book:

“…my father…said that the prairie dog section is so boring that no one is going to finish it, and if they do, the rest of the book is such a downer they will be sorry they did. But I think there have been many other people who have understood it, and who stayed with it. I just had a woman email me who has started a prairie dog watch society—she’s outraged that this is a species that could become extinct within this century; she’d never known that before.”

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