Western Book Roundup
Nonprofit Bookstore Opens in Bend and New Missoula Lit Mag Launches
Idealistic optimism in the book world is not dead: David Jasper of the Bend Bulletin reported that Kilns Bookstore, a nonprofit enterprise, opened in Bend over the holiday weekend. (Via Shelf Awareness.) Jasper writes, "The opening comes just more than a month after The Book Barn, a 35-year-old shop in nearby downtown, closed due to declining sales and stiff competition from online retailers such as Amazon."
Rick Bass recently reviewed Stephen Trimble's new book, Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America for the Boston Globe.
Denise Hill at the NewPages blog noted the arrival of the premier issue of a new literary magazine called The Oval, published by University of Montana undergraduates.
Also in the Roundup: the Virginia Quarterly Review publishes a new story by a Casper author, the Colorado Book Award finalists are announced, and Denver's David Sirota tours.
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"The Gulch" Jackson, Wyoming. Photo by Gil Brady.
New West Book Review
Lonely Hearts: Steven Wingate’s “Wifeshopping”
Wifeshopping
By Steven Wingate
Houghton Mifflin, 208 pages, $12.95
The men in Steven Wingate's engrossing, entertaining debut story collection Wifeshopping are looking not just for love, but for marriage. They're not adverse to commitment, but they are particular, seeking the ideal woman for whom to forsake their days of youthful flings. This ultimate woman never quite materializes for Wingate's protagonists, who reject their girlfriends and fiancées because they don't like used clothes or don't agree that they should get rid of a stranger's mementos found buried in the backyard. But more often, their women reject them for being too pompous, for proposing marriage too early or for trying to rush them out of their rituals of mourning for past loves. Wingate, who lives in Lafayette, Colo. and teaches at the University of Colorado, sets his stories across the country, from Denver to Thermopolis, Wyo., to Rockport, Mass., to Miami (and vividly evokes each of these varied settings), but the problems that plague his characters are the same everywhere—they're not-quite-perfect guys trying to create something lasting and meaningful with not-quite-perfect women.
Steven Wingate will discuss his book at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on July 30 at 7:30 p.m., and at Poor Richard's Bookstore in Colorado Springs on August 7 at 5 p.m.
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Western Book Roundup
Policing Nonfiction, and Boulder Writer’s “Just Do It” takes Manhattan
Bryan Burrough recently reviewed Alexandra Fuller's The Legend of Colton H. Bryant for the New York Times Book Review. Burrough admired Fuller's poetic writing, but wasn't convinced that the book should be classified as nonfiction because so much of it consists of dialogue that she wasn't present for, and she admits in an author's note that she "juggled time" and took other "narrative liberties." Burrough writes:
"That’s not artistic license. It’s cheating. Not cheating in the sense that plagiarism is cheating. I don’t believe Fuller has committed a major literary felony here, but it’s clearly a misdemeanor, even if she comes out and admits it."
Also in the Roundup: A Denver Post reporter has sex with his wife 101 days in a row and recovers in time to write the tale.
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Oral Arguments Heard Thursday
Federal Judge to Decide Soon on Lawsuit Over State Wolf Management
U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy in Missoula heard oral arguments Thursday in a case brought by environmental groups to return gray wolves in the Northern Rockies.
Molloy did not rule, but his decision is expected in the next several days on whether to grant a preliminary injunction and return wolf management to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service while a lawsuit challenging the federal decision to delist the wolf proceeds.
The plaintiffs, a coalition of 12 environmental and animal rights groups represented by the environmental legal firm Earthjustice, asked for the injunction to immediately stop the killing of wolves under state management and prevent wolf hunts proposed for the fall.
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Western Writers
An Interview with Alexandra Fuller: Part Two
In the second part of my interview with Alexandra Fuller, we discuss her passion for Wyoming, her concern for the state's welfare in the wake of the oil boom, her thoughts on other Wyoming writers, her run-in with Wyoming State Senator Kit Jennings, and how Jackson Hole "feels a whole lot smaller" when both she and Dick Cheney are in town.
New West: How has Wyoming changed in the years you've lived there?
AF: Well, between a quarter and a fifth of the land is now under oil and gas lease. The place where Colton fell used to be critical winter wildlife range in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem for the animals coming down from Grand Teton National Park. And if you got caught trespassing out there in the winter, you got into severe trouble. And in the summer if you were caught off road, they considered that range so critical that you would get in trouble. There used to be this kind of reverence for the open spaces. It absolutely was sacred ground. There was a deep understanding that this was a difficult place to make a living for man and for beast. It did feel wild—it felt African to me. You could walk all day and not see another human being.
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Western Writers
An Interview with Alexandra Fuller: Part One
Alexandra Fuller grew up on a farm in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and her first book was a critically-acclaimed memoir of those years, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. She followed it with a nonfiction book about an African soldier, 2004's Scribbling the Cat. In 1994, she moved to Wyoming and this month she published her first book set in the state, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, a moving, poetic portrait of a charismatic Evanston, Wyo. man who died in February 2006 when he fell off the oil rig where he was working. I recently spoke to Fuller over the phone, and in this part of the interview, we discuss how she came to know the Bryant family and how the loss of her own siblings inspired her to pursue this story.
NW: Did you find any similarities between Colton's youth in Wyoming and your own in Africa?
AF: Oh yes. Horses and guns and the toughness of it, how tough you're expected to be from a very young age. Our fathers are practically the same man. Our mothers feel pretty similar too. I don't think Kaylee takes a lot of nonsense from her kids. She's very supportive but she's not a hand-holder. The most dreadful, chilling similarity is that in Wyoming, a lot of people die young, which is similar to the way I grew up.
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New West Book Review
Margot Kahn’s “Horses That Buck”
Horses That Buck: the Story of Champion Bronc Rider Bill Smith
By Margot Kahn
University of Oklahoma Press
194 pages, $24.95
I grew up going to the National Western Stock Show in Denver and Cheyenne's Frontier Days, but I never knew much about the rodeo cowboys that I saw—where they came from, what they did when they weren't riding broncos or bulls at these big showcases. Margot Kahn's Horses That Buck fills in the gaps for me through the life story of one cowboy, Bill Smith, who grew up in Bearcreek, Montana in 1941, moved to Cody, Wyoming as a teenager, and after many years of failure, broken bones, and living out of his car, rose to become a three-time World Champion Saddle Bronc rider.
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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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LET'S GET OUR WORDS STRAIGHT
Wilderness is Multiple Use
Have you ever heard somebody say they prefer "multiple use" over Wilderness? I have what seems like a thousand times, and every time I hear it, I say to myself, wrong!
So, it seems like a good time to say it out loud because the words, "multiple use" have been lost in the Wilderness.
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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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