Jackson Hole News

Movie Q and A

If life is a highway, we’re in trouble--unless we start making highways safer for wildlife, wildlands and the planet. Simply put, America’s ever-expanding web of streets and freeways is a noxious force that threatens to "pave over the landscape.”

So says Division Street, a beautifully filmed and notable new documentary premiering Thursday, June 11, at the Roxy Theater in Missoula. The 7 p.m. showing will be followed by a panel discussion featuring filmmaker-producer Eric Bendick and officials from Transportation for America and American Wildlands.


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New West Book Review

The Signal
By Ron Carlson
Viking, 184 pages, $25.95

Ron Carlson's new The Signal is a taut and suspenseful novel written with beauty and precision, centered around a camping trip in Wyoming's Wind River Range. For ten years, Mack and his wife Vonnie have gone hiking in that area every September, but this year is starkly different. Since the last trip, Mack has been "running in low-rent behavior for almost a year, scrambling for money, crossing the line when it worked for him, drinking too much because it didn't matter and the company he kept drank."

In the face of his financial troubles, with his ranch in danger of foreclosure, Mack got involved with some meth runners. Vonnie left Mack when his behavior became unacceptable and probably divorced him, though he doesn't know that for certain, as he never opened the letters from her lawyer, "golden envelopes with return addresses pretty as wedding invitations." Mack recently finished a stint in jail for busting the windshield of Vonnie's new beau's fancy vehicle. Feeling sorry for Mack, Vonnie agreed to complete their annual camping trip one last time.

This backstory is delivered cleverly amid the present action of the six-day camping trip. The caustic barbs in the dialogue between Mack and Vonnie reveal their complicated past. ("Somebody's been to REI," the perpetually broke Mack comments when Vonnie brings out a new pair of binoculars.) Mystery drives the first part of the book, as Carlson metes out the details of Mack and Vonnie's past, while suspense powers the second part of the book, as new dangers face the couple. [more]

Western Book Roundup

Tipped off by the Wyoming Arts Blog about Wyoming novelist Craig Johnson's imminent book tour in France, I decided to investigate his Gallic appeal. On his blog for Penguin, Johnson reports that the French edition of The Cold Dish will be published by Éditions Gallmeister this month (he also recounts "one of the most embarrassing moments [his] life," when a beautiful French woman caught him looking at her twice). Gallmeister specializes in the literature of the American West, and is the French publisher of Rick Bass and Edward Abbey, among others.

Let's look at what the Éditions Gallmeister website has to say about the last Johnson book the company published in translation, Little Bird:

"Go West ! Cette fois c'est dans le Wyoming que nous vous emmenons de voyager en compagnie de Walt Longmire, shérif mélancolique du comté d'Absaroka."

This is great. So jaunty and breezy—I am not a real translator, but basically: "Go West! This time it's to Wyoming that we whisk you to travel in the company of Walt Longmire, the melancholic sheriff of Absaroka county."

The French word for county is comté, which suggests the sort of place presided over by a count. Also I like the way the state is called "le Wyoming."

Next I traveled over to the French side of the web through the portal of Google.fr to see what people were saying about Mr. Johnson—I found Yann Le Tumelin's blog, Moisson Noire ("Black Harvest"). He appears to be especially interested in noirish tales set in the great outdoors.
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Western Book Roundup

Vice President Dick Cheney will be doing more than hunting and fishing when he moves back to Wyoming from Washington—he recently told Sean Hannity that he is considering writing a book about his time in office. Cheney said, "My family has been bugging me about [writing a book]. I've got 40 years since I came to town to stay 12 months. I've got a lot of stories to tell. And a few scores to settle." (Via LA Times & Galleycat).

Perhaps Cheney's future tome will join the shortlist of Wyoming classic books. Perhaps not. Tom Nissley recently shared his opinions of the best Wyoming books for the blog Omnivoracious, for its "Books of the States" series. Nissley writes:

"Jack Schaefer, author of Shane and over a dozen more Westerns, was an Oberlin grad and an Eastern newspaperman who fell in love with the Old West but only moved out to New Mexico later in life (and, as far as I can tell, hadn't even set foot in Wyoming when he wrote Shane). Wyoming, as a literary state, seems to exist mostly as an idea in the head of writers from the East: the best-known classic Wyoming book, The Virginian, was written by a friend of Theodore Roosevelt who prepped at St. Paul's [edited per O'Connor's comment below] and had two Harvard degrees, while the best-known modern Wyoming book (or at least story), "Brokeback Mountain," is by a woman who lived in Vermont for decades and moved out to Wyoming a few years before her story first appeared."

In addition to the three works mentioned above, Nissley added Mark Spragg's Where Rivers Change Direction to his list of essential Wyoming books, and notes that "I was so happy to find a promising book by someone born and bred in the state."

Also in the Roundup: Colorado authors on NPR's Fresh Air, a good review for Kim Barnes in the New York Times, the Tattered Cover lays off some workers, and a tribute to Creede author and outdoorsman Greg Coln. [more]

Part 2: Oregon, Utah, Wyoming, and Other Western States

In part two of the NewWest.Net/Books Best Books of 2008 list, I’ll discuss my favorite books set in Oregon, Utah, Wyoming, and other Western states.

Oregon

One of my favorite books set in Oregon actually was published late last year, but I didn't get to mention it in last year's best books list. Benjamin Percy's short story collection Refresh, Refresh (Graywolf Press, 249 pages, $15) makes the landscape of central Oregon come alive, enhancing the mystery and brutality of the characters. The title story (which won the Plimpton Prize from the Paris Review and earned a spot in the Best American Short Stories 2006) conveys searing authenticity, brutal energy, and a pitch-perfect dramatization of the impact of the Iraq war on communities that are losing their parents to combat. This year, Percy won a $50,000 Whiting Award for his work. (Check out my interview with Percy from earlier this year.) [more]

On the eve of Tuesday's general election, it appears that a Libertarian may again be poised to play the spoiler's role in 2008.

No stranger to running for office, W. David Herbert, of Riverton, ran against Michael Enzi and Kathy Karpan in 1996, competing to fill the seat of retiring Senator Alan Simpson. That means Herbert is also no stranger to defeat.

This year, too, Herbert concedes that his chances of winning outright on November 4 are "not realistic at all." Herbert says his main reason for running is "to keep my party on the ballot." [more]

Sheridan -- The ancient Greeks had a word, καιρ?ς or kairos, which means an era of unique opportunity. It's an unspecified period of time ripe for taking advantage of changing circumstances.

Wyoming and the energy-rich West have an opportunity to at least acknowledge such an era: we live in a time where change occurs at an unprecedented speed.

Wyoming can either react to this acceleration or be dragged along by it, probably a little of both. But we ignore it at our peril. [more]

house race

Republican congressional candidate Cynthia Lummis, a devout Lutheran, said that when she was growing up in Cheyenne many of her closest friends were Mormons, and during her college years she twice considered converting, taking all the introductory lessons for membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Locked in a tight race with Jackson Hole Democrat Gary Trauner for Wyoming's sole US House seat, Lummis is hoping Wyoming's Mormon population -- constituting at least one in ten voters -- will put her over the top against a formidable opponent. [more]

Diary of a Mad Voter: Joan McCarter

Charles Pelkey and Reese Jenniges have an in-depth and informative look at what might just shape up to be a major upset in the West next month--Dick Cheney's old House seat might very well flip to a Democrat. I'm going to trust a Wyomingite on a Wyoming race before my own gut feelings anytime, but my observations from a trip there last week confirm for me much of what they report. [more]

house race

Barbara Cubin is winding down a seven-term run in Congress and retiring in January, after surviving a squeaker of an election in 2006 against Teton County Democrat Gary Trauner.

With the unpopular Cubin's departure, many expected Wyoming's at-large House seat to revert seamlessly to Republican hands. Ordinarily, the race is pretty much decided in the August Republican primary, an election to pick a GOP successor for a spot that hasn't been in Democratic hands for 30 years. Given the GOP's hold on the state, Wyoming's general election has been more coronation than an actual battle.

So why does it look like we have another close one on our hands? [more]