Western Book Roundup
Man Gives $20,000 to Help Golden’s Clear Creek Books
Lisa Knudsen, director of the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association recently wrote in the organization's newsletter about the fate of a couple of Colorado bookstores. Craig Johnson, the owner of Clear Creek Books in Golden, Colo. was having trouble keeping his business afloat. After some media attention about the store's pending closing, the folks in Golden rallied around the bookstore, and according to Knudsen, one anonymous donor wrote Johnson a check for $20,000. Johnson hopes to keep the bookstore running, but says he won't succeed unless people in Golden start shopping there instead of "stopping off at the Barnes & Noble after work in Denver or ordering from Amazon at 3 a.m."
Meanwhile, the owners of the Book Rack in Fort Collins will close their current shop on March 31 and move to a new location, opening in Old Town Fort Collins as Old Firehouse Books in April. (Via Shelf Awareness.)
The people at Unbridled Books say they have a Southwestern treasure on their hands in writer Rick Collignon. According to publisher Fred Ramey, "There's a great deal of cultural significance in what he's doing." Unbridled has published several of Collignon's books, and the latest, Madewell Brown, is due to hit shelves May 5. To spread the word, Collignon and Ramey have embarked on a pre-publication "The Author As Artifact Tour," with stops across the Southwest, including a visit to Denver and Boulder earlier this week. The goal is to introduce the author to booksellers and readers who may not have heard of him before. They will be at Moby Dickens in Taos today, and tomorrow they'll travel to Collected Works and Garcia Street Books in Santa Fe and Bookworks in Albuquerque.
Ramey has uploaded the first entry in his video diary of the tour here, and you can follow his travels with Collignon on Twitter @FredRamey. (By the way, I'm Twittering these days, too.) Watch for my review of Madewell Brown in May.
Also in the Roundup: The Tucson Books Festival, the passing of poet Bill Holm, ABA Indie Choice Book Award Nominees, and this year's John Burroughs Award winner for Best Published Nature Essay.
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Western Book Roundup
Saying Goodbye to the Rocky and McGuane and Stegner Honored
Last Friday the Rocky Mountain News printed its last edition. With the close of the paper, another great books section vanished forever. I sincerely hope that Patti Thorn, the Rocky's gracious, smart Books Editor finds a new home for her talents soon. I wrote book reviews for the Rocky for over eight years, and read the paper every morning since I was a kid. (I went out on a good note, with a review of the great T.C. Boyle's latest novel, The Women.) I feel like I lost a friend. The Denver Post picked up a handful of the Rocky's reporters, but the vast majority of its 200 newsroom employees are out of work, not to mention the many freelancers who wrote for the paper.
Reporter Nancy Mitchell wrote an inside scoop on the Rocky's demise for Salon this week, "The Death Throes of My Newspaper." This economy is really starting to suck. Thankfully, as Thorn wrote in one of her last Rocky columns, a good coping mechanism is to bury your nose in a book.
On a happier note, the Center for the American West honored Montana writer Thomas McGuane with its Wallace Stegner Award last week. Patricia Limerick, the Center's resident genius, interviewed McGuane about his life, and he proved a worthy raconteur, regaling the crowd with stories about the time he worked on a movie with Marlon Brando, "The Missouri Breaks." Brando was balking about starring in the film, so the movie's director convinced a "crooked plumber" to go to Brando's house and tell him his plumbing needed to be completely redone, a project so big he'd need to make a movie to finance it. McGuane worked on script edits at Brando's house, as Brando's yellow-eyed pet wolf sat under the writing desk, looking him over.
Also in the Roundup: More McGuane, why Cormac McCarthy agreed to Oprah's interview request, and the University of Utah celebrates Wallace Stegner's 100th birthday.
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Western Book Roundup
Love Amid the Book Stacks and Regional Writers Win Prizes
In time for Valentine's Day, I bring you a story of books and love: Shelf Awareness noted Caitlin Hamilton Summie's piece on the blog She Is Too Fond of Books, in which she writes about her wedding reception that was held at the LoDo Tattered Cover a few years ago. Hamilton Summie is the Marketing Director for Colorado-based publisher Unbridled Books, and she writes that she and her husband had a difficult time finding an affordable location in downtown Denver for their reception, until her friend, the events planner at the Tattered Cover, suggested she host it at the store. She writes:
"Everybody was charmed. It was different, there was plenty of space, the building is old, and people from out of town got a real taste of the city. Book fans browsed the shelves. We never bothered the staff or customers. I’m not certain, unless you saw my husband and I squeak through the main doors, or heard the faint sound of jazz, that anyone would have ever known we were all there."
University of Idaho professor Brandon Schrand won this year's Carter Prize for the Essay sponsored by Shenandoah.
Also in the Roundup: The winner of The Wasatch Journal's Quick-Draw Story Contest, Illiterate launches its website, and the Boulder Book Store hosts a slew of events.
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LONELY IS THE BRAVE NEW WEST
After 20 Years, ‘Zephyr’ Blows Out of Moab
They met at a poker game in an old brick house on the edge of Moab, Utah. Jim Stiles was a young volunteer at Arches National Park, a sometimes-artist shacking up in a desert trailer owned by the Park Service. The grizzled man across the table, wearing a furry state trooper’s hat, had done the same years before, and he nodded at Stiles choice of semi-employment.
“Good,” the man growled. “We need more radicals at the Park Service.”
Stiles tells the story driving through Moab behind the wheel of his Subaru Forester. As he talks, he imitates his mentor and friend, legendary desert crusader Edward Abbey, with a gruff voice and furrowed brow. Stiles had come West in search of this curmudgeonly conservationist. He looked for him first in remote Wolf Hole, Ariz., where, in a mischievous author’s note, Abbey once claimed to reside. Stiles found no Abbey, no wolf, not even a hole.
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News tidbit
Utah County Creates Roadmap for Growth, Saving Farmland
The Salt Lake Tribune's Brandon Loomis has a great story today about how Morgan County, Utah is poising itself for a quickly approaching population boom. The story highlights a Rocky Mountain community that -- unlike others already grappling with rampant growth -- has the space and time to really envision what kind of place it wants to be.
Here's the nut:
"Morgan is an up-and-coming mountain hub that soon will be the fastest-growing county in Utah, but its residents don't want their kids pushed out by million-dollar mortgages."
Saving farmland and building dense city centers are two ways they're going at that. Read Loomis' story here.
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Part 2: Oregon, Utah, Wyoming, and Other Western States
Best Books of 2008, Part Two
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.)
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New West Book Review
Mormons & Taxidermy: Alissa York’s “Effigy”
Effigy
By Alissa York
St. Martin's Press, 342 pages, $25.95
Effigy, Alissa York's fascinating, accomplished new novel set largely in Utah territory in 1867, transports the reader to Mormon ranch where the four wives of Erastus Hammer pursue their separate destinies within the strictures placed on them by their marriages and their society. York lives in Toronto, and Effigy was a finalist for last year's Giller Prize in Canada. It's easy to see why—Effigy is written in convincing, image-rich prose and features a singular cast of characters who interact in complex and surprising ways.
The first wife of Erastus Hammer, Ursula, is a formidable presence overseeing and disapproving of much that goes on at the ranch. She is the only wife who behaves outwardly as one might expect of a Mormon pioneer woman—spending her time cooking, cleaning, and raising children—yet she is far from a simple figure. Through lucid flashbacks, we learn that as a young woman in Nauvoo, Illinois, she developed a desperate crush on Joseph Smith, who founded the Mormon religion. Devastated by his death at the hands of a mob in 1844, she collected a lock of Smith's hair, which she keeps in a ring and occasionally allows her children to touch, with appropriate reverence.
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Western Book Roundup
Westerners Among Whiting Winners
Last week the 2008 Whiting Writers Award for emerging writers was announced, and among the ten winners of $50,000 each were a couple of Western writers, Oregon native fiction writer Benjamin Percy (whom we featured here), and fiction writer Manuel Muñoz, who currently lives in Tucson and teaches at the University of Arizona. (There were also two California-based honorees, fiction writer Lysley Tenorio and poet Douglas Kearney.)
Oregon's Barry Lopez presented the awards, and Galleycat shared this video interview with him, shot at the event. Lopez said of the honorees, "The world's problems are not theirs to solve—they're the ones who will provide us the structure in which to think about how to address these things."
Also in the Roundup: The Center of the American West features immigration as the topic of this year's "Words to Stir the Soul," and the Wasatch Journal extends its story contest deadline.
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New West Author Interview
An Interview with Erin Hogan
Erin Hogan's first book, The Spiral Jetta, is an entertaining account of the road trip she took through the American West in her Volkswagon Jetta, seeking the greatest hits of land art, including Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative in Utah and Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field in New Mexico. Hogan, the director of public affairs at the Art Institute of Chicago, recently answered some questions via email about why these artists were drawn to the West to create their works, how her perceptions changed over the course of the journey, and the fate of her Jetta.
New West: What first gave you the idea to embark on a land art road trip through the West? Did you plan to write a book about it from the beginning?
Erin Hogan: I had actually wanted to take a trip like this for a while. I mentioned it to an editor friend of mine who said, “Absolutely! You should do this, and then you should write a book about it!” I wasn’t sure I could make a book out of it, but I did think I could write an article or two about the experience. So while I was on the trip I took a lot of notes and pictures and recorded people at these various sites. When I sat down later to start writing, well, I guess I had more to say than I thought I would, and it just grew into the book.
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Western Book Roundup
Helena, Moab, and Denver Host Literary Festivals
It's literary award and festival season across the region. Colorado Humanities and Colorado Center for the Book will announce the winners of the 17th annual Colorado Book Awards tonight at the Tivoli Turnhalle on the Auraria Campus in Denver (6-10 p.m.), and tickets are available for $75. As I mentioned before, several of the books we've reviewed over the past year are finalists for awards.
Meanwhile in Utah, Confluence: A Celebration of Reading and Writing in Moab will be held from October 14 through 19.
Farther north, the Helena Festival of the Book kicks off today. Authors scheduled to participate include Hipólito Rafael Chacón, whose book Brian D'Ambrosio recently reviewed for New West, Russell Rowland, a writing teacher at MSU-Billings and the editor of The Smoking Poet and Stone's Throw magazine (which is accepting submissions now), and Missoula essayist Susanna Sonnenberg.
Also in the Roundup: Boulder Book Store celebrates its 35th Anniversary, and even more festivals are to come in Missoula and Denver this month.
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