New West Poetry
Two Poems from Katie Phillips’ ‘Driving Montana, Alone’
New West closes out National Poetry Month with two poems by Katie Phillips, whose Driving Montana, Alone won the 2010 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. Phillips grew up in Maryland and Colorado and lived in Montana before moving to a suburb of Chicago. She has a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Iowa and feels fortunate that she can walk to work with her dog, Sasha. Her poems have been published in the Cider Press Review, the Raintown Review, the White Pelican Review, and elsewhere. Driving Montana, Alone is illustrated by several of Phillips’ photographs of Montana, and the title poem was recently featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.
Moab
I can see myself
growing lonely at the corner
of Uranium and Main.
Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)
Never Too Soon to Choose a Career, Son
“How about this program, dad? Personal Expression. Poetry, painting, sculpture, photography, creative writing, stuff like that. Looks pretty cool.”
“Yeah, all that sounds great. You’re a creative guy, you’d probably enjoy it. But don’t expect to ever make any money doing any of that. Being a cartoonist or a musician might attract the chicks at first, but when they find out you’re Tap City, they’ll run off with the first real estate agent who gives her a ride in his Jag.”
[more]Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)
Chopped: The Best Cooking Show Ever
Welcome to my latest TV obsession, Chopped. It’s like the Rachael Ray Show, if she were held captive in a Nazi concentration camp, and the menu was created by William Burroughs. The Food Network has somehow hit on the perfect combination of elements to create the most devilish, entertaining game show on TV.
[more]Western Writers
An Interview With Charles Wilkinson, Author of Siletz History ‘The People Are Dancing Again’
Charles Wilkinson has written several notable books on a wide range of issues facing the modern West. His latest book, The People Are Dancing Again: The History of the Siletz Tribe of Western Oregon (University of Washington Press, 576 pages, $35) is a fascinating, at times heart-wrenching, historical account of the tribe he worked to help restore in the seventies. The book traces the long history of the Siletz, from the days preceding contact with Euro-American settlers, through war, relocation, and eventual termination as a federally recognized tribe. It continues into the modern era with the tribe’s restoration and subsequent revival of traditional heritage, arts, and language. Widely regarded as one of the nation’s pre-eminent experts in tribal and natural resources law in the West, Wilkinson is Distinguished Professor and Moses Lasky Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School, and is the author of many books, including The Eagle Bird: Mapping a New West and Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations.
New West: This book obviously grew from a deep personal regard for the Siletz people, and for their remarkable survival amidst immense adversity. How did this project first come about?
Charles Wilkinson: I was an attorney at the Native American Rights Fund here in Boulder in the seventies, and had represented the Menominee tribe of Wisconsin in being restored. Congress had terminated tribes in the fifties, broken the treaties, sold off the land, and ended all federal services, with the idea that they’d just blend into the larger society. The policy was a colossal failure. When the Menominee were the first tribe to be restored, people from Siletz came out and said they wanted to achieve restoration, and I was assigned to the case.
Very soon after that, by coincidence I went to teach at the University of Oregon Law School and I was now within two hours of the reservation. That meant that I got to see a lot of the Siletz people. It was the time of the fish wars in the Northwest, when tribes had been awarded fifty percent of the salmon runs, so Indian issues were very sensitive and there was strong opposition from the fishing community to the bill. There were a lot of public meetings, at which the tribal members and I would go to explain that the bill didn’t affect fishing rights. There were a lot of late night meetings and I just got to know people really well.
Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)
The 1970s: Rock’s Best Decade Since the Sixties
The 1970s was simply the best decade for rock. It’s a subjective sentiment, partly borne of my being the right impressionable age at the right time, but you can’t argue with the ground-breaking and timeless music that was produced during that ten years that stretched between the birth of heavy metal on Black Sabbath’s debut album to the elegy for Bon Scott (the lead singer who died from alcohol poising which, in rock, is known as “natural causes”) on AC/DC’s scajillion-selling Back in Black
[more]New West Book Review
Craig Lancaster Confronts Domestic Pain in ‘The Summer Son’
Craig Lancaster never met a troubled family he didn’t like—or at least felt he couldn’t mend through dialogue and cathartic scenes of pop psychology in his novels. Conflict between father and son was at the core of his debut, the award-winning 600 Hours of Edward and it’s front and center in his sophomore novel.
In The Summer Son, Lancaster has sliced open another vein of domestic pain for a more ambitious book. If he’s not quite as successful here as he was with 600 Hours of Edward—a tightly-wound novel with an unforgettable narrator (the titular Edward who has Asperger’s)—then it’s not for lack of trying. The Summer Son is looser and baggier by comparison, but it also feels more intimate. The Billings author has put his heart into telling the story of an embittered relationship between narrator Mitch Quillen and his 71-year-old father, going deep into territory that feels both singularly personal for Lancaster and universally accessible for readers who will identify with what’s at stake here.
[more]Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)
Government Shutdown: Merry Xmas, Tea Party!
Everyone agrees that spending must be reduced, but President Obama and congressional Republicans seem unable to agree on how much to cut, and where the cuts are made. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s Demos are attempting to trim this rump roast of spending with a tiny keychain Swiss Army knife, while Speaker of the House John Bohner’s ruthless Republicans seem eager to kowtow to Tea Party extremists by savagely hacking away at social programs while leaving their beloved sacred cow of a military budget fat, dumb and happy.
[more]New West Film Feature
Rare Screening of ‘Red Skies of Montana’ Offers Classic Glimpse of Both Smokejumping and Missoula
During the making of “Red Skies of Montana,” various Hollywood stars were severely injured on a motorcycle, stung on the neck by a hornet, burned badly, missing eyebrows singed off unintentionally and visiting the local dentist to repair two busted front teeth.
It was an eventful filming in and around Missoula in the early ‘50s. And although, by today’s standards, the acting’s kind-of hokey, “Red Skies” remains an important testimony to the history and bravery of the men (and, now, a few women) who jump out of planes and helicopters to fight the West’s fires.
Smokejumping was about nine years old when the filming got under way and, to those involved in that world, it was a huge deal to have 20th Century Fox buy the rights to the story –- and bring in big-name actors Victor Mature (the original lead) and Richard Widmark (the man who replaced him after Mature’s motorcycle accident just outside of Missoula).
When it premiered in 1952, “people from New Hampshire probably didn’t know a smokejumper from a Martian alien,” said Stan Cohen, who authored a pictorial history of smokejumping and has recently added to what’s likely the world’s largest collection of “Red Skies” memorabilia.
[more]Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)
Does Booking Online Lead To Alcoholism?
After a long bout of serious online mano a mano, I finally got the flights booked. It only took two hours, three phone calls to Delta, and a half a bottle of wine. One of those gigantic bottles.
[more]Western Book Roundup
Whitefish Review Hosts a Ski Fundraiser and Boise’s Anthony Doerr is a Finalist For Big Story Prize
Boise fiction-writing powerhouse Anthony Doerr just won the $20,000 Story Prize for his recent collection Memory Wall, and now he’s made the shortlist of six finalists for an award with a very long name: The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. Why does it have such a long name? Because according to the press release, it’s “the world’s most valuable short story award” and the winner gets £30,000 so they can call it whatever they want. My handy pound-to-dollar converter tells me that’s $47,954--for one story! And you thought writing short stories was a career destined to result in penury. For chumps maybe, but not for A-Dog, which is the name I’ve just invented for Mr. Doerr. If he wins, he needs to get a necklace with a solid-gold £ symbol hanging from it. We’ll find out how Doerr’s story “The Deep” fared on April 8 when the winners are announced at the The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival.
Also in the Roundup: The Whitefish Review hosts a fundraiser at Turner Mountain, Montana-raised Kim Baker’s book about Afghanistan earns rave reviews, and Craig Lancaster’s 600 Hours of Edward is this year’s One Book Billings selection.
[more]
