Boulder News

A New Take on Old West Lit

When we did the Western Literature Association survey of Most Important Authors, very few women made the list. Willa Cather got her fair share of votes. Mari Sandoz was the next favorite, followed by Leslie Silko and Mary Austin. After that came such names as Amy Tan, Sandra Cisneros, Pam Houston, Terry Tempest Williams and Ann Zwinger. With the exception of Cather, none had sufficient support to be called “important.”

For my list of significant Western women writers, I chose the four I find most unforgettable, four women I have spent many evenings with and who belong in the library of any well-read Westerner.

1. Mary Austin’s The Land of Little Rain

Mary Austin’s The Land of Little Rain (1903) will not tempt you to hoist the family bungalow onto a flatbed truck and move to the Mojave Basin; however, Austin can lead you to wonder why you live where you live. The Mojave hills, the colors, the seasons of the place “trick the sense of time, so that once inhabiting there you always mean to go away without quite realizing that you have not done it.” Austin treats individuals—the Basket Maker, the Pocket Hunter, the Mule Driver on the borax wagons—as the equals of the coyotes, the scrawny rabbits, the soaring hawks and cruising vultures.

Western Book Roundup

Helen Thorpe‘s Colorado Book Award-winning Just Like Us is out in paperback now, and it includes an update about the lives of her subjects, four young Mexican women who grew up in Denver, two with U.S. citizenship and two without. On May 12, Thorpe will speak at the Arvada Public Library, and on May 15 she will participate in the Dean’s Forum at St. John’s Cathedral in Denver. In October, Just Like Us will be the featured book for One Book One Town in Carbondale, Colo.

• Brady Udall‘s excellent novel The Lonely Polygamist is out in paperback now too. Udall will appear at the Jackson Hole Writers Conference, along with Cristina García, Gary Ferguson, and Stephanie Elizondo Griest from June 23-26. The conference is open for registration now. (Check back on New West in late June for David Abrams‘ report on the conference.)

Also in the Roundup: Robin Black is this year’s Lighthouse Fly-By Writer, the new Mountain West Poetry Series, lit champ Jennifer Egan to headline the Literary Sojourn in Steamboat Springs, and Women Writing the West conference tickets are on sale now.

New West Book Review

Kevin Desinger‘s debut novel, The Descent of Man (Unbridled Books, 272 pages, $24.95), jumps off to a brisk start when a forty-year-old man named Jim wakes up in the middle of the night and looks out his bedroom window to see two men attempting to steal his Camry. His wife Marla tells him to call the cops, but instead he heads outside to try to foil the theft. He observes them for a moment, then, as Desinger writes, “something in the Camry broke off with a loud snap, and one of the car thieves swore. At the same time something in me snapped too.” Jim, a mild-mannered man suddenly filled with rage, hops into the men’s truck, drives it down the road into a ditch, and beats it with a galvanized pipe. Jim can’t account for his own actions, and begins to craft a series of lies to cover up what he did from Marla and the police.

Kevin Desinger will discuss The Descent of Man in Portland at Powell’s on May 3 (7:30 p.m.), Woodstock Wine & Deli on May 7 (7:30 p.m.), and Broadway Books on May 10 (7:30 p.m.).

New West Poetry

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.

Western Book Roundup

Deanne Stillman‘s Mustang continues to find new audiences off the page. According to Hollywood Reporter, actress Wendie Malick will star as Velma Johnston in the movie “Wild Horse Annie,” in development for summer 2012 for the Hallmark Channel. Kimberly Nordyke writes:

“The movie is being adapted from a portion of Deanne Stillman’s epic book Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West. It centers on the late Velma Johnston, a leading animal rights activist who campaigned to protect America’s wild horses. Her quest culminated in the U.S. Congress’ passing the Wild Free Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971.”

Also in the Roundup: A new story by Thomas McGuane in The New Yorker, Boulder writer Florence Williams is a finalist for a prestigious award, the busy career of Boulder scholar Adam Bradley, and the Colorado Book Award finalists and Oregon Book Award winners are announced.

New West Book Review

Claudia Sternbach’s moving memoir Reading Lips: A Memoir of Kisses (Unbridled Books, 224 pages, $12.95) is composed of essays about the memorable kisses in her life. It’s a clever concept, but what makes this book so easy to love is its offbeat execution of this idea—you never quite know how the kiss will turn up in the stories. Will it be a comforting kiss, an ominous kiss, a romantic kiss, or a missed kiss?  Sternbach has written newspaper columns for many years, and her breezy prose has a natural, effortless quality that is surely the result of great care.

One of the strengths of Reading Lips is Sternbach’s ability to capture the evolution of her thoughts, emotions, and sensory perceptions at each age. The voice is recognizably the same, but in the early chapters the details convey the quirky viewpoints of a child’s perception, free of the rote language adults use to describe common objects and experiences, like this moment from a visit to her mother’s office: “She showed us her desk, stacked with papers and in and out boxes. And the machine she used to do all of the adding and subtracting. She showed us how it worked. I liked the sound it made. Noisier than a typewriter. A fatter noise.”

Western Book Roundup

Sometimes we journalists have to go into some pretty harrowing situations to investigate our stories. Take Ted Conover, who has become a train-hopping hobo, served a stint as a prison guard at Sing Sing, trekked with Mexican migrants, hung out with icky shallow Aspen people, and traversed some of the world’s most dangerous roads.

My assignment last Thursday took me to the Evil Companions Literary Award celebration at the Oxford Hotel in Denver, honoring Denver-raised Conover, and benefiting the Denver Public Library Friends Foundation. Like Conover, I wanted to embed myself in this unfamiliar world, try to fit in, and find out what I could learn. The ballroom was packed with a sold-out crowd of stylish, bookish people, and the open bar was serving a martini called the Sing Sing Sling. For research, I sampled several of them. I met a nice woman who told me that Ted Conover used to baby-sit for her children. I also met a pair of lovely geneticists from the University of Colorado who drank with me and geeked out over our mutual past participation in the Denver Museum of Nature and Science’s paleontology certification program. We all wished we had been able to drop everything and go on that mastodon dig in Snowmass. Sigh.

Also in the Roundup: Colorado connections to this year’s Pulitzer Prizes, and several observers question the truth of Three Cups of Tea by Bozeman’s Greg Mortenson.

New West Book Review

Philip Connors has spent eight seasons in a high, isolated outpost as a wilderness lookout in the Gila Wilderness of New Mexico, the “epicenter of American wildfire,” spotting fires for the U.S. Forest Service. How did he become one of the “freaks on the peaks,” and why does he love this job? Connors has plenty to say about these and other subjects in the entertaining and informative Fire Season: Field Notes From A Wilderness Lookout (Ecco, 256 pages, $24.99).

Connors mixes natural, personal, and literary history in this remarkable narrative, along with a touch of Ed Abbey-style ranting against America’s fat, out-of-shape people and the government’s bumbling ways when it comes to wilderness management, allowing cows to graze on public land, and agricultural subsidies. Although Connors spends most of his time in the wilderness alone, Fire Season keeps plenty of company, fitting comfortably and capably into the American nature writing tradition headed up by Thoreau, who went to the woods “to live deliberately,” and carried on by Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, which Connors calls “the one and only masterpiece ever written on the subject of American wildfire.”

Stops on Philip Connors’ book tour include visits to Bookworks in Albuquerque (April 26), Garcia Street Books in Santa Fe (April 29), Moby Dickens in Taos (April 30), Boulder Book Store (May 2, $8 tickets include a discount coupon and will benefit the Fourmile Canyon Fire Department), Tattered Cover (LoDo, May 3), Bookworm of Edwards in Edwards, Colo. (May 4) and Maria’s Bookshop of Durango, Colo. (May 5, 6:30 p.m.)

Western Writers

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.

Western Book Roundup

Boise’s Anthony Doerr continued his winning streak last weekend, collecting the The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award for his story “The Deep,” which came with a £30,000 prize. (Last month he won the $20,000 Story Prize for his collection Memory Wall). Doerr spoke with the Boise Weekly just before the win, and noted that the award ceremony was to be held in the Great Hall of Christ Church College at Oxford University, “where they film the great hall of Hogwarts.” It’s like I’ve been telling you these past months--literary Boise is en fuego.

• Craig Johnson reported in his newsletter that filming will begin this month on a television pilot based on his Walt Longmire mysteries. Johnson notes that the crew is filming in the “Las Vegas/Taos/Santa Fe area of New Mexico, since it was deemed that Wyoming’s weather was too unstable for shooting a series and had too much snow to appear to be spring.” The show, for Warner Horizon and A&E, will be called “Longmire.” Johnson explains if the pilot gets picked up, they will film a dozen episodes for the first season, “borrowing chunks of the novels, but following their own tales because of the amount of stories they need to tell and the time constraints in which to tell them.” (Via Wyoming Arts Blog.)

Also in the Roundup: Chris Abani speaks in Utah, Western readers snap up eBooks, and Philip Connors visits the Boulder Book Store.