Boulder News

Denver Literary Event

Lighthouse Writers Workshop is an independent creative writing program that has sponsored writing classes and literary events in Denver since 1997.  Many accomplished Colorado writers teach at Lighthouse, including novelists Nick Arvin, Eli Gottlieb, and Laura Pritchett, and several writers who have taken classes at Lighthouse can boast of significant achievements as well, notably Gary Schanbacher, whose story collection Migration Patterns was a finalist for last year’s Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, and David Wroblewski, whose debut novel, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, was a critically-acclaimed national bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club pick.  For the past seven years, Lighthouse has hosted the weekend-long ”Inside the Writers Studio,” bringing one outstanding writer to Denver to read and discuss his or her writing process.  Past participants include Tobias Wolff and Francine Prose, and this year the Writers Studio will feature Lorrie Moore, whose smart, witty fiction has earned her ardent fans and many honors, including the Rea Award for the Short Story and the O. Henry Award.

Moore will participate in an on-stage interview with Eli Gottlieb at the L2 Arts & Culture Events Center in Denver on Saturday, October 24 (4 p.m., $10-$15) followed by drinks and appetizers (6 p.m., $55-$70). On October 25, Moore will present “A Non-Crafty Look at Craft: Breaking Into the Writer’s Craft” at the Tattered Cover (LoDo, 10 a.m.-12 p.m., $50-$65).

This fall Lorrie Moore followed up her best-selling story collection, 1998’s Birds of America, with her first novel in fifteen years, A Gate at the Stairs.  Set in the fictional Midwestern college town of Troy, A Gate at the Stairs follows farm-raised 20-year-old narrator Tassie Keltjin as she navigates college, a babysitting job for an unusual couple who adopt a biracial toddler, and a new, mysterious boyfriend.  Moore recently responded to some questions via email.

SASKATCHEWAN FISHING LODGES

After visiting about a dozen fishing lodges in northern Saskatchewan, we’re starting to notice a lot of similarities, especially the fishing and environs, but we had no problem seeing how Foster Lake Lodge stands apart from the rest.

The lodge is located on Middle Foster Lake, which is just another amazingly pristine wilderness lake loaded with lake trout and northern pike, but the only lodge on this sprawling shield lake is like no other fishing camp or resort in the province.

Western Book Roundup

Last night I read Danica Novgorodoff‘s graphic novel version of Benjamin Percy‘s prize-winning short story ”Refresh, Refresh” (First Second, 138 pages, $17.99)—it took a while before I could peel myself off of the couch after finishing it.  As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue, Percy’s story about what happens to the soldiers’ families left behind remains powerful and topical.  Percy grew up in Bend, Oregon, and much of his fiction takes place there.  Novgorodoff’s illustrations capture a small Oregon town set against the wilderness, where joining the military is one of the only viable employment options.

Novgorodoff based her graphic novel on the screenplay by James Ponsoldt, which extends the original story.  The graphic novel uses some of Percy’s original language from the story, which first appeared in The Paris Review in 2005 (and won that magazine’s annual prize for best story, as well as a slot in the Best American Short Stories), and was the title story of Percy’s 2007 short story collection published by Graywolf Press. 

Also in the Roundup: Moab Confluence literary festival and Billings’ High Plains Book Awards.

New West Book Review

Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel
by Jeannette Walls
Scribner, 288 pages, $25

In her author’s note, Jeannette Walls explains how she came to write this novel about her singular grandmother: “This book was originally meant to be about my mother’s childhood growing up on a cattle ranch in Arizona.  But as I talked to Mom about those years, she kept insisting that her mother was the one who had led the truly interesting life and that the book should be about Lily.” Walls’ mom was right: Lily Casey Smith is a one-of-a-kind horse-breaking, whiskey-drinking, poker-playing, moonshine-selling, ranch-running, airplane-flying, pistol-packing, school-teaching, indomitable pioneer. 

The Phoenix-born Walls previously wrote a bestselling memoir, 2005’s The Glass Castle, about her unconventional childhood.  Although Half Broke Horses records the actual events of Lily Casey Smith’s life, Walls writes it in the first-person and creates vivid scenes that she wasn’t present for, so as she puts it, “the only honest thing to do is call the book a novel.” Whatever you call it, it’s a fascinating book, packed with harrowing situations, colorful characters, and beautiful description of the southwest landscape that Lily knew intimately from her years ranching it.

Western Writers

One Friday last April at a Denver restaurant, the attention of every woman at the table was riveted to Sara Megibow, a literary agent four months into a surrogate pregnancy.  She told of how she agreed to do it for close friends, a breast cancer survivor and her husband.  Her story resonated not because anyone present was in the market for a good surrogate.  But most there were always in the market for a good story.  At least two of the women weighed Megibow’s experience as potential material to write about.  One said it might make a good article for a woman’s magazine.  Another thought it might fit into one of her series of inspirational books.  This was a table of women with ink in their blood.

Its web site describes Literary Ladies Luncheon as “A loose association of women writers. Or an association of loose women writers...and editors and literary agents.” The group—started by writer and publicity consultant Bella Stander— meets monthly at a designated Denver-area eatery, and often about a dozen attend for chow and chat, but twice that many may dined together at more prolific times.  The emailed invitees number up to 45; some show up for every lunch, others appear most of the time, and a few drop in occasionally.

Stander and a small circle of friends started the lunches in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1996.  “I was bored and lonely,” she says.  “As a writer you sit home and work alone, so it’s good to get to know other writers.” Stander founded a Colorado branch less than a year after she moved to the state in 2005.  The southern chapter still flourishes.  “We want to take over the world,” she says.

LET'S GET OVER THE BIG PISTOL SYNDROME

General big game hunting seasons are opening soon, and legions of stealthy hunters will be silently stalking around grizzly country in pre-dawn darkness, but only after they’ve sprayed themselves with human scent blocker, “buck scent” or stale elk pee. As sure as the seasons will open, some of them will have a close encounter with a grizzly, often resulting in a dead bear.

Much has been written about this subject. Every wildlife expert out there has encouraged hunters to carry bear pepper spray instead of a big handgun for self-defense, but clearly, a lot of hunters ignore this advice, even though it’s all for their own safety and the future of hunting.

Western Book Roundup

I have a lot of good news to report this week about regional writers:

• Last week Pen Center USA announced that Moscow, Idaho’s Kim Barnes has won their award for Fiction for her novel A Country Called Home. (A complete list of winners is here.) Conveniently for those who may have missed this absorbing, lyrical novel, the paperback edition just hit bookstores last week.  Last year I spoke to Barnes about her inspiration for the book and her difficulty with the term “regionalist,” among other topics.

Pen USA will also honor Elmore Leonard with a lifetime achievement award.  According to the organization’s website, “In a career spanning 60 years, Leonard has published 43 novels and numerous short stories, creating a distinct literary style that has delighted readers and influenced a new generation of writers.”

• The winners of the Willa Awards for “for outstanding literature featuring women’s stories set in the West” were announced recently in Los Angeles.  Jana Richman won in the contemporary fiction category for her novel The Last Cowgirl.  (A complete list of winners is here.) I spoke with Richman last year about the Utah environmental issues that fuel her fiction.

• Harper Perennial will publish Denver writer and engineer Nick Arvin‘s new novel, The Reconstructionist, in the fall of 2010.  According to Publisher’s Marketplace, the book follows “a forensic investigator who specializes in car crash sites, and who enters a haunted affair with the wife of his mentor in the profession,” and the sale was “a six-figure deal.” Fox has purchased the rights to make the story into a TV series.  I spoke with Arvin in 2007 about his first novel, Articles of War, which was a One Book, One Denver selection.

Also in the Roundup: Casper College Lit Fest, a Hemingway celebration in Idaho, Tom Miller’s brush with Hemingway’s Nobel Prize Medallion, Kevin Canty reads in Missoula, a new Poet Laureate for Montana, a new children’s book review blog, and Maria’s Bookshop in Durango celebrates its 25th.

New West Book Review

The Financial Lives of the Poets
by Jess Walter
Harper, 290 pages, $25.99

In his hilarious and timely new novel, Spokane’s Jess Walter explores the maxim that there’s nothing more dangerous than an unemployed man, even though the primary person in danger may be the man himself, as is the case with protagonist Matt Prior.  Several years before The Financial Lives of the Poets begins, Matt was a business reporter for a daily newspaper and he decided to pursue his ill-conceived dream: starting a website that reports business news in poetry form.  When Poetfolio.com tanked before it was even launched, something that everyone but Matt could see coming, Matt scurried back to his newspaper job.  But because he’d left, he lost his seniority at the paper, and was one of the first to be laid off when the paper downsized.

Matt couldn’t afford to lose his job: he’s got an enormous mortgage on a big house, a car payment, a garage full of supposedly collectible crap that his wife purchased in a compulsive shopping binge on eBay, and two non-Catholic young sons who attend Catholic school because the neighborhood public school reminds Matt of Sing-Sing.  One evening when Matt has just received a letter from the mortgage company threatening foreclosure in a week, he is becoming increasingly suspicious of his wife’s Facebook conversations with her old high school boyfriend, and his unemployment benefits are about to run out, Matt heads to a 7-Eleven to buy some milk.  “Two tattooed white kids in silk sweat suits step to the line behind me and I tense a little, double-pat my wallet,” Walter writes.  As Matt walks outside, one of the guys offers him “a hit on a glass blunt.”

Jess Walter will discuss The Financial Lives of the Poets at Powells Books in Portland, Ore. on October 29, in Missoula at Fact and Fiction on November 5, and at the University Bookstore in Moscow, Idaho on December 3.

New West Book Review

Tree Spiker: From Earth First! to Lowbagging: My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action
by Mike Roselle with Josh Mahan
St. Martin’s Press
252 pages, $24.99

Mike Roselle is a co-founder of the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network, Earth First!, and the Ruckus Society.  Tree Spiker details his life as an environmental activist and outsider agitator.  In his acknowledgments, Roselle notes that this book doesn’t completely cover the movement or even his memories, but that we should think of it as “a series of campfire tales and late-night bar talk.” And that’s exactly how it reads: like sitting next to a great storyteller and hearing his fascinating experiences.

Anyone living in the West, or anyone even remotely interested in the environment or environmental groups, should read Tree Spiker.  When I looked at the gothic-like cover with spooky trees and horror writing yellow font, I wasn’t sure how much I would like it.  In college I read Edward Abbey’s books and found Hayduke’s slovenly sexism and tossing aluminum cans out car windows unattractive, and I figured Roselle would be more of the same.  But then I read he spent part of his childhood in Butler County, Kentucky, where a billboard with a picture of three hooded Klansmen burning a cross welcomed people to Klan country.  That intrigued me, but Roselle hooked me with:

“I heard a rumor that my father, Stewart Lee, was in town.  I hadn’t seen him since my step-grandfather chased him out of our house with a pistol he kept for that purpose.  The last time I saw him, he was running down South Eighth Street toward the bars on Magnolia Street.”

Mike Roselle will read from Tree Spiker at Back of Beyond Books in Moab on October 15th (7 p.m.), in Jackson at Valley Book Store on October 20 (5 p.m.), in Missoula at Fact & Fiction on Tuesday, October 27 (3 p.m.) and at a fundraiser at The Badlander (7 p.m.), and in Portland at Julia’s Cafe on October 30 (7 p.m.).

Q&A FOR DRIVERS

Last week, I vented about the incredibly dangerous rage a few motorists have for road cyclists. (You should check out the comment section.)

This week I’m trying to be more constructive and address some of the reasons I think might cause the anger, things many motorists might not understand about cycling and cyclists. Hopefully, this “motorist Q&A” helps explain why cyclists do the things they do and lessen concerns drivers have, which should make it easier for all of us to courteously and safely share the road.

I could, actually, give the same answer for all of these questions--"it’s the safest way to ride"--but I will try to be more helpful.