Missoula News

New West Series

The single track road leading up to the pink-stucco one-story is turning to mud, and water trickles from the berm behind the home all the way down to the creek at the end of the neighborhood. Although the mountains adjacent to his house are still frozen under near-record snowpacks, it’s already predicted the rivers will flow higher than average this April and May. Spring is coming, and Tom knows that means he’s going to be very busy.

“March comes, so now I’ve got essentially two months to get stuff done in the house before I head out to work,” Tom says.

He works seasonally in the wilderness around Western Montana, doing inventory on entire swaths of land for companies interested in logging and other natural resources. It’s been his lifestyle for more than 20 years, leaving for months in the summer to come home to a frozen landscape and, sometimes, a near freezing family, to continue work on the Earthship.

Western Writers

Jenny Shank’s debut novel, The Ringer (The Permanent Press, 352 pages, $29), begins with a tragic mistake when a police officer shoots and kills a man on a no-knock warrant that’s been written for the wrong address. The shooting intimately affects the two families involved—the police officer’s and the slain man’s—but it also sparks an outcry from an entire community concerned with larger issues of justice, race, and class. The fictional setting for this novel is Denver, and the drama plays out against the backdrop of championship Little League baseball. Baseball fans should note that The Ringer’s publication coincides with the beginning of Major League spring training, but this book will appeal equally to baseball fans and to those who just want to read a great story that combines police drama with personal loss and a community’s quest for redemption.

Jenny Shank is an award-winning writer who grew up in Denver and currently lives in Boulder with her husband, daughter, and son. The Ringer, her first novel, was a semi-finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship and the Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel Award. I recently caught up with Jenny Shank to find out more about The Ringer’s real-life influences and to understand what makes this accomplished young writer tick. Shank will discuss The Ringer at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on April 8 (7:30 p.m.) and at the Boulder Book Store on April 27 (7:30 p.m.).

New West: Jenny, you’re not shy about admitting your upbringing in the Denver public school system. In The Ringer’s acknowledgments, you give a shout-out to your hometown, saying: “Denver, I love you.” How did your close ties to this city help you construct Denver as the setting for The Ringer?

Jenny Shank: There’s a chance that I would have still been a writer if I hadn’t gone through the Denver Public Schools, but I have no idea what I would be writing about. I attended school in Denver during the period of court-ordered desegregation for integration. Many white families left the district at that time, but mine stayed, so starting when I was six years old, I rode the bus thirty minutes across town to a school in west Denver that had a majority Mexican-American population. Later, the Mexican-American kids were bused to my neighborhood. Then in middle school I was bused to Five Points, Denver’s historically black neighborhood. That was in the early ‘90s, during the height of gang violence between the Crips and the Bloods in Denver, and my middle school was a recruiting ground for Crips. 

Western Book Roundup

The beginnings of a spring thaw must have mobilized the region’s writers, because most of what I have to report today has to do with regional book tours:

• Denver author Cara Lopez Lee will visit Fact & Fiction in Missoula at 7 p.m. tonight to discuss her memoir They Only Eat Their Husbands: A Memoir of Alaskan Love, World Travel, and the Power of Running Away (Ghost Road Press, $19.95). The publisher describes the book in this way:

“At twenty-six, after a lover threatens to kill her, Cara runs away to Alaska. In the Last Frontier she lands in a love triangle with two alcoholics: Sean the martial artist and Chance the paraglider pilot. Nine years later, sick of love, she runs again, to backpack around the world alone. They Only Eat Their Husbands is a memoir of her yearlong trek, against a backdrop of reflections on her life and loves in Alaska.”

Also in the Roundup: Book tours for Tim Sullivan and Ruth McLaughlin, Ted Conover wins the Evil Companions Literary Award, and I’ll talk to Chérie Newman on this week’s The Write Question on Montana Public Radio.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Picking eight winners out of a field of 16 will be a cakewalk compared to last week, when I had to utilize my entire collected knowledge of NCAA basketball to fill out my original brackets for the March Madness tournament. Actually, it didn’t take that long because my entire collected knowledge of NCAA basketball would fit into the dot over the letter “j” in the word “idjit,” with enough room left over to store everything I know about electricity and plumbing.

Snow Blog Column

Snowbowl officials claim that they wish to increase skiing and snowboarding opportunities for beginner and intermediate level skiers; however, as I’ve noted above, the Lolo National Forest Management Plan explicitly states there is no need to increase local ski-area capacity to meet demand. Regardless of which party is correct, the expansion would occur on our national forest lands.

The proposed 40-year Special Use Permit would allow Montana Snowbowl to construct permanent structures on our national forest lands, for their own economic benefit. At present, the ski resort pays an annual average of only $24,000 to the Lolo National Forest for the present use and administration of 1,138 acres of public lands [4-60].

It is claimed by Snowbowl representatives that the expansion will lead to increased economic incentives for the entire Missoula community. This is a fallacy. By Snowbowl’s own admission, the majority of visitors arrive from local communities. The EIS states that the resort’s expansion would result in a “transfer of income, not a creation of income”.

Western Book Roundup

Filmmakers Alex and Andrew Smith (the sons of Montana writer Annick Smith) are adapting James Welch’s signature novel, Winter in the Blood, into a movie, according to a recent article in the Missoulian (via Twitter.com/Submishmash). Jamie Kelly interviewed Welch’s wife Lois, who said that he had always dreamed of seeing Winter in the Blood become a movie. They hope to begin filming this summer in Montana, and will work with several actors with Montana ties, including Chaske Spencer and Lily Gladstone, according to the cast list on the film’s website.

• On March 19, a number of writers’ organizations from Colorado will host a “Writers Fest” at the Tattered Cover (LoDo), from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. (free). The event, sponsored by the Colorado Authors’ League and Denver Woman’s Press Club, will bring representatives from Women Writing the West, Mystery Writers of America, Rocky Mountain Children’s Writers, Romance Writers of America, Lighthouse Writers, ACC Writers Studio, Pikes Peak Writers, Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, and Author U, along with several literary agents together to talk to people about local writing groups. Speakers include Anita Mumm of Nelson Literary Agency, who will discuss ‘What Agents Look for in a Query Letter,” and Michael Henry of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, who will discuss “Writing the Image: Using Details to Make Your Writing Vivid and Memorable.”

Also in the Roundup: Denver to host 2012 Women of the World Poetry Slam, Marcia Hensley reads at Grand Valley Books in Grand Junction, and The Bookery Nook in Denver exhibits rare nude Madonna photos.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Thousands killed in Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Hundreds of bodies wash up on shore as water recedes. Hundreds more trapped in earthquake rubble and tsunami debris, entire cities destroyed, a nation in shock. Yeah, but HOW’S THE STOCK MARKET?

New West Series

It’s a warm weekday in the middle of January in the Sapphire Mountains south of Missoula, Montana. The ground is slushy and an inversion hangs just below the peaks of the Bitterroot Mountains across the valley from Tom Leonard’s home.

He’d like to be cross-country skiing, snowshoeing or hiking the hills that surround his home, which sits outside the town of Florence, but the warm weather doesn’t fool him. He’s spent enough winters up here to know that, even in June, it can drop below freezing around these peaks, and his stockpile of wood is looking a little thin.

There’s still a long way to go before the end of the winter. He chucks a log into its home under a canopy that extends from an exterior wall.

“That’ll get us through until at least March,” he says.

He packs up his chainsaw, houses his ax and eyes the solar panels on the hillside. It’s getting late in the season and the sun is changing position, but he decides he’ll change the angle on the 16 panels next week.

Western Book Roundup

Listen up: Western writers kicked butt last week.

First, Boise’s Anthony Doerr won The Story Prize for his collection Memory Wall. The Story Prize awards $20,000 annually to one writer of an outstanding collection of fiction in English published during the prior year.

Next, the finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction were announced, and the shortlist includes--straight out of Laramie--Brad Watson’s Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives.

Then, Denver novelist Carleen Brice traveled to Los Angeles Friday for the NAACP Image Awards, where Sins of the Mother, a Lifetime original movie based on Brice’s first novel Orange, Mint and Honey, was nominated for Outstanding Television Movie, Mini-Series or Dramatic Special. Did she win? You bet your Rocky Mountain oysters she did. (Visit her fabulous blog, White Readers Meet Black Authors, why don’t you?)

Meanwhile, The Weird Sisters by Denver’s Eleanor Brown and West of Here by Washington state novelist Jonathan Evison are hanging out together on the New York Times Best-Seller List for Hardcover Fiction. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Montana’s Jaime Ford has been on the paperback fiction list for forty weeks now.

See? It’s all about training at altitude.

Also in the Roundup: A reading to commemorate the six-month anniversary of the Fourmile Canyon fire in Boulder, and the Tuscon Festival of Books.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

“Well,” said my doctor, removing the blood pressure cuff. “You’ve got hypertension. Could lead to heart disease.” Then he uttered The Sentence, the one all males dread their entire lives, the one that we invariably ignore until it comes from a Doctor, someone with the exact combination of knowledge, authority and objectivity that leaves no doubt: “You need to make some changes in your lifestyle.”

I gulped. My depth of field suddenly grew shorter, just like in the movies. Somewhere a string section began playing ominous music in a minor key.