New West Book Review
Freak on Peak Speaks: Philip Connors’ ‘Fire Season’
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 Book Roundup
Anthony Doerr Extends Winning Streak and New Mexico Will Star as Wyoming in ‘Longmire’ TV Pilot
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.
New West Feature
How a New Mexico Find Revolutionized Archaeology
Although little visited, it was near this town in a valley of pine-covered volcanic buttes near the border of New Mexico and Colorado, that sensational discoveries were made in the last century. They proved ancient man lived and hunted here long before previously thought.
The existence of Folsom Man and the projectile points he used to down massive, now-extinct creatures was revealed here in 1926-27, after the bones were found in 1908. Thompson was opening the Folsom Museum on a Saturday to show me how it happened.
Until those years, the theory held by influential archeologists at the Smithsonian Institute was that native people had only been in North America for about 4,000 years, said Steve Holen, curator of archeology for the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
New West Book Review
Boy in the Wilderness: Summer Wood’s “Wrecker”
Wrecker
by Summer Wood
Bloomsbury, 290 pages, $20
Taos-based writer Summer Wood‘s heartfelt new novel is about the unconventional upbringing of a boy named Wrecker, who is raised by a collection of well-intentioned semi-parents while he roams the redwood forests in the remote Lost Coast area of Northern California. Wrecker examines what happens when a task as complicated as raising a child is shared collectively, and delves into the doubts, frustrations, guilt, and joy that parents feel when they are confronted by the endless needs, misbehavior, and love that a child provides.
The book begins in San Francisco in 1965, when that city was “home to saints and sinners and seekers of every stripe.” One such seeker, Lisa Fay, leaves the strictures of her parents’ house to join the counterculture in San Francisco, has a fling with a sailor and is left with a son unknown by his father. She doesn’t name her son at first, “She called him HeyBoy or BigBoy or Beauty; she called him Honey and Sweetie and Champ.” When he’s a toddler she asks if he can “leave off wrecking things, for once,” and he replies, “I a wrecker,” so that’s what she names him finally—Wrecker.
New West Poetry Book Review
Orlando White Explores Navajo Identity Through Language in Innovative “Bone Light”
Bone Light
by Orlando White
Red Hen Press, 64 pages, $15.95
When I heard the title of Orlando White‘s first book of poetry, Bone Light, and learned that White was a Navajo poet who had grown up on the Navajo Reservation near Tolikan, Arizona, I wanted to connect this intriguing juxtaposition of words in this title to the austere landscapes that I associate with Navajo country. I naively imagined something like a Georgia O’Keefe painting, maybe a ghostly skull of some buffalo hovering over a distant mesa.
What I found inside the pages of Bone Light, however, was a poetry that unsettled the sort of easy assumptions about the relationship between poetry and identity that my first musings on the title had inspired. White’s tightly focused poetry is devoid of the representations of landscape and the coherent sense of “rooted” identity they are often associated with in the poetry of the Southwest.
New West Feature
The New Future for Valles Caldera Depends on Action by a New Congress
“It’s Your Experiment” is the official slogan of northern New Mexico’s Valles Caldera National Preserve, a broad volcanic valley in the heart of the Jemez Mountains near Los Alamos.
The slogan doesn’t refer to a science experiment, but to the preserve itself and its unorthodox management scheme. Congress created the preserve in 2000 to be managed by the Valles Caldera Trust, a wholly-owned government corporation with the mandate to make the national preserve financially self-sustaining by 2015.
With that goal looking increasingly unlikely, a Sen. Jeff Bingaman-led effort to end the experiment failed in December when the lame duck Congress sidelined an omnibus public lands measure that included a bill that would have transferred management of Valles Caldera from the trust to the National Park Service. The NPS manages the adjacent Bandelier National Monument and oversees many of the nation’s other national preserves.
