Western Book Roundup

Westerners Among Whiting Winners

Last week the 2008 Whiting Writers Award for emerging writers was announced, and among the ten winners of $50,000 each were a couple of Western writers, Oregon native fiction writer Benjamin Percy (whom we featured here), and fiction writer Manuel Muñoz, who currently lives in Tucson and teaches at the University of Arizona. (There were also two California-based honorees, fiction writer Lysley Tenorio and poet Douglas Kearney.)

Oregon's Barry Lopez presented the awards, and Galleycat shared this video interview with him, shot at the event. Lopez said of the honorees, "The world's problems are not theirs to solve—they're the ones who will provide us the structure in which to think about how to address these things."

Also in the Roundup: The Center of the American West features immigration as the topic of this year's "Words to Stir the Soul," and the Wasatch Journal extends its story contest deadline. 

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New West Author Interview

An Interview with Erin Hogan

Erin Hogan's first book, The Spiral Jetta, is an entertaining account of the road trip she took through the American West in her Volkswagon Jetta, seeking the greatest hits of land art, including Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative in Utah and Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field in New Mexico. Hogan, the director of public affairs at the Art Institute of Chicago, recently answered some questions via email about why these artists were drawn to the West to create their works, how her perceptions changed over the course of the journey, and the fate of her Jetta.

New West: What first gave you the idea to embark on a land art road trip through the West? Did you plan to write a book about it from the beginning?

Erin Hogan: I had actually wanted to take a trip like this for a while. I mentioned it to an editor friend of mine who said, “Absolutely! You should do this, and then you should write a book about it!” I wasn’t sure I could make a book out of it, but I did think I could write an article or two about the experience. So while I was on the trip I took a lot of notes and pictures and recorded people at these various sites. When I sat down later to start writing, well, I guess I had more to say than I thought I would, and it just grew into the book.  

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Western Book Roundup

Helena, Moab, and Denver Host Literary Festivals

It's literary award and festival season across the region. Colorado Humanities and Colorado Center for the Book will announce the winners of the 17th annual Colorado Book Awards tonight at the Tivoli Turnhalle on the Auraria Campus in Denver (6-10 p.m.), and tickets are available for $75. As I mentioned before, several of the books we've reviewed over the past year are finalists for awards.

Meanwhile in Utah, Confluence: A Celebration of Reading and Writing in Moab will be held from October 14 through 19.

Farther north, the Helena Festival of the Book kicks off today. Authors scheduled to participate include Hipólito Rafael Chacón, whose book Brian D'Ambrosio recently reviewed for New West, Russell Rowland, a writing teacher at MSU-Billings and the editor of The Smoking Poet and Stone's Throw magazine (which is accepting submissions now), and Missoula essayist Susanna Sonnenberg.

Also in the Roundup: Boulder Book Store celebrates its 35th Anniversary, and even more festivals are to come in Missoula and Denver this month. 

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NEW WEST BOOK REVIEW

Stephen Trimble’s “Bargaining for Eden”

Bargaining for Eden
by Stephen Trimble
University of California Press
319 pages, $29.95

The contemporary story of the American West is being written in town halls across the region where neighbors stand at odds with one another over their vision for the prized landscapes that surround them.

Every area has its Eden besieged by developers, and each one inevitably becomes buried in controversy, and sometimes scandal.

For author Stephen Trimble, the Eden was northern Utah’s Snowbasin, and its controversies, complete with a billionaire developer, backroom Congressional deals and the Olympic scandals that would soon mar the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics, outdo most.

Stephen Trimble will present his book at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on October 4 (2 p.m.) and at the Utah Humanities Book Festival at the Salt Lake City Main Library on October 25. 

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