Boise News

From the Panhandle

Devoted readers will recall a post a few months ago about an inordinate local interest in wolverines, sparked by a study of forest carnivores—many of them members of the Mustelid family—being made by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game. Last week, two IDFG biologists, Lacy Robinson and Michael Lucid, presented the findings from this study at the East Bonner County Library.

Members of the Friends of Scotchman Peaks Wilderness hosted the presentation. These individuals have a penchant for human-powered travel in their proposed wilderness, which, as it turns out, was included in the area IDFG wanted to study and was not accessible by snowmobile. Hence they were recruited to ski/snowshoe into a study site, and they enthusiastically assisted Robinson and Lucid—whom they thought of as “Mr. and Mrs. Mustelid,” in setting it up to capture the elusive carnivores on camera.

From the Panhandle

At the end of April, I flew from Spokane back East for a conference. My flight was delayed due to heavy rain where I connected in Minneapolis and high winds where I landed in New Jersey. And this was fortunate, since it was snowing so hard as I left Sandpoint that I could barely see to drive, and I arrived late at the airport. As the light came up for my early morning departure, it was evident that the snow was piling up in the fields and sticking even on the roadway.

It was 80 degrees in New York. I got off the subway at the wrong stop, and spent some time wandering around the north end of Manhattan as a result. I was in my shirtsleeves, and it was after 10 p.m.

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.

From the Panhandle

It’s almost Easter, bringing to mind spring, green grass, daffodils, bunnies….

But here in Sandpoint, the grass is white with frost, the temperature is well below freezing, and tiny white flakes are drifting down aimlessly from an icy gray sky.

What happened to spring this year? In the mountains, the snowpack continues to increase (although the ski area has closed), and in the garden, the tulip leaves have emerged from the ground, but the flowers refuse to bloom.

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.

Western Writers

Boise writer Alan Heathcock’s impressive debut short story collection Volt (Graywolf Press, 208 pages, $15) examines the gritty realities of life in a small town called Krafton, somewhere in rural America. The New York Times called Volt “galvanizing proof of [Heathcock’s] talent,” and the book, which is in its third printing, received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. I recently interviewed Heathcock via email about how movies influence his fiction, why he thinks ”Volt is basically an episode of Roy Rogers, just with the blood on-screen, and without the singing away of pain,” and why Boise should be declared New West’s new Literary Capital of America. (Are you listening, Cody, Wyo.?)

New West: Your stories made me think of movies. There are several references to movies in Volt, such as the moment in “Smoke” where Vernon imagines or hallucinates that he’s talking to Roy Rogers in the middle of moving a body, or “Fort Apache,” which begins in a movie theater and addresses the contrast between the dreams movies offer people and the realities of life. Even the structure of “Peacekeeper” reminded me of a technique sometimes used in film, the way it flashes back and forth in time and gradually reveals the mystery at its center. Are movies an influence on your writing?

Alan Heathcock: I have no hobbies.  I raise my kids, love my wife, read books, write, and watch movies.  I watch a lot of movies.  I’ve kept a movie log for the past 15 years and as of today I’ve watched 3,061 films during that time.  That’s not to say that I’m not equally influenced by books, or by life itself, but film is absolutely an influence.  Some of the most important literature of the past 100 years has been on celluloid.  I feel compelled to pay close attention.  In fact, whenever I see a scene in a film, or even a moment, I take out my notebook and try and write that scene, to translate cinema into words, taking it from the external sensory medium and into the empathetic medium that is fiction.  I find this exercise to be highly rewarding.  I once wrote out the entire film, Winter Light, by Ingmar Bergman.  It taught me a great deal—for example, I was surprised the entire film could be written out in only about fifty pages, which made me then worry less about the idea that a shorter work couldn’t be completely full and rewarding.  The film Following by Christopher Nolan, is directly responsible for the structural decisions I made when writing my story “Peacekeeper”.  I’ve studied dialog from There Will Be Blood and have taken images from Scorsese and The Coen Brothers, worked to discover how David Lynch builds tension through environment.  Sometimes I think it’s easier to learn from film because it’s not fiction, because I have to think my way in deciding how it could/would/should be written to its highest effect, how words operate to create theme music and lighting and subtle gestures of the finest actors.

Western Book Roundup

Boise fiction-writing powerhouse Anthony Doerr just won the $20,000 Story Prize for his recent collection Memory Wall, and now he’s made the shortlist of six finalists for an award with a very long name: The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. Why does it have such a long name? Because according to the press release, it’s “the world’s most valuable short story award” and the winner gets £30,000 so they can call it whatever they want. My handy pound-to-dollar converter tells me that’s $47,954--for one story! And you thought writing short stories was a career destined to result in penury. For chumps maybe, but not for A-Dog, which is the name I’ve just invented for Mr. Doerr. If he wins, he needs to get a necklace with a solid-gold £ symbol hanging from it. We’ll find out how Doerr’s story “The Deep” fared on April 8 when the winners are announced at the The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival.

Also in the Roundup: The Whitefish Review hosts a fundraiser at Turner Mountain, Montana-raised Kim Baker’s book about Afghanistan earns rave reviews, and Craig Lancaster’s 600 Hours of Edward is this year’s One Book Billings selection.

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.

New West Book Review

Boise writer Alan Heathcock‘s gripping debut short story collection Volt is an intricately crafted examination of a fictional small town called Krafton that could be located anywhere in rural America. If you happened to pass through Krafton, you’d be advised to lock your doors and keep on driving—although on the surface it seems like a sleepy town, Krafton is riven with crime, secrets, terrible accidents, and heartache. Several characters in the book are compelled to help hide a body and several become murderers. The violence is multi-generational—characters recur, and their experience of harrowing troubles in one story doesn’t absolve them from receiving additional misery in another.

Although each story is written in timeless, distilled language, there are subtle clues that peg these stories as occurring at different times between the 1940’s and the present. Many of the characters have returned to Krafton after serving in some twentieth or twenty-first century war, irrevocably changed, and are no longer content to live peacefully in their hometown. But often it’s not war, but something unexplainable that makes these people snap. In the title story, which concludes the collection, the mother of one such character explains: “You think some are just bad or evil or whatnot, but somewhere along the way they was someone’s baby, sucking the teat like anybody. Then something puts a volt in ‘em and they ain’t the same no more.”

Western Book Roundup

This year’s Montana Book Award winner is Ruth McLaughlin’s moving memoir, Bound Like Grass: A Memoir from the Western High Plains (University of Oklahoma Press). The prize committee praised it for its “acute observation,” honesty, and beautiful writing. The committee also named four honor books published in 2010:

Everything by Kevin Canty (Nan A. Talese)

Goodbye Wifes and Daughters by Susan Resnick (University of Nebraska Press)

The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking)

Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photographing the Northern Rocky Mountains by Dan Flores (University of Oklahoma Press)

The winners will be honored at the Montana Library Association conference in Billings on April 7. McLaughlin will do a victory lap at several bookstores in Montana: in Bozeman at the Country Bookshelf on March 29, in Hamilton at Chapter One Bookstore on March 30, and in Missoula at Fact and Fiction on March 31. All readings are at 7 p.m.

Also in the Roundup: Boise’s Alan Heathcock launches Volt, Benjamin Percy reads in Denver, and three Western bookstores are in the running for the Bookstore of the Year Award.