Western Book Roundup

Book Festivals of the West 2011

Each year readers and writers gather to celebrate the written word at book festivals, fairs, and writing conferences throughout the West. Although there are a few spring festivals, everything really begins to pick up in June, and the schedule remains busy through November.

The offerings vary from those that concentrate on helping writers improve their craft, such as the Lighthouse Writers Workshop’s retreat in Grand Lake, Colo. (July 10th-15th), to those that introduce writers to readers through panels, readings, and book signings, such as the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula (October 5th-7th). Some, such as the Aspen Summer Words Festival (June 19th-24th), combine workshops and readings. The workshops charge fees, but plenty of the festivals are free to attend, including the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula and the Equality State Book Fair in Casper. Most workshops are already accepting applications for this year.

I’ve updated the Book Festivals of the West map with this year’s information when it was available. Please let me know if there are any more events to add or update—I’ll even throw this open for events in California and Texas. New West will run reports from the festivals again this year—we already have correspondents lined up for the Jackson Hole Writers Conference, Aspen Summer Words, and the Montana Festival of the Book, and are looking for more contributors.

Western Book Conferences & Festivals

Missoula Teemed with Back-Slapping Writers and Enthusiastic Readers Last Weekend

Montana Festival of the Book
Where: Missoula, Montana
When: Annually, in October.  This year’s festival was held October 29 through 30.
What: Readings, panel discussions, parties, and a book fair focused on all genres of literature from Montana and the West.
Cost: Almost all events are free and open to the public.

Friday, October 29, 7:30 a.m. I’m speeding along I-90 from Butte to Missoula, hurrying to meet Benjamin Percy for an interview before we both plunge into all the activities the Humanities Montana Festival of the Book has to offer.  I race through the Blackfoot River corridor, my Hyundai hugging the dark ribbon of interstate.  Roadkill carcasses line the shoulder—half a mule deer here, a smear of skunk there.

I feel like I’m in a story by Ben Percy—or any one of the more than 100 other writers converging on Missoula.  Even on an ordinary day, the so-called “Paris of the Rockies” is teeming with literary hotshots—swing a roadkill by the tail and you’re bound to hit a writer.

This year marks the 11th annual Festival of the Book and offers sessions on everything from “Storytime with Curious George” to “Curiouser & Curiouser: Fun Montana Facts with Ednor Therriault.” In between, attendees can bounce between readings by Jim Lynch (Border Songs), Kevin Canty (Everything), Stan Lynde (To Kill a Copper King), and David Allen Cates (Freeman Walker).  Or they can listen to Ellen Baumler spin ghost stories, Hugh Ambrose describe the War in the Pacific, and Jack Horner tell “How to Build a Dinosaur.” Last year (my first festival), I was only able to stay for half a day; this year, I’m going for the whole enchilada.

New West Book Review

Missoula Writer’s New Novel Takes on “Everything”

Everything
by Kevin Canty
Nan A. Talese, 282 pages, $25.95

Kevin Canty’s accomplished novel Everything tackles life on its elemental level, forming an understated drama out of the ordinary events of a handful of lives: birth, death, sex, youth, aging, marriage, divorce, illness and real estate.  So the title isn’t lying.  Written in spare, concentrated prose and suffused with wry humor and frank observations, Everything follows a group of Montanans at a point when they’re battered by the regular everything that has happened in their lives and are searching for what to do next.

At the center of the mess, there’s RL, a divorced, fifty-something single parent who owns a store where tourists buy bait and tackle and can hire out a river guide, such as his employee Edgar, a new father with an art degree and a restless streak.  There’s June, a hospice worker who was married to RL’s childhood best friend until he died of a heart attack at 39, eleven years before Everything begins.  Now she’s thinking of selling her beloved home, whose value has increased dramatically.  There’s Betsy, RL’s college girlfriend who lives in a remote area with her family; RL agrees to let her stay at his place near Missoula while she receives chemotherapy treatments. 

Kevin Canty will appear at the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula on October 30 as a part of the “Shiver Runs Through It” Gala Reading at the Wilma Theatre (7:30 p.m., free), and at several of the panel discussions and readings throughout the weekend.

Growing a Garden City: An Excerpt

“I wanted to be happy. I wanted to be healthy. I wanted to be a good person.”

I was living in Seattle with my family—we had been living there since I started fifth grade—and I became a lost, terrible person. Just drugs and running away and bad people and hurting people and ruining my whole life. And one day my dad found me, bungee-corded me, took away my shoes, chains, knives, and drugs, threw me in the back of his Subaru, and drove us all night to Roundup, Montana, where his parents were living.
I detoxed there for a week, but I don’t remember being there. I had also shaved my head. So. [Laughs] If you want to know how crazy you go, you shave your head.

We were just going to pass through Missoula. My father wasn’t sure what he was going to do with me. He kept threatening to put me in a foster home where they were going to put me in some other drug program. I would have just run away.

Western Writers

An Interview with Benjamin Percy: Part 2

In the second half of New West’s interview with Benjamin Percy, whose debut novel, The Wilding, hits bookstores today, we discuss the characters in the novel, how Central Oregon is Percy’s muse, the many creative projects Percy is working on, and how Percy “could definitely beat [James Franco] in a cage match.”

New West: It seems like all the elements that you wove together in The Wilding are introduced to provide maximum tension in each chapter.  Karen is dissatisfied with her husband Justin, Paul has just had a heart attack, the convenience store employee is angry at them, Graham has asthma.  Is that the goal you had in constructing each chapter?

Benjamin Percy: I’m always trying to ratchet up the tension and raise the emotional and physical stakes in every chapter so that by the end, there is hopefully a sense of explosion.  A slow burn that moves toward an explosion.  I’m doing something similar in my short stories.  They’re not quiet stories—they’re all tamped down with gunpowder.  Only trouble is interesting in fiction, and I’ve got a whole lot of trouble going on in my pages.  It helps keep me interested, and hopefully the reader leaning forward as well. 

Literary Events

Book Festivals of the West

View 2010 Western Book Festivals & Conferences in a larger map
Each year readers and writers gather to celebrate the written word at book festivals, fairs, and writing conferences throughout the West. The offerings vary from those that concentrate on helping writers improve their craft, such as the Tin House workshop in Portland, to those that introduce writers to readers through panels, readings, and book signings, such as the Helena Festival of the Book.  The workshops charge a fee, but plenty of the festivals are free to attend, including the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula and the Equality State Book Fair in Casper. 

From Squalor to Hauler

From Trailer to Trails, New Life for Rescued Huskies

OLNEY – Jeff Ulsamer knelt next to Sunshine, a beautiful black husky with ice-blue eyes, and massaged her ears while reassuring the terrified animal. Attached to a dog sled for only her third time, Sunshine was the lone dog in a yard of more than 100 other canines that was silent.

Ulsamer rescued Sunshine and two other huskies from the Flathead County Animal Shelter only days before. He thought they could have a better life at his Olney home and business, Dog Sled Adventures, than they did in the shelter.

“They do okay with the other dogs; the people are what they have problems with,” Ulsamer said. “It’s going to take that dog a while to come out of her shell, if she ever does.”

Western Book Roundup

Montana Festival of the Book Brings Crime Fiction Superstars to Missoula

This year’s Montana Festival of the Book, which begins Thursday, has an incredible lineup scheduled.  The October 23 reading with humorist David Sedaris is sold out, but there’s so much else going on that nobody who missed out on tickets for that event should go home with an empty brain. 

On Thursday, October 22, four renowned crime novelists will participate in the panel discussion ”The Last Good Kiss: An Appreciation of James Crumley.” Michael Koepf will interview Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Laura Lippman and James Grady about “the work of Montana mystery writer James Crumley and its impact on the mystery genre and literature as a whole” (Wilma Theatre, 3 p.m.).

Many writers of some of the great books I’ve reviewed here over the past few years will offer readings, including Maile Meloy (with Dennis Lehane and Andrew Sean Greer on Thursday, October 22, Wilma Theater, 7:30 p.m.), Marianne Wiggins and Kevin Canty (with James Lee Burke, October 24, Wilma Theater, 7:30 p.m.), and Rick Bass (October 24, Holiday Inn, 11 a.m.). 

Bass and Wiggins will participate on a panel discussion called “Locating the Novel” that sounds fascinating, described in The Missoulian in this way: “Some novels are ‘high concept.’ Some authors start out with a setting, a room, a landscape. And sometimes the story begins with the sound of a voice, a character. How does the ‘initiating impulse’ affect the final product? And do some authors only hear voices while others always see visions?” (October 23, with Andrew Sean Greer, and Peter Orner, Holiday Inn, 2:30 p.m.)

The one presentation that makes me wish teleportation existed so that I could just zap myself up to Missoula is “‘The Wire,’ An Interview,” with the show’s creator David Simon, and George Pelecanos, one of the show’s co-producers and writers (Holiday Inn, October 24, 1 p.m.).

Also in the Roundup: A call for submissions to an anthology about living and working in the National Parks, Sun Valley’s Hemingway festival, a Boise man wins Esquire’s fiction contest, Denver novelist Carleen Brice shares her home with the Denver Post, and David Wroblewski kicks off his paperback tour.

Western Writers

An Interview with Maile Meloy

Malie Meloy grew up in Helena, currently lives in Los Angeles, and has become one of the most acclaimed young American fiction writers in recent years, with two novels (2003’s Liars and Saints and 2006’s A Family Daughter) and two short story collections (2002’s Half in Love and the new Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It) to her credit.  Granta listed her among the 21 ”Best Young American Novelists” in a 2007 feature, and she has won several awards including The Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from The Paris Review, a PEN/Malamud Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Meloy will appear in Missoula at this year’s Montana Festival of the Book on October 22 (Wilma Theater).  I recently interviewed Meloy via email about her new story collection, her writing process, and the difference in word choice between her and her brother, The Decemberists‘ Colin Meloy.

New West: Eight of the eleven stories in this collection are narrated by or written from the perspective of male characters.  Why did you decide to write mainly from the male perspective?

Maile Meloy: The stories were written over several years, so I didn’t realize how prevalent the male perspective was until I was putting the book together.  There was a while when I was first writing stories when I didn’t feel I could write a man’s voice, but now it feels almost more comfortable, maybe because it’s easier to keep myself out of it.