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Western Book Roundup

And now the moment we’ve all been waiting for: two weeks ago I asked New West readers to vote on what book I should review next.  I was delighted and relieved when several people voted.  The winner, with four votes, is Staking Her Claim: Women Homesteading the West by Marcia Meredith Hensley.  I’ll review it next Monday.  And since the voting was so tight, I plan to review the runner-up, How it Looks Going Back by Doris Knowles Pulis, in a few weeks as well. 

As for the other two books: they’ll go back on my guilt pile, and I’ll get to them as soon as I can.  Every time I open the cabinet where I keep my un-reviewed books, the books scream, “Pick me!  Pick me!” I’m okay with it, but it frightens the kids.

• Wyofile has an in-depth feature by Susan Gray Gose on Wyoming mystery and thriller novelist C.J. Box.  Gray Gose writes that Box “cranks out 1,000 words a day,” “publishes two books a year,” and that one of his novels could be adapted into a screenplay soon:

“The producers of About Schmidt (the 2002 New Line Cinema comedy) bought the rights to Blue Heaven. While many optioned books languish, this one seems to be moving forward. It’s received financing, and actors Jack Nicholson, Alec Baldwin and Joe Pesci have signed on.”

New West Book Review

Bone Fire
by Mark Spragg
Knopf, 304 pages, $25.95

Mark Spragg’s understated yet satisfying third novel, Bone Fire, takes several characters from his first two novels and binds them together in a story in which some of the people are struggling to find a way to leave the town of Ishawooa, Wyoming, while others are trying to return to it.  In Bone Fire, Einar Gilkyson and Crane Carlson, two characters from Spragg’s prior novels, have moved a bit farther down the inevitable conveyor belt that is life, declining in health while Griff, the young woman they both care about, flounders as she seeks direction.

In 2004’s An Unfinished Life, Griff Gilkyson was a nine-year-old girl, named after her dead father, who found refuge from her mother’s flighty ways at her crusty paternal grandfather Einar’s Wyoming ranch.  Griff’s mother, Jean, ended up marrying the town sheriff, Crane Carlson. 

Mark Spragg is currently on a book tour with Laura Bell, with stops in Boulder (Boulder Book Store, March 16, 7:30 p.m.), Bozeman (Country Bookshelf, April 20, 7 p.m.), Missoula (Fact & Fiction, April 21, 7 p.m.), and many more places in Montana, Utah, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and California.

Western book Roundup

It might not be spring yet, but it sure feels like it here in Colorado, where our piles of November snow have finally started to melt and some crocuses are peeking out of the ground.  With the change in season comes a bunch of regional book awards and event announcements:

• Stories on Stage, a Denver theater company that presents literature through performances by professional actors, will present The Stories of Your Life based on the work of Jim Sheeler on March 13 (5 & 8 p.m., Jones Theater, DCPA). Sheeler, a former reporter for the Rocky Mountain News who won a Pulitzer Prize for his series Final Salute (later published as a book of the same name), honed his skills as a journalist by writing obituaries.  He collected his favorites in the book Obit: Inspiring Stories of Ordinary People who Led Extraordinary Lives, which Peggy Lowe reviewed for New West.

• Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Great Falls resident Jamie Ford is the winner of the 2009 Montana Book Award. 

New West Book Review

Claiming Ground
by Laura Bell
Knopf, 239 pages, $24.95

In her remarkable memoir, Claiming Ground, Cody’s Laura Bell offers up exquisite snapshots from her life spent working as a sheepherder, ranch hand, forest ranger, and masseuse.  Bell’s adventure began when she was a minister’s daughter just out of college, back home in Kentucky, and couldn’t think of what to do with herself but to pursue her “childhood’s private world blown larger than life, with a horse, two dogs, a rifle, a wilderness.” In 1977, she came west with her sister, whose husband was a paleontologist working on a dig in Wyoming, and she never left.

Claiming Ground begins with an account of Bell’s early days spent herding sheep in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin, where she was one of the only women in this occupation.  At one point she and the sheep are restless in the heat, anxious to leave for the higher ground of their summer pasture.  The man who tends Bell’s camp tells her the road up to the pasture is “a son-of-a-gun” and it proves to be a difficult journey with her horse and sheep.  Bell writes, “We’d made it, though not without false starts and backtracks to find the single spot of grace that might let us through.”

Western Book Roundup

Every week, publishers and authors send me books in the hope that I’ll review them for New West.  I read pretty fast, but I can’t get to all of the deserving books, so some of them end up in my Book Cabinet of Guilt.  My daughter keeps her crayons in the same cabinet, so every time she wants to color and opens the cabinet’s door, little wafts of guilt escape.

I review a book a week for New West, and cover many more through this column and author interviews.  I try to write about books in advance of their authors’ regional appearances so people can go to the readings if they’re intrigued, and I try to discuss most books as closely as possible to their release dates so people can check them out while they’re still in book stores.  (Books are shuffled in and out of stores in just a few weeks, these days.) But some books, as intriguing as they are, take a while to make it to the top of my review pile.

I have one free slot in March for a book to review and a whole pile of interesting books languishing in my Book Cabinet of Guilt.  How can I choose?  That’s where you come in.  I’ll list four books below.  Between now and March 15, leave a comment on this post with your vote for which book I should review, and I’ll review the book that receives the most votes.  These books all look good to me, so I hope to review as many of them as I can eventually—but I can only cover one of them this month:

New West Book Review

From the Hilltop
by Toni Jensen
University of Nebraska Press, 180 pages, $19.95

In Toni Jensen’s first story collection, From the Hilltop, many of the characters are Native American, some sharing the author’s Métis background, living in places where they stick out, such as West Texas, where a Blackfoot father and his Blackfoot-Comanche son run a hotel that the locals dub the “Powwow Hotel,” or in Minnesota, where we meet an adopted Blackfoot teenage girl who longs to be crowned a Dairy Princess at the Minnesota State Fair.  She’s interested in statistics, and enumerates her situation frankly:

“I was almost a dairy princess, was runner-up in my county, which borders Canada.  The whole county has only 1,882 residents, 978 of them female, 143 who are between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, the proper dairy princess age range.  Of those 143, all are white, except me; I’m an Indian, Blackfoot, the only one in the county.” Of the six applicants, the narrator lost out to a girl her mother calls her “arch nemesis,” and she heads down to the fair to see her rival’s head sculpted in butter along with the other county dairy princesses.

Western Writers

Brian Hart grew up in McCall, Idaho and recently moved back to his hometown after spending over fifteen years away.  In December Hart published his first novel, Then Came the Evening, to wide critical acclaim.  The New Yorker called it a “quietly exceptional début novel” and noted that Hart is “an astute observer of the transitional Western landscape.” Hart worked as a janitor, carpenter, welder, commercial fisherman, and framer of elevator shafts before he earned his MFA from the University of Texas at Austin.  In 2006, Hart’s manuscript won the school’s first annual Keene Prize for Literature, an award of $90,000, “the world’s largest student literary prize,” according to UT.  I recently interviewed Hart via email about how his friends in McCall ended up “on the government fishing team,” how he saw grad school as a “vacation from the inevitable,” and how characters for his future novel came to him during long walks home from school when he was a boy.

New West: When did you leave Idaho?

Brian Hart: As soon as I finished high school and saved up some money.  I was seventeen.

NW: Where do you live now?

BH: Idaho once again. I spent the last four years in Texas and was ready to get back to some snow and free flowing rivers. I live in McCall, where I was born and raised. Here, at the moment, home foreclosure notices are taking up four full pages in the local paper. And it’s been going like this for a year or more. Most of my friends are on the government fishing team, as in collecting unemployment and fishing. It’s good, though, at least there’re fish because there isn’t any work.  Steelhead season is in full swing.  We’re having the best run this year, more fish than anyone can remember.

Western Book Roundup

Wyoming has the smallest population of any U.S. state, but it maintains a literary output that rivals most other places.  While it’s been a quiet year so far for writers in Colorado (population 4,939,456, according to 2008 Census Bureau projections), writers in Wyoming (population 532,668) have been publishing at a good clip over the past few weeks. 

Laramie’s Alyson Hagy kicked things off in early February with the publication of her fourth story collection, Ghosts of Wyoming.  Claiming Ground, a memoir by Cody’s Laura Bell, is due out March 9, and it comes with glowing blurbs from Rick Bass, Kent Haruf, William Kittredge, and Mark Spragg.  Haruf writes, “This is a book that compels you to the last sentence, both because of its sheer beauty and its profound meaning.” Spragg writes, “Laura Bell’s Claiming Ground is the finest memoir I’ve read.” I guess I’d better read it myself.

Knopf will publish Spragg’s third novel, Bone Fire, on March 11.  Spragg is also from Cody, (population 9309), which means that .0215% of Cody’s population will publish a book in March.  To put that in perspective, writers in New York City (population 8,363,710) would have to publish 179,820 books in March to keep up with Cody’s per capita output.  Even if you include self-published writers, I doubt New York’s scribes could produce that many volumes, especially given that about 172,000 books were published for the entire year in the United States in 2005, the most recent year for which UNESCO’s publishing statistics are available.

New West Book Review

Revenge of the Saguaro: Offbeat Travels Through America’s Southwest
by Tom Miller
Cinco Puntos Press, 228 pages, $14.95

My heart was hardened against the chimichanga early.  In my Denver public elementary school, the cafeteria ladies used to serve chimichangas for Cinco de Mayo and Día de Independencia on September 16.  (I wonder if the same individual is still in charge of holiday menu planning, as DPS officials recently caught flack for offering students “Southern Style” chicken and collard greens “in Honor Of M.L. King.") The chimichanga was meant to be festive, but it sat there like a lump on the tray, bathed in a thin, pinkish-beige sauce with chunks in it that so resembled vomit that the effect couldn’t possibly have been unintentional.

But with his essay collection Revenge of the Saguaro, Tom Miller, a passionate chimichanga advocate, has convinced me to overcome my prejudices against the fried treat.  Miller’s book, which was originally published as Jack Ruby’s Kitchen Sink a decade ago, still offers fresh insights about some touchstones of Southwestern culture: chimichangas, saguaro cacti, bola ties, black velvet paintings, “La Bamba,” and more.  About the only thing Miller left out is an investigation of those brightly painted howling coyote carvings that used to be ubiquitous.

Tom Miller will appear at the second annual Tuscon Festival of Books from March 13 through 14 on the University of Arizona campus.

Western Book Roundup

Wallace Stegner, as probably most of the people reading this know, was a novelist, nonfiction writer, and environmentalist who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for Angle of Repose.  His place in the literature of the American West is so secure that he’s often called “The Dean of Western Writers.” Stegner grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, Great Falls, Montana, and Saskatchewan.  He taught writing at several universities and founded the creative writing program at Stanford. 

In a New York Times column last year, Timothy Egan called Stegner an “uber-citizen of the West” and wrote, “All over the West, Stegner centers, Stegner prizes and Stegner scholars produce work that follows his life theme: an attempt to get Westerners to make peace with their surroundings.”

Last year the University of Utah celebrated the 100th anniversary of Wallace Stegner’s birth with a series of events culminating in a spring symposium.  But Westerners aren’t done celebrating Stegner yet, as several Stegner-related events are scheduled across the region over the next few weeks: