My Page: Jenny Shank
Western Book Roundup
Awards for Kim Barnes and Jana Richman and a Big Book Deal for Nick Arvin
I have a lot of good news to report this week about regional writers:
• Last week Pen Center USA announced that Moscow, Idaho’s Kim Barnes has won their award for Fiction for her novel A Country Called Home. (A complete list of winners is here.) Conveniently for those who may have missed this absorbing, lyrical novel, the paperback edition just hit bookstores last week. Last year I spoke to Barnes about her inspiration for the book and her difficulty with the term “regionalist,” among other topics.
Pen USA will also honor Elmore Leonard with a lifetime achievement award. According to the organization’s website, “In a career spanning 60 years, Leonard has published 43 novels and numerous short stories, creating a distinct literary style that has delighted readers and influenced a new generation of writers.”
• The winners of the Willa Awards for “for outstanding literature featuring women’s stories set in the West” were announced recently in Los Angeles. Jana Richman won in the contemporary fiction category for her novel The Last Cowgirl. (A complete list of winners is here.) I spoke with Richman last year about the Utah environmental issues that fuel her fiction.
• Harper Perennial will publish Denver writer and engineer Nick Arvin‘s new novel, The Reconstructionist, in the fall of 2010. According to Publisher’s Marketplace, the book follows “a forensic investigator who specializes in car crash sites, and who enters a haunted affair with the wife of his mentor in the profession,” and the sale was “a six-figure deal.” Fox has purchased the rights to make the story into a TV series. I spoke with Arvin in 2007 about his first novel, Articles of War, which was a One Book, One Denver selection.
Also in the Roundup: Casper College Lit Fest, a Hemingway celebration in Idaho, Tom Miller’s brush with Hemingway’s Nobel Prize Medallion, Kevin Canty reads in Missoula, a new Poet Laureate for Montana, a new children’s book review blog, and Maria’s Bookshop in Durango celebrates its 25th.
[more]New West Book Review
Laughing on the Way to Bankruptcy: Jess Walter’s “Financial Lives of the Poets”
The Financial Lives of the Poets
by Jess Walter
Harper, 290 pages, $25.99
In his hilarious and timely new novel, Spokane’s Jess Walter explores the maxim that there’s nothing more dangerous than an unemployed man, even though the primary person in danger may be the man himself, as is the case with protagonist Matt Prior. Several years before The Financial Lives of the Poets begins, Matt was a business reporter for a daily newspaper and he decided to pursue his ill-conceived dream: starting a website that reports business news in poetry form. When Poetfolio.com tanked before it was even launched, something that everyone but Matt could see coming, Matt scurried back to his newspaper job. But because he’d left, he lost his seniority at the paper, and was one of the first to be laid off when the paper downsized.
Matt couldn’t afford to lose his job: he’s got an enormous mortgage on a big house, a car payment, a garage full of supposedly collectible crap that his wife purchased in a compulsive shopping binge on eBay, and two non-Catholic young sons who attend Catholic school because the neighborhood public school reminds Matt of Sing-Sing. One evening when Matt has just received a letter from the mortgage company threatening foreclosure in a week, he is becoming increasingly suspicious of his wife’s Facebook conversations with her old high school boyfriend, and his unemployment benefits are about to run out, Matt heads to a 7-Eleven to buy some milk. “Two tattooed white kids in silk sweat suits step to the line behind me and I tense a little, double-pat my wallet,” Walter writes. As Matt walks outside, one of the guys offers him “a hit on a glass blunt.”
Jess Walter will discuss The Financial Lives of the Poets at Powells Books in Portland, Ore. on October 29, in Missoula at Fact and Fiction on November 5, and at the University Bookstore in Moscow, Idaho on December 3.
[more]Western Book Roundup
John Hickenlooper, Helen Thorpe, and Mark Spragg Discuss Books with Western Booksellers
The final day of the 2009 Mountains and Plains Independent Bookseller Association Trade Show in Denver, Saturday, September 26, featured a breakfast with presentations by four authors to benefit literacy organizations in the region. Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper introduced his wife, Helen Thorpe, the author of Just Like Us, describing how each of them were initially reluctant supporters of the other’s chosen career path.
Hickenlooper explained that Thorpe is “as much of an introvert as I am an extrovert,” and said she had consented to his run for mayor because “she would meet people through the process of the campaign that she would never otherwise meet,” and because there “was absolutely no way in God’s green earth that I would ever win.” During the campaign, when Hickenlooper went ahead in the polls, Thorpe looked over her copy of the Rocky Mountain News at him and said, “You never told me you were going to win.”
Hickenlooper described Just Like Us as “a book about four Hispanic girls whose parents are illegal immigrants,” adding, “as an elected official, that’s not the topic you’d choose for your wife to write.” But he became more enthusiastic as he realized she could “create a narrative that was as compelling as fiction, with characters that grow on you and unfold, just as in a novel. To witness this was one of the most rewarding processes, more rewarding even than getting elected mayor.”
[more]Western Book Roundup
Economic Woes Can’t Keep Western Booksellers Down
This weekend I attended the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association (MPIBA) annual trade show, which was held in Denver. For all the doom and gloom I’ve been hearing about the book business in recent years, I found the booksellers at this conference to be a fairly contented lot. Maybe they just seemed upbeat because they enjoy this event, or maybe they’ve been cheered by all the popular books publishers have released this fall, which have brought in renewed traffic to their stores.
Several people, including Charles Stillwagon of the Tattered Cover and Arsen Kashkashian of the Boulder Book Store, told me Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol and Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory have been selling briskly. Both of those stores hosted packed readings with Krakauer this month, and Stillwagon said he was surprised by how well the Dan Brown book is selling at the Tattered Cover, given that it’s the sort of book a reader could buy anywhere—and at a great discount online. But as I learned in a session entitled “Surviving Tough Times,” every independent book store has been hit hard by the recession, so maybe these booksellers seemed happy to me simply because they enjoy what they do for a living, and are thankful to still be doing it.
[more]Western Writers
Helen Thorpe on Immigration and Denver’s Many Layers
Journalist Helen Thorpe brings a unique perspective to her riveting first book, Just Like Us, which follows the lives of four Mexican girls as they graduate from high school and attend college in Denver. Two of them are legal U.S. residents, while the other two, whom Thorpe calls Marisela and Yadira, do not have papers. Thorpe’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Texas Monthly, and 5280. Thorpe’s husband is Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, and this allows Thorpe to portray the city’s many layers, and brings an additional dimension to the story when an illegal immigrant, Raul Gómez García, murders a Denver police officer, and it turns out that Gómez García was employed in a restaurant owned by Hickenlooper. I interviewed Thorpe via email about how she chose and wrote this story, how she convinced the four girls to open up to her, and her trip to a Mexican nightclub.
New West: You’ve said that you were interested in the topic of immigration in part because you grew up in the U.S. as an Irish citizen with a green card. Was there also a more recent event that prompted you to begin work on this book, or did it grow out of topics that had always intrigued you?
Helen Thorpe: Yes there was an additional prompt. It was that I was curious about how Denver was changing, and I started looking at the demographic shifts in the city over recent decades. That actually led me to think about writing about immigration, because the numbers of immigrants coming to the city was so huge.
[more]New West Book Review
War Hits Home in Phil Condon’s “Nine Ten Again”
Nine Ten Again
by Phil Condon
Elixir Press, 186 pages, $17
Looking out the window each day at peaceful American streets, it’s difficult for many of us to tell that our country is at war. But the characters in Missoula writer Phil Condon’s sharply-written new story collection, Nine Ten Again, are all too aware of the far-away wars that the U.S. has participated in over the past few decades, which have affected them in ways both tangible and intangible. Yellow ribbons appear throughout the book not as symbols of hope but as symptoms of malignancy, signs of the wars that rob people of their lives, mental health, self-respect, and peace of mind.
Most of Condon’s characters work blue-collar jobs, and so they are not as insulated from war as are those with more money. They are veterans too scarred by their service to hold down a job, or people desperate enough for money to contemplate signing up for a hitch as contractors in the Middle East. As a character in the title story says, “She ain’t ever gonna be 9-10 again, boys.”
Phil Condon will read from his new book at Fact & Fiction in Missoula on Friday, September 25 (7 p.m.).
Western Book Roundup
It’s Book Season: The Helena Book Fest and Many More Events Across the Region
I’ve got a lot of odds and ends to mention today, many good excuses to get out of the house and enjoy some bookish activities across the region this week:
Montana
The Helena Festival of the Book kicks off tomorrow and runs through the weekend, September 24-26 at the Holter Museum of Art and the Montana Historical Society. Participants include Steven Rinella, Wendy Parciak, Samuel Ligon and Laurie Lamon.
A few weeks ago I shared my enthusiasm for Thomas Savage’s The Pass. O. Alan Weltzien, who teaches at Western Montana College of The University of Montana, wrote the forward for the new edition of the novel, and he’s going to be discussing Savage as part of the Helena Book Festival. His lecture, entitled, ”Not Always Happy Endings: Thomas and Elisabeth Savage,” will be held at the Montana Historical Society (Sept. 24, 6:30 p.m.). On September 25, Weltzien will participate in a Thomas Savage panel along with Sue Hart and Karl Olson (Montana Historical Society, 12 p.m.). If you can’t make it out to Helena, the three Savage buffs will reprise their panel at the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula in October.
Also in the Roundup: Events and news from Colorado, Idaho, and Utah.
[more]Western Writers
An Interview with Janet Skeslien Charles
Janet Skeslien Charles grew up in Shelby, Montana and studied English, French, and Russian at the University of Montana, where she had a part time job translating letters from Montana men to their prospective Russian brides. After graduation, she moved to Odessa, Ukraine as a Soros Fellow, where she taught English for two years and began to research the mail-order bride industry, which became the topic of her winning debut novel, Moonlight in Odessa. The book follows Daria, a smart, ambitious Odessan woman whose English language skills earn her a coveted office job. She moonlights as a translator for a matchmaking service, and then attempts to make an international love match of her own. Since 1999, Skeslien Charles has worked and lived in Paris, where she has taught writing classes at Shakespeare & Company. She will discuss and sign Moonlight in Odessa at Hastings in Great Falls on Sunday, September 20 (2-4 p.m.) and on the University of Montana campus in Missoula on Wednesday, September 23 from 12-1:30 p.m. (Tickets are available at Fact & Fiction.)
New West: One of the distinctive aspects of Moonlight in Odessa is a contrast between the book’s lighthearted subject matter and the darker themes it addresses throughout—it’s the story of Daria, a pretty, plucky young woman who wants to succeed in work and love, and the tone is often comic, but then she has to deal with things like anti-Semitism, murderous gangsters, poverty, and the deprivations that come with living in Odessa. How did you balance these contrasting aspects of the book? Did you know when you started writing it what tone you wanted to strike?
Janet Skeslien Charles: When I lived in Odessa, Ukraine, I was struck by the way Odessans used humor as a way of dealing with painful situations. When a coworker got an abortion, it was gossiped about and the other women joked, “She’s doing her part to keep the population down.” I thought they were barbarians. It was only much later that I realized that most of the women sitting at the table had had an abortion. It was the only option available to them in Soviet times. They joked about it to cover up their own sadness, and it was a form of bravado. When I set the book in Odessa, the humor capital of the former Soviet Union, I knew my characters had to have the same tough reactions. It was important to show the daily difficulties that people there encountered.
[more]Western Book Roundup
Wyoming Book Festival and Fall Book Season Kicks Off with Krakauer Reading
After a two-year hiatus, the Wyoming Book Festival will return to Cheyenne on September 19, with a streamlined list of presenters. The festival hosted 70 authors during its first year, 2007, but this year it’s focusing on eight writers: Margaret Coel, Tina Forkner, Gene Gagliano, Craig Johnson, Zak Pullen, Cindy Reynders, Peg Sundberg ("Cowgirl Peg"), and Cat Urbigkit. Readings, book signings, and discussions will take place at Lions Park in Cheyenne from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Tina Lackey of Wyoming State Library told the Wyoming Arts Blog: “Festival goers told us the past festival was too spread out, which made it difficult to attend all the events. This time we made it much more convenient for them.” The Wyoming Book Festival Blog features profiles of all the participants.
Randy Dotinga recently wrote in the Christian Science Monitor that this year’s fall season in books is “chock-full of star authors, a bounty that could pull the publishing industry out of its doldrums or leave few winners and many losers…Add other complicating factors, such as the rise of books in electronic form and the desperate struggle of some booksellers, and the fall looks to be one humdinger of a season for publishers, stores, and authors, not to mention ordinary readers.”
But when he spoke to Arsen Kashkashian, the book buyer for the Boulder Book Store, Kashkashian demonstrated “perhaps the most calm of anyone in the industry,” saying the fall book season has “a little more sense of urgency to it,” and that the book store has “adapted to what the economy is.” Kaskashian offered some extra commentary in his Twitter feed: “I just seem calm, because anything the book industry can throw my way doesn’t compare to the chaos of having a baby in the house.”
Also in the Roundup: Jon Krakauer’s Boulder appearance, “The Dude” is in talks to play Rooster Cogburn, and a couple saves Libby’s Cabinet Books and Music.
[more]New West Book Review
Growing Up Illegal in Denver: Helen Thorpe’s “Just Like Us”
Just Like Us: The True Story of Four Mexican Girls Coming of Age in America
by Helen Thorpe
Scribner, 387 pages, $27.99
Some readers will pick up Helen Thorpe‘s Just Like Us because it’s written by the wife of Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper. But by the time they finish this moving, intelligent, and nuanced inquiry into the situation of illegal immigrants in contemporary America, they may begin to think of Hickenlooper as the husband of the writer Helen Thorpe. Thorpe begins by plunging into the preparations for prom night of four engaging west Denver girls in April of 2004.
Marisela is flamboyant, driven, “dramatic,” and wears “twice as much makeup as anybody else in her circle.” Yadira is strong and reserved and “never gave away anything important with her facial expressions.” Sensitive Clara usually dresses like a tomboy, and Elissa is a star athlete. They are all eighteen, all top students at their Denver public high school, and each of their families immigrated from Mexico.
While Clara has a green card and Elissa was born in the U.S., Marisela and Yadira remain illegal immigrants, born in Mexico but raised in the United States, with American ambitions and the skills to realize them, but with the host of insurmountable obstacles that living in this country without citizenship cause. Simple privileges that their peers enjoy, such as getting a driver’s license, boarding an airplane, or qualifying for in-state tuition, are out of their reach. When legislation that would allow illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition in Colorado fails to pass, the girls manage to cobble together scholarships or funds from benefactors to go to college, and three of them decide to attend the University of Denver, while the fourth, Elissa, heads to Regis College in Denver.
Helen Thorpe will discuss her book at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on September 22 at 7:30 p.m.
