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Western Book Roundup

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.

Denver Literary Event

Lighthouse Writers Workshop is an independent creative writing program that has sponsored writing classes and literary events in Denver since 1997.  Many accomplished Colorado writers teach at Lighthouse, including novelists Nick Arvin, Eli Gottlieb, and Laura Pritchett, and several writers who have taken classes at Lighthouse can boast of significant achievements as well, notably Gary Schanbacher, whose story collection Migration Patterns was a finalist for last year’s Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, and David Wroblewski, whose debut novel, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, was a critically-acclaimed national bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club pick.  For the past seven years, Lighthouse has hosted the weekend-long ”Inside the Writers Studio,” bringing one outstanding writer to Denver to read and discuss his or her writing process.  Past participants include Tobias Wolff and Francine Prose, and this year the Writers Studio will feature Lorrie Moore, whose smart, witty fiction has earned her ardent fans and many honors, including the Rea Award for the Short Story and the O. Henry Award.

Moore will participate in an on-stage interview with Eli Gottlieb at the L2 Arts & Culture Events Center in Denver on Saturday, October 24 (4 p.m., $10-$15) followed by drinks and appetizers (6 p.m., $55-$70). On October 25, Moore will present “A Non-Crafty Look at Craft: Breaking Into the Writer’s Craft” at the Tattered Cover (LoDo, 10 a.m.-12 p.m., $50-$65).

This fall Lorrie Moore followed up her best-selling story collection, 1998’s Birds of America, with her first novel in fifteen years, A Gate at the Stairs.  Set in the fictional Midwestern college town of Troy, A Gate at the Stairs follows farm-raised 20-year-old narrator Tassie Keltjin as she navigates college, a babysitting job for an unusual couple who adopt a biracial toddler, and a new, mysterious boyfriend.  Moore recently responded to some questions via email.

Western Book Roundup

Last night I read Danica Novgorodoff‘s graphic novel version of Benjamin Percy‘s prize-winning short story ”Refresh, Refresh” (First Second, 138 pages, $17.99)—it took a while before I could peel myself off of the couch after finishing it.  As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue, Percy’s story about what happens to the soldiers’ families left behind remains powerful and topical.  Percy grew up in Bend, Oregon, and much of his fiction takes place there.  Novgorodoff’s illustrations capture a small Oregon town set against the wilderness, where joining the military is one of the only viable employment options.

Novgorodoff based her graphic novel on the screenplay by James Ponsoldt, which extends the original story.  The graphic novel uses some of Percy’s original language from the story, which first appeared in The Paris Review in 2005 (and won that magazine’s annual prize for best story, as well as a slot in the Best American Short Stories), and was the title story of Percy’s 2007 short story collection published by Graywolf Press. 

Also in the Roundup: Moab Confluence literary festival and Billings’ High Plains Book Awards.

New West Book Review

Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel
by Jeannette Walls
Scribner, 288 pages, $25

In her author’s note, Jeannette Walls explains how she came to write this novel about her singular grandmother: “This book was originally meant to be about my mother’s childhood growing up on a cattle ranch in Arizona.  But as I talked to Mom about those years, she kept insisting that her mother was the one who had led the truly interesting life and that the book should be about Lily.” Walls’ mom was right: Lily Casey Smith is a one-of-a-kind horse-breaking, whiskey-drinking, poker-playing, moonshine-selling, ranch-running, airplane-flying, pistol-packing, school-teaching, indomitable pioneer. 

The Phoenix-born Walls previously wrote a bestselling memoir, 2005’s The Glass Castle, about her unconventional childhood.  Although Half Broke Horses records the actual events of Lily Casey Smith’s life, Walls writes it in the first-person and creates vivid scenes that she wasn’t present for, so as she puts it, “the only honest thing to do is call the book a novel.” Whatever you call it, it’s a fascinating book, packed with harrowing situations, colorful characters, and beautiful description of the southwest landscape that Lily knew intimately from her years ranching it.

Western Book Roundup

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.

New West Book Review

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.

Western Book Roundup

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.”

Western Book Roundup

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.

Western Writers

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.

New West Book Review

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.).

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