My Page: Jenny Shank

<< Newer articles <<    Author Home     >> Older articles >>

Books of the West

Writing the Great American Novel seemed out of the question. So instead I set out to write the Decent Denver Novel. Why Denver, you ask? Why not Denver, I say. New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, even Santa Fe, Missoula, and Las Vegas have scores of writers telling their stories. There are plenty of authors in Denver writing literary novels, but many of them choose to set their work elsewhere. Why shouldn’t Denver be the star?

I grew up in Denver, and I’ve always loved my hometown unreasonably, so I wanted to honor it by telling a big, sweeping story about its inhabitants. Okay, I’m not the first to write a Denver novel. If you search the Library of Congress catalog for “Denver fiction,” you’ll find dozens of romances, science fiction novels, and mysteries set in Denver by such writers as Sarah Andrews, Robert Greer, Margaret Coel, Suzanne Proulx, Manuel Ramos, and Michael Stone.

Jenny Shank will discuss The Ringer at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on April 8 (7:30 p.m.) and at the Boulder Book Store on April 27 (7:30 p.m.).

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

The beginnings of a spring thaw must have mobilized the region’s writers, because most of what I have to report today has to do with regional book tours:

• Denver author Cara Lopez Lee will visit Fact & Fiction in Missoula at 7 p.m. tonight to discuss her memoir They Only Eat Their Husbands: A Memoir of Alaskan Love, World Travel, and the Power of Running Away (Ghost Road Press, $19.95). The publisher describes the book in this way:

“At twenty-six, after a lover threatens to kill her, Cara runs away to Alaska. In the Last Frontier she lands in a love triangle with two alcoholics: Sean the martial artist and Chance the paraglider pilot. Nine years later, sick of love, she runs again, to backpack around the world alone. They Only Eat Their Husbands is a memoir of her yearlong trek, against a backdrop of reflections on her life and loves in Alaska.”

Also in the Roundup: Book tours for Tim Sullivan and Ruth McLaughlin, Ted Conover wins the Evil Companions Literary Award, and I’ll talk to Chérie Newman on this week’s The Write Question on Montana Public Radio.

New West Book Review

Cold Wind
by C.J. Box
Putnam, 400 pages, $25.95

Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett’s long-simmering resentment against his intolerable mother-in-law, the notorious gold digger Missy Vankueren Longbrake Alden, comes to a boil in Cold Wind, the eleventh novel in C.J. Box‘s popular mystery series. Pickett is too much of a chivalrous, white-hat-wearing cowboy type to ever retaliate against his mother-in-law for her years of belittlement—but in Cold Wind, he is seriously tempted to. As Cold Wind opens, Missy’s fifth husband turns up murdered in a spectacular fashion: shot and hanging from one of the 250-foot turbines on his wind farm. When police discover the murder weapon in Missy’s car and she is arrested for the crime, Pickett is inclined to stay out of the case.

Box’s Joe Pickett novels often open with a description of a dead game animal, illegally poached, that Pickett must trace to a culprit and beyond that to further misdeeds. Cold Wind‘s introduction of a human body instead at the beginning sets the tone for the plot, which won’t involve much game warden action from Pickett. 

Western Book Roundup

Filmmakers Alex and Andrew Smith (the sons of Montana writer Annick Smith) are adapting James Welch’s signature novel, Winter in the Blood, into a movie, according to a recent article in the Missoulian (via Twitter.com/Submishmash). Jamie Kelly interviewed Welch’s wife Lois, who said that he had always dreamed of seeing Winter in the Blood become a movie. They hope to begin filming this summer in Montana, and will work with several actors with Montana ties, including Chaske Spencer and Lily Gladstone, according to the cast list on the film’s website.

• On March 19, a number of writers’ organizations from Colorado will host a “Writers Fest” at the Tattered Cover (LoDo), from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. (free). The event, sponsored by the Colorado Authors’ League and Denver Woman’s Press Club, will bring representatives from Women Writing the West, Mystery Writers of America, Rocky Mountain Children’s Writers, Romance Writers of America, Lighthouse Writers, ACC Writers Studio, Pikes Peak Writers, Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, and Author U, along with several literary agents together to talk to people about local writing groups. Speakers include Anita Mumm of Nelson Literary Agency, who will discuss ‘What Agents Look for in a Query Letter,” and Michael Henry of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, who will discuss “Writing the Image: Using Details to Make Your Writing Vivid and Memorable.”

Also in the Roundup: Denver to host 2012 Women of the World Poetry Slam, Marcia Hensley reads at Grand Valley Books in Grand Junction, and The Bookery Nook in Denver exhibits rare nude Madonna photos.

New West Book Review

Wrecker
by Summer Wood
Bloomsbury, 290 pages, $20

Taos-based writer Summer Wood‘s heartfelt new novel is about the unconventional upbringing of a boy named Wrecker, who is raised by a collection of well-intentioned semi-parents while he roams the redwood forests in the remote Lost Coast area of Northern California. Wrecker examines what happens when a task as complicated as raising a child is shared collectively, and delves into the doubts, frustrations, guilt, and joy that parents feel when they are confronted by the endless needs, misbehavior, and love that a child provides.

The book begins in San Francisco in 1965, when that city was “home to saints and sinners and seekers of every stripe.” One such seeker, Lisa Fay, leaves the strictures of her parents’ house to join the counterculture in San Francisco, has a fling with a sailor and is left with a son unknown by his father. She doesn’t name her son at first, “She called him HeyBoy or BigBoy or Beauty; she called him Honey and Sweetie and Champ.” When he’s a toddler she asks if he can “leave off wrecking things, for once,” and he replies, “I a wrecker,” so that’s what she names him finally—Wrecker. 

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.

<< Newer articles <<    Author Home     >> Older articles >>