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Western Book Roundup

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.

Western Writers

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. 

Western Book Roundup

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.

New West Book Review

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.

Western Book Roundup

Has anyone else out there ever been on a hike gone awry that feels like something out of Cormac McCarthy‘s No Country for Old Men is about to happen?  Over the weekend my family and I decided to explore some nearby open space.  We pulled off on the side of a road in a rural area outside of Boulder and hiked up a yucca-and-prickly-pear-filled hill.  We discovered that the baby had pitched his baseball hat somewhere along the way.  We looked for it on the way down and couldn’t find it.  There was no trail, the vegetation was scratchy, and I was the only one wearing jeans, so I went back to search for the hat while my husband fed the kids snacks by the car. 

I didn’t find the hat, and on my way back down a man that sounded a few yards away yelled a string of expletives at someone else, startling me because I thought I was alone.  A man emerged from the underbrush and started walking down the road toward my family while I watched from the hill.  He didn’t look like the hiking sort—stocky and dressed in black urban clothes, dark-haired, with a whisker-stubbled, scarred-up face. 

I thought, where have I seen this before?  And I remembered the scene in No Country for Old Men where Anton Chigurh is about to dispatch a guy pulled over on the side of the road with a cattle bolt gun.  So I start to gesture at my husband to convey I don’t know what—a Cormac McCarthy villain is approaching?  What would the sign for that be?  I just sort of waved my hands and mouthed “NO.”

Chigurh approached my husband and I couldn’t hear what he said.  I hoped it wasn’t, “You know how this is going to turn out, don’t you?”

Also in the Roundup: Montana book events for Dennis Dunn and Janet Skeslien Charles.

New West Book Review

Sometimes We’re Always Real Same-Same
by Mattox Roesch
Unbridled Books, 317 pages, $15.95

Cesar, the seventeen-year-old narrator of Mattox Roesch‘s first novel, Sometimes We’re Always Real Same-Same, is badly in need of a change of scenery when the book opens.  Cesar has grown up in Los Angeles with his Eskimo mother and white father, and he and his older brother have joined Hispanic gangs.  “We were those chameleon kids who almost blended in but never quite did,” Cesar observes.  Cesar’s mother decides to leave his father and L.A. behind after his brother is sent to prison for murdering two 15-year-olds who were trying to leave his gang.  She moves with Cesar to the village she left twenty years earlier, Unalakleet, Alaska (the same village where Roesch currently lives with his family). 

Cesar is focused on earning enough money to return to L.A., but his cousin, the exuberant Go-boy, does everything he can to convince him to stay.  Through Cesar’s eyes, Roesch creates a richly detailed portrait of this town—from its plywood buildings, to its annual salmon counts, to a common malady known as “seal finger"—that is authentic and refreshingly unlike any typical depiction of Alaska.

Mattox Roesch will read from his novel in Portland, Oreg. at Annie Bloom’s books on Thursday, September 10 (7:30 p.m.), and he’ll appear at the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association tradeshow the following day. Roesch will read at Neptune Coffee in Seattle on September 17 (7 p.m.) and at Village Books in Bellingham, Wash. on September 18 (7 p.m.).

Western Photographers

Stephen Strom has been photographing the deserts of the American Southwest for thirty years, creating arresting images of forbidding, breathtaking landscapes containing geological formations and striking colors like nothing else on earth. Strom worked for over a decade as an astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, where he first began to “love the desert.” Strom’s photography has been featured in several books, including the recent Otero Mesa: Saving America’s Wildest Grassland and the new Earth Forms (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 96 pages, 43 photographs, $45), which collects his entrancing photographs of multi-colored mudhills in New Mexico, the red rock formations of Canyonlands National Park in Utah, and canyons, cliffs, and desert lands throughout California, Nevada, and Arizona. This fall, Strom will present Earth Forms at several galleries, including Tucson’s Etherton Gallery (book signing on October 17, 3-5 p.m.), the Tubac Center for the Arts in Tubac, AZ (book signing on October 28), and Santa Fe’s Verve Gallery of Photography, which will display Storm’s photos from November 13 through January of next year.  I recently interviewed Strom via email about his work process, his explorations of the desert, and how the desert at times becomes “a two-dimensional painting.”

New West: What first attracted you to the desert landscapes that you photograph?

Stephen Strom: The time I spent in Tucson from 1972-83 (as a staff astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory) transformed me into a confirmed desert rat. I learned to love the desert, and over time, began to see and feel the subtle rhythms – color, sculptural, floral – of what appears to most people to be desolate and lifeless. 

Western Book Roundup

The winners of this year’s Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Regional Book Awards were announced last week:

• Adult Fiction: Another Man’s Moccasins: A Walt Longmire Mystery by Craig Johnson (Penguin)

• Adult Nonfiction: American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon by Steven Rinella (Random House)

• The Arts: Colorado’s Wild Horses by Claude Steelman (Wildshots, Inc.)

• Regional Reference: Staking Her Claim: Women Homesteading the West by Marcia Meredith Hensley (High Plains Press)

• Children’s Chapter Book: Go Big or Go Home by Will Hobbs (HarperCollins)

• Children’s Picture Book: The Illuminated Desert by Terry Tempest Williams, illustrations by Chloe Hedden (Canyonlands Natural History Association)

I have only read one of the above books—Rinella’s American Buffalo, which I thoroughly enjoyed and felt certain would win some prizes because it was so entertaining and distinctive.  Plus, who doesn’t like buffaloes?

The selection that interests me the most is the Adult Fiction winner, Craig Johnson’s Another Man’s Moccasins.  I’m sorry to say I haven’t yet read anything by Johnson, and it’s interesting to note that this is the first time since the MPIBA started giving these awards in 1991 that this category has been won by a genre novel rather than a work of literary fiction.  Some of the best contemporary books with Western settings have won this award—including Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses, Larry Watson’s Montana 1948, Rick Bass’s The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness—so I’m sure that Johnson’s work must rise above regular mystery genre conventions.  Clearly I’ve been missing out.  If there are any Craig Johnson fans out there, leave a comment and let me know what captured your attention in his books. 

Johnson wrote a classy thank you on the MPIBA blog, which begins, “All right, there are a few awards I figured I’d never get, and I got both of them this year—one was the Western Writer’s of America Spur Award and the other is the Mountains & Plains Independent Bookseller’s Association (Regional Book Award - Fiction) Novel of the Year.”

Speaking of genre vs. literary novels, a while back I pondered why it seemed like there were more genre novels set in Colorado, and more literary novels set in Montana.  But lately a number of genre novels with Montana settings have come to my attention: 

New West Book Review

Lights on a Ground of Darkness
by Ted Kooser
University of Nebraska Press, 60 pages, $10.95

Ted Kooser, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, popular essayist, former United States Poet Laureate, and proud Nebraska citizen, has reached the stage in his career where he can publish anything he wishes to, whether or not it fits into a standard category.  And that’s a lucky thing for readers, because it’s difficult to know what to call his Lights on a Ground of Darkness—a novella-length memoir, maybe?—but it’s a wonderful little book, studded with insights and arresting images about Kooser’s mother’s family, German-Americans who lived in the little town of Guttenberg, Iowa, on the banks of the Mississippi.  The prose is so full of sensory detail that it transports the reader to this simpler time and place, where the social highlight of a summer week was a lively neighborhood pinochle game on the screened porch.

In the preface, Kooser elegantly describes the dilemma of a writer who wants to record a family history: “This is a book I put off writing for more than fifty years because I wanted it to be perfect, which it is not and could never be.  In almost every family there is someone like me who desperately wants to write such a story and is forever kept from it by fear of failure.” Kooser finally wrote this story in 1997, when his mother was dying.  “She was the last living member of her family, and before she was gone I wanted to show her how much I had loved them,” Kooser writes.  She was pleased with the story, and Kooser first published it in the Great River Review. 

Western Book Roundup

White House Press Secretary Bill Burton announced a list of five books that President Obama is bringing on his vacation in Martha’s Vineyard.  Among them is Kent Haruf‘s Plainsong.  Now, during last year’s Democratic National Convention in Denver, Jeff Lee of the Rocky Mountain Land Library asked a bunch of notable Western writers and…me to contribute a “reading list for the President-Elect: A Western States Primer for the Next Administration.” The Tattered Cover featured many of these suggestions in a display.  One of the books on my list was Plainsong.  (Rick Bass and Laura Pritchett also assigned Plainsong for presidential reading.)

More than just a coincidence?  Isn’t it pretty to think so?

The vegetation is getting crispy around here, and so it’s appropriate that Stephen Pyne is coming to Boulder to discuss his book, Flame and Fortune. A Brief History of Fire in America for the Center for the American West on September 3 (CU Boulder campus, Eaton Humanities 150, 7 p.m.).  According to a press release, Pyne will talk about “fire in America and…the issues it raises about the interface of wild lands and urban development.”

Also in the Roundup: A forthcoming book set in a Colorado boys’ reformatory, and Elmer Kelton is remembered.

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