Colorado Writers Earn Their Spurs and Boise Indie Bookstores Falter

By Jenny Shank, 4-09-08

Two Colorado women cleaned up recently at this year’s Spur Awards, with Denver resident Sandra Dallas winning the Best Western Short Novel category with her book Tallgrass, and Colorado native and current Missoula resident Aryn Kyle winning the Best Western Long Novel category with her book The God of Animals. The Spur Awards are sponsored by the Western Writers of America, who have been handing out the honors since 1953. (Via Texas Pages.)

Sandra Dallas keeps busy as a prolific novelist (with seven novels so far), nonfiction writer (with two nonfiction books), and journalist, writing, among other things, a regular Regional Nonfiction column for the Denver Post.

As for Kyle, the paperback edition of The God of Animals just came out, and you can also find her work in the most recent Best American Short Stories collection.

One other Spur Awards category whose results I found interesting was Best Western Drama—the Oscar may have gone to No Country for Old Men, but the Spur went to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which beat out No Country and 3:10 to Yuma.  Check out the complete results here.

Last week, Rachael Daigle confessed in the Boise Weekly that she’s a voracious reader but writes that “after almost a decade in Boise, I hadn’t patronized a single local, independently owned bookstore,” preferring to buy books at garage sales, chain stores, and online. (Via Shelf Awareness.)

Daigle writes, “Today, the number of unchained, locally owned bookstores selling new books across genres (that is, those booksellers who aren’t filling a niche, like Christian literature) is three. And we’re about to lose one,” with the impending close of Boise Book and Gift Co.

Daigle points to one cause of the independents’ struggle: “The practice of remitting unsold books to their publisher for credit is what some in the bookselling business feel is a major fault in the system.”

As Mokoto Rich of the New York Times reported last week, this practice could change if a new imprint by HarperCollins is successful.  A new division, headed by Robert S. Miller, will forgo author advances in favor of a profit sharing plan, and won’t allow bookstores to return its books.

Finally, Denver authors Charlotte S. Waisman and Jill S. Tietjen will visit the Tattered Cover in LoDo on Friday, April 11, to discuss their new book, Her Story: A Timeline of The Women Who Changed America.  The timeline, which is packed with color photos and drawings, begins with Virginia Dare, the “first child to be born to English parents on what is now American soil” in 1587 and concludes with Drew Gilpin Faust being named president of Harvard University and Gail Kimbell being named Forest Service chief in 2007.  Waisman and Tietjen recently spoke to NPR about the book.

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