Pregnant Bend Man to Write Book & High Plains Book Award Finalists Announced

By Jenny Shank, 5-28-08

From the department of Sadly, We Are Not Above This: US Weekly reports that Bend resident Thomas Beatie, “the world’s first pregnant man, will write a memoir about his experience.” (Via Gawker.) Love Makes a Family: A Memoir of Hardship, Healing and an Extraordinary Pregnancy will hit bookstores in September.  There’s no word on the publisher of the book yet.  Apparently there is some dispute about whether Beatie is actually the first pregnant man in the world, but he’s certainly the first pregnant male Bend resident, so he’s got that going for him.  Plus, since Beatie’s pregnancy experience has been lived out in the public eye, whoever is publishing this memoir can rest assured that this memoir won’t be fake, unlike that of another Oregon writer we could mention.

On to something more highbrow: the Parmly Billings Library recently announced the finalists for this year’s High Plains Book Award, which honors books that “examine and reflect life on the High Plains.” The contenders include some books that have already caught our attention, such as Gary Schanbacher’s fine story collection, Migration Patterns, which is among the three finalists in the First Book category (Spring Warren’s Turpentine and Sam Morton’s Where the Rivers Run North are the others). 

In the Nonfiction category, a unique photography book I reviewed earlier this year, Kathe LeSage’s One Woman’s Montana is in the running (along with This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor by Susan Wicklund and Montana author Alan Kesselheim, Boxing for Cuba by Denver’s Guillermo Vincente Vidal, Gall: Lakota War Chief by Greeley’s Robert W. Larson, and Charles M. Russell: A Catalogue Raisonné, edited by B. Byron Price).

In the Fiction category, Billings’ Russell Rowland is nominated for his novel The Watershed Years (along with South Dakota’s Lori G. Armstrong for Shallow Grave and Winnipeg’s Sarah Klassen for A Feast of Longing).

Winners will be announced on October 17.

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