WESTERN BOOK ROUNDUP
‘Edgar Sawtelle’ Has Aspen Homecoming
Wroblewski wins Colorado Book Award
By David Frey, 6-23-09
This is what author Luis Alberto Urrea has to say about the role played by a sense of place in his books, which tend to hopscotch back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border.
“I firmly believe there is no ‘them.’ There is only ‘us.’ I also believe that place is not out there. It’s right here.”
Urrea was speaking on Monday at the Aspen Writers’ Foundation’s Aspen Summer Words literary festival. He is among a group of writers from around the planet gathered for the festival, with a theme this year of “World of Words.”
Among the others: Ishmael Beah, of Sierra Leone, author of the bestselling A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, and Colum McCann, who launches his newest novel, Let the Great World Spin today at the festival. (It’s Amazon’s book of the month for June.)
Monday’s events also included the 18th annual Colorado Book Awards. It should come as no surprise that David Wroblewski won the award for fiction for his breakaway success, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.
“There’s a connection between Edgar’s story and the Aspen Summer Words program,” Wroblewski says. It was the last place Wroblewski workshopped the novel, back in 2005.
Other Colorado Book Award winners are:
BIOGRAPHY: Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America, by Walter R. Borneman
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE: M is for Mischief, An A to Z of Naughty Children, by Linda Ashman, illustrated by Nancy Carpenter
CREATIVE NONFICTION: Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, by Amy Irvine
GENERAL NONFICTION: Storey’s Illustrated Breed Guide to Sheep, Goats, Cattle and Pigs, by Carol Ekarius
GENRE FICTION: Breath and Bone, by Carol Berg
HEALTH AND WELL-BEING: Unexpected Intimacy: Everyday Connections that Nourish the Soul, by Sarah Gabriel
HISTORY: Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War, by Thomas G. Andrews
JUVENILE LITERATURE: The Totally Made-Up Civil War Diary of Amdana MacLeish, by Claudia Mills
PICTORIAL: Colorado Scenic Byways, Taking the Other Road, by Jim Steinberg and Susan J. Tweit
POETRY: A Murmuration of Starlings, by Jake Adam York
YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE: Fact of Life #31, by Denise Vega
And one more quote from the literary festival:
“I’m generally very suspicious of nonfiction because I think there’s a desire to self-protect. I find fiction truer.”
- Chimamanda Adichie, award-winning Nigerian author, whose book The Thing Around Your Neck debuts this month.
Aspen Summer Words: The unspeakable schmoozing with the unreadable. At least "Storey's Illustrated Breed Guide to Sheep, Goats, Cattle and Pigs" probably has it's agriculturally didactic strong points. Wait a minute. Given the outrageous decadence seen in contemporary American literary culture, especially in New York, could this tome actually be about, well, bestiality? Hmmm. Maybe Aspen will be more fun than we know.
Comment By william morris, 6-24-09I guess that as a 4 generation coloradian, I still harbor the resentment of the wealthy sequestering of the best places for themselves, a 2 class society of the rich and their servants. Aspen certainly is the worst example. Hmm. Karma. I suppose that the Ute Indians were similary pissed about the whites coming and taking their land too. However. As the best places in the west are becoming more and more "gated communities citys", please do not forget that the writers honored at this event are often expressing the problems that such unequal sharing of wealth result in. Wallace Stegner saw the west as an explotative culture, and now the explotation is of a different kind. Ask any low paid worker in Aspen what it is like to commute way way away from the golden city on the hill. Ditto for Vail and Summet county, where the social problems of get exported to my home town of Leadville. Ah, go ahead and pat yourselves on the back.
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