Missoula News

WILL IDAHO AND MONTANA BE LEFT OUT?

With the severe escalation of partisan politics and divisiveness in recent years, it has become basically impossible to pass a Wilderness bill or any other type of public lands or outdoor recreation legislation on its own. Time on the Senate and House floor is so scarce and closely guarded and partisanship so bitter that the only way public lands legislation has any realistic chance is a relatively new invention called the omnibus bill.

As you may remember, Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed S. 22, a massive public lands omnibus bill on March 30, 2009 after a long, heated debate and lots of last-minute maneuvering. The 1,300-page bill was the combination of 170 pieces of legislation creating new national parks and monuments, plus park expansions and national recreation trails, protecting hundreds of miles of wild and scenic rivers, and designating more than 2 million acres of Wilderness.

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Western Book Roundup

Regular New West contributor and Colorado-based travel writer David Frey has been off on a dream trip for several weeks, following in the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway through Europe.  Frey is documenting it all on his blog, Papa’s Planet, which he is turning into a book, tentatively titled “Papa’s Planet: An Ernest Exploration of the Places Hemingway Lived and Loved.”

In a presentation Frey gave last month explaining his interest in Hemingway, he wrote, “In Ernest Hemingway, there’s something we can all claim. He was a freedom-loving, communist-loving, red-white-and-blue, gun-toting nature lover who almost assuredly ate quiche.”

Frey is writing detailed postcards from his Hemingway stops, such as 74 Rue de Cardinal Lemoine in Paris, where Hemingway and his wife Hadley lived, an interlude described in A Moveable Feast.  In Spain, Frey interviewed Maripaz Vega, the country’s only female bullfighter.  He’s also been to Venice, Cuba, Key West, and Ketchum, Idaho, journeys he explains in the essay ”Why I’m Stalking Hemingway,” which was named a Community Keynote in the Travel Blog Exchange annual conference in New York last June.

Frey reports he’s scheduled to have an article on Hemingway’s Sun Valley in the fall issue of Sun Valley Magazine, “looking at the ways Sun Valley has changed since Hemingway’s day and the role he played bringing those changes about.”

Also in the Roundup: A Denver exhibition of 50 prize-winning book covers, a new novel from Daniel Grandbois, and Ward Six’s list of “excellent” names from the Missoula phone book.

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Western Book Events

Tin House Summer Writers Workshop
Where: Portland, Oregon.
When: Annually, in July.
What: Started eight years ago, Tin House Summer Writers Workshop was an outgrowth of Tin House Magazine, one of the top literary magazines in the country. In 2005, the magazine expanded to include Tin House Books. The summer conference includes writing workshops in fiction (some devoted specifically to the novel), poetry, and creative nonfiction, in addition to seminars on craft, and readings by the writers who teach the workshops. Once participants have been accepted into the workshops, they may apply for mentorships. These include a written critique of an entire book by an available workshop leader or editor and several meetings during the week of the conference.
Food and Lodging: The conference takes place at Reed College, where participants of the conference eat in the cafeteria and sleep in the dorms.  The cost for food and lodging is $575.
Cost: Tuition is $1000-$1100, and applications are due July 10 each year.  Manuscript critiques are $750-$1000.  A pass to attend all the readings and seminars is $250, and tickets to individual events are available for $5-$20.

Bonnie ZoBell, who has participated in five Tin House Summer Writers Workshops, offers her report:

The folks who run the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop in Portland, Oregon, aren’t stupid. I’m at the July 2010 conference now. When they asked me the other day to write an article on the conference for their newsletter, you have to figure they’d noticed I’ve attended five years in a row. They’ve probably seen me rave about the place online. In fact, for years I’ve been trying to convince them they should give me a cut for every new recruit I bring in. They laugh nervously. People who know me, though, will tell you I don’t even have to be prompted to gush. I continue to have a great experience every time I come here, so I have nothing secret to report to you. 

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A Bob Wire Classic™

After our post-Rushmore lunch, we pointed the 4Runner east once again, and the antidote to my euphoria of natural beauty lay ahead in the form of Wall Drug. As we neared the Badlands, the Wall Drug signs multiplied like scabs on a ten-dollar hooker. We would have to stop, of course, although there was no way it could live up to the hype. I mean, a six-foot rabbit? I haven’t seen one of those since, well, I can’t remember, but I’m sure Jäegermeister was involved.

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EQUAL RIGHTS? WHAT A NOVEL IDEA!

You could call this old news, but I didn’t see much press coverage on this rather momentous event, so I wanted to do my part to make sure cyclists and motorists knew the rules of the road are changing.

Back on March 12 Ray LaHood, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation, went to the National Bike Summit and dropped a bomb. Transportation policy might have, finally, made the right turn.

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Western Book Roundup

The Boulder Daily Camera recently reported on the social media full-court press launched by current and former students at Boulder-based Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in response to the June layoffs of 23 staff members at the school. 

Posting under the tag SaveTKS on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, the students have released a list of demands, including the desires, as Scott Schlaufman of the Daily Camera wrote, “that the ideals and values of the Jack Kerouac School are retained, that student participation in decision-making at the school is increased, and that the school’s diversity advocate position—cut in the June 15 layoffs—be reinstated.”

Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa founded Naropa in 1974, and he invited Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, John Cage and Diane di Prima to start a poetics program there shortly after it opened.  Because it was founded by such anti-institutional figures, Naropa has always seemed a freewheeling place, but Stuart J. Sigman, the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Naropa, responded to the people behind SaveTKS with a statement written in standard academia speak.

Also in the Roundup: Julianne Crouch reports on Wyoming’s many writing groups, and news about the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference.

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