Western Book Roundup

Aryn Kyle in The Atlantic, and Portland’s Edgy Writing Conference

By Jenny Shank, 7-23-08

The Atlantic’s summer fiction issue is out, and it includes a new story by Missoula’s Aryn Kyle, who launched her career in that magazine in 2004 with ”Foaling Season,” which won a National Magazine Award.  She later extended that story into her first novel, The God of Animals.  Kyle’s new story, ”Nine," also features a young protagonist, and Kyle’s deft way with children as characters is one of the subjects of an interview by Jessica Murphy Moo featured on The Atlantic’s website.  They also discuss the University of Montana’s MFA program, which Kyle calls “an invaluable experience,” and how Kyle was inspired by the changes in her home town, Grand Junction, Colo., to extend “Foaling Season” into the novel it became.  Kyle explains:

“I finished graduate school—I went to graduate school in Missoula, which is where I live now—and I stayed around for an extra year. Then I ended up moving back to my hometown of Grand Junction, Colorado, because I got a job teaching comp at a community college there. That’s the town that the story had been kind of loosely based on. My family is there, so I’d of course been back to visit for holidays and things, but I hadn’t spent a lot of time there since graduating from high school, and the town had changed a lot in the time that I’d been away. A lot of new money was moving in, lots of chain stores popping up all over the place, and I was so surprised at the way the town was starting to look like any other town with an Olive Garden and a Red Lobster and three Wal-Marts. When my family first moved there, I was five, and it was still really a western town back then. Lots of bare desert land.

I became aware of the way all that was being filled in, and people who had lived in that town for generations and generations were being pushed father and farther to the outskirts as land was bought up and all this money was moving in. I started to think about those characters again. I began to wonder how they would maintain their lifestyle in the face of encroaching suburbia.”

The Rocky Mountain Land Series at the Tattered Cover in LoDo will feature Courtney White on Tuesday, July 29 at 7:30 p.m.  White shared an excerpt from his new book, Revolution on the Range: The Rise of a New Ranch in the American West, with New West readers earlier this year.

Meanwhile, in Oregon, the third annual Writer’s Edge Conference will be held this week from July 25 through 27 at various locations on Portland State University campus.  According to a press release, “Writers will learn about edge, and its application in their writing, through five workshops on writing innovative fiction, two panels, a faculty reading, an open mic, and ‘myriad conversations about experimental prose.’” Sounds like just the workshop to break me of writing quaint, homespun stories about quilting and pies.  Drat!  I missed the application deadline, but there’s always next year.

A few weeks ago I mentioned a new literary magazine, Oval, that just started up at the University of Montana.  Not to be outdone, Montana State University in Billings is launching a new online literary magazine, Stone’s Throw.  The magazine’s editors, MSU professors and writers Russell Rowland and Tami Haaland are seeking submissions now.  The busy Rowland also edits The Smoking Poet, whose summer issue features the winners of its first fiction contest, and teaches novel workshops (more information is on his website).

Finally, check out my review of Larry McMurtry’s new memoir, Books: A Memoir, that ran in the Rocky Mountain News Books page this week.

Have some regional literary news or events to share?  If so,

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