Western Book Roundup

Genre Writers Flourish in Colorado, While Literary Types Type in Montana

By Jenny Shank, 10-31-07

Mark Graham wrote a nice profile of prize-winning science fiction writer Connie Willis for the Rocky Mountain News this week.  Willis, who lives in Greeley, boasts a crowded trophy shelf filled with rocket-shaped Hugo Awards and “nebulae” Nebula Awards.  Graham describes her as “one of the most honored science fiction writers of all time,” and cites the astonishing fact that Willis has won more of the aforementioned awards than sci-fi heavyweights such as Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke.

What’s Willis’ secret?  She seems to have a champion work ethic, for one thing.  According to Graham, she starts out her mornings working at a coffee shop or the Student Center of UNC (where her husband is a professor), takes a break for lunch, and gets back at it in the afternoon.  Willis told Graham, “My life has to be a pretty solitary life,” in order to sustain her prolific output.

This profile made me ponder a regional literary phenomenon--Colorado seems to be packed with talented genre writers, such as Willis, mystery writers Margaret Coel, Diane Mott Davidson, John Dunning, and Stephen White, and thriller writer Jeff Long, but the state seems to lack high-profile literary fiction writers, especially when you compare it to Montana. 

While literary fiction set in Montana abounds, Kent Haruf is one of the few literary novelists I can think of who both lives in Colorado and sets his fiction here.  Aryn Kyle, who grew up in Grand Junction, published a great Colorado-based novel this year, The God of Animals, but now lives in--you guessed it--Montana.  Is there something in the water that makes genre books more likely to pop up here and the literary ones take root farther north in the Rockies?  I’d appreciate hearing people’s theories on this.

A few weeks ago, Dwight Garner at the New York Times’ Paper Cuts blog ran a short interview with Maile Meloy, a great literary fiction writer who grew up in Montana (of course!).  Meloy reveals that she’s working on a collection of short stories and usually finds her books shelved in bookstores between Larry McMurtry and Melville.  If any contemporary writer can hold her own between those two, it’s Meloy.

And the Washington Post recently launched a book blog of its own, Short Stack.  One of the first posts was by Rachel Shea, who wrote, “As the sole Westerner on the Book World staff, I feel geographically obligated to highlight some of my favorite novels about the settling of the West.” She picked Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985), A Sudden Country by Karen Fisher (2005), Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner (1971), Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (1985), and The Ox-Bow Incident by Walter van Tilburg Clark (1940) as her top five western books.

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