Western Book Roundup

Nick Arvin Editorializes and a Denver Fiction Anthology

By Jenny Shank, 8-13-08

	Nick Arvin.

With the Democratic convention coming up, everybody in Denver seems to be thinking about politics these days, and writers are no exception.  Denver novelist Nick Arvin (who I interviewed last year) wrote an editorial for this weekend’s Rocky Mountain News about Barack Obama’s skills as a writer, which predated his political ambitions.  Arvin’s thesis:

“I’d like to suggest that the fact that Obama is a writer—not just a typer of e-mails and compiler of legal briefs but a writer of literary quality with the ability to craft compelling narrative and interrogate his own feelings on the page—tells us some things about him that are worth considering as he competes for the presidency. These ideas flow from a few simple observations about writers generally.”

The qualities that Arvin finds that writers have in common with Obama: “Writers like words…Writers like good sentences…Writers hate clichés…Writers understand narrative.”

And speaking of the Rocky, in contrast to all the bad news about book review sections disappearing from newspapers across the country, the Rocky’s Editor-in-Chief John Temple has announced an innovative fiction contest, “A Dozen on Denver.” To celebrate Denver’s 150th birthday, the paper will print a special section on November 14 with eleven stories about Denver from local writers (Margaret Coel, Joanne Greenberg, Pam Houston, Connie Willis, Nick Arvin, Sandra Dallas, Manuel Ramos, Robert Greer, Arnold Grossman, Diane Mott Davidson and Laura Pritchett).  The twelfth slot will be filled by the winner of the contest, open to anyone who writes a story of around 2,500 words set in Denver some time in the future.  The deadline is September 15.

As a Boulder resident, it is my policy to avoid all things JonBenet Ramsey-related, so I didn’t feel like reading Joyce Carol Oates’ new novel, My Sister, My Love, which was inspired by the case. Arsen Kashkashian, book buyer for the Boulder Book Store did read the book and conducted an interview with Oates about it for the Boulder Weekly, which he has reprinted on his blog.

On August 18, short story writer and musician Daniel Grandbois will read from and discuss his book Unlucky Lucky Days at the Laughing Goat Coffee House in Boulder (8 p.m.)

Finally, Clive Sinclair over at the Guardian in London recently wrote about his ”top ten favourite westerns.” Alongside Charles Portis’ True Grit, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and Annie Proulx’s two collections of Wyoming stories among others, Sinclair included The Great Gatsby.  How did that East coast classic sneak into his list?  Sinclair writes:

“Although set on the eastern seaboard the story it tells, as its narrator himself observes, is really about the West. But that admission is not the primary reason for Scott Fitzgerald’s novel to be invited into the Western Hall of Fame; no, it has more to do with the metamorphosis of Jimmy Gatz into Jay Gatsby. The process begins in childhood (evidenced by a ragged old copy of a book called Hopalong Cassidy, into which Gatsby-to-be had inscribed a strict daily timetable, and a list of general resolves), and concludes when he meets a mentor surnamed Cody. The name of course is a signal. It broadcasts that Jay Gatsby reborn is a part of that line of self-made westerners that begins with the scout whose exploits reenacted thrilled the Crowned Heads of Europe; none other than Buffalo Bill Cody. On top of all that is the fact that the book concludes with the necessary shoot-out.”

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