http://www.newwest.net/topic/main/C132/L/ New West Network: The Voice of the Rocky Mountains en info@newwest.net Copyright 2011 Wed, 31 Aug 2011 19:55:46 MST Wed, 31 Aug 2011 19:55:46 MST http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/loneliness_and_laughter_daniel_orozcos_orientation/C132/C132/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/loneliness_and_laughter_daniel_orozcos_orientation/C132/C132/ Mon, 06 Jun 2011 08:01:00 MST Idaho-based writer Daniel Orozco‘s first book, Orientation and Other Stories (Faber and Faber, 162 pages, $23), journeys to so many different places—from life among the perpetual painters of the Golden Gate Bridge, to Paraguay, where the deposed president of a Latin-American country lives in sumptuous exile, to white-collar and blue-collar American workplaces in Washington, California, and elsewhere—that it’s hard to believe it’s less than two hundred pages long. The years of care Orozco has put into this book—which was more than fifteen years in the making—are evident in every honed sentence. You can tell Orozco was having fun, challenging himself to try every possible narrative technique—first-person, second-person, third-person, perspectives that are limited to one character and some that are omniscient (including one that ventures briefly into the perspective of a pack of dogs), stories composed of several distinct episodes, and one comprised of entries from a police officer’s log that build into a hilarious love story. Daniel Orozco will kick off his book tour in Moscow, Idaho with a reading from his pickup truck in front of BookPeople on Main Street on June 10 (7 p.m.). He’ll read in Portland on June 23 at Powell’s Books on Hawthorne (7:30 p.m.). http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/whats_a_honyocker_dream_david_mogen_explains_in_new_memoir/C132/C132/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/whats_a_honyocker_dream_david_mogen_explains_in_new_memoir/C132/C132/ Mon, 30 May 2011 08:00:01 MST Colorado State University English professor David Mogen recounts his peripatetic 1950’s Montana childhood with good humor and insight in Honyocker Dreams: Montana Memories (University of Nebraska Press, 231 pages, $21.95). His father worked as a teacher and superintendent for school districts throughout Montana. Every few years, Mogen’s parents would move with their six children to a new town for a different job—the towns the family lived in included Missoula, Ennis, Box Elder, Billings, Whitewater, and Froid, where Mogen graduated from high school. (When he went to college at Columbia in New York, one of his new classmates informed him that he pronounced the name of his hometown incorrectly.) Although there were many differences between these places—such as the contrast between lively Missoula, where Mogen’s dad completed his studies through the G.I. Bill, and the “time warp” they encountered in Whitewater, population 75, where electricity had only recently been introduced—Mogen sees all of these towns as places where the prior generations enacted their “honyocker dreams.” David Mogen will discuss his book at Matter Bookstore in Ft. Collins on August 25 at 7:30 p.m. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/in_this_light_collects_utah_writer_melanie_rae_thons_greatest_hits/C132/C132/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/in_this_light_collects_utah_writer_melanie_rae_thons_greatest_hits/C132/C132/ Mon, 23 May 2011 07:00:43 MST The accomplished writer Melanie Rae Thon grew up in Montana and teaches at the University of Utah. In This Light: New & Selected Stories (Graywolf Press, 256 pages, $15) collects some of the highlights of her career, and there have been many—her stories have regularly appeared in the Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Thon frequently sets her stories in the West, but they follow none of the typical paths Western writers are often expected to take. Thon focuses on people who exist on the fringes of society, who are damaged, dispossessed, addicted to drugs, alcohol, sex, or all three, people who never have the chance to stop and admire the landscape—like the homeless kids of Kalispell in her story “Heavenly Creatures"—they’re too busy scrapping for survival. Thon relentlessly turns her attention on people that society ignores, and describes them with intense language in stories that are replete with ghosts. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/the_sisters_brothers_updates_a_classic_western_novel_scenario/C132/C132/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/the_sisters_brothers_updates_a_classic_western_novel_scenario/C132/C132/ Mon, 16 May 2011 08:02:11 MST The Sisters Brothers (Ecco, 328 pages, $24.99), the second novel by Oregon’s Patrick DeWitt, is an update on a classic Western scenario, featuring hired killers on horseback out to get their man, traveling through hard-bitten frontier outposts in 1851. DeWitt has invigorated this well-worn path with wit, style, and imagination. Brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters are hit men working for a mysterious wealthy Oregon man named the Commodore. As the book opens, the Commodore has dispatched the Sisters brothers to kill Hermann Kermit Warm, who is currently being watched by Henry Morris, another of Commodore’s men, in California. The Sisters brothers move across the country in a welter of violence, but the carnage goes down easily through the endearing narration of Eli, the younger, fatter, and more reluctant killer of the two. Eli narrates in a humorous, formal sort of diction that several critics have compared to that of Mattie Ross in True Grit, but Eli is more of a softie than Mattie ever was, collecting his half of the money whenever he and his brother kill someone for profit, but then giving it away to prostitutes and other women who sway his sensitive heart before he’s had a chance to spend any of it. Patrick DeWitt will discuss The Sisters Brothers at University Bookstore in Seattle (4326 University Way) on May 18, at Powell’s Bookstore in Portland on May 19, and in Denver at the Tattered Cover (Colfax) on May 24. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/lights_camera_action_manuel_munozs_novel_reimagines_psycho_filming/C132/C132/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/lights_camera_action_manuel_munozs_novel_reimagines_psycho_filming/C132/C132/ Mon, 09 May 2011 08:00:10 MST In Manuel Muñoz‘s entrancing first novel What You See in the Dark (Algonquin Books, 251 pages, $23.95), a character called The Director, based on Alfred Hitchcock, observes, “Small towns are filled with people who notice every little detail.” Muñoz, who teaches at the University of Arizona, has paid utmost attention to detail in this novel that reimagines the filming of Psycho in the sleepy town of Bakersfield, California in 1960. Muñoz sets the filming of that classic movie against the murder of a young woman that occurs at the same time. Muñoz writes with exquisite control of atmosphere, mood, perspective, and image—not unlike Hitchcock’s technique—as he builds the moving story of the murder of Teresa, a young Mexican woman, at the hands of her white lover. The narrative switches between several perspectives, beginning with a skillful second-person collective voice that we come to learn speaks for the town of Bakersfield in 1960 as a whole, and also for Candy, Teresa’s jealous co-worker at the shoe store. Manuel Muñoz will discuss What You See in the Dark at the Tattered Cover (Colfax) on May 11 at 7:30 p.m. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/four_unforgettable_western_women_writers/C132/C132/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/four_unforgettable_western_women_writers/C132/C132/ Fri, 06 May 2011 06:20:30 MST When we did the Western Literature Association survey of Most Important Authors, very few women made the list. Willa Cather got her fair share of votes. Mari Sandoz was the next favorite, followed by Leslie Silko and Mary Austin. After that came such names as Amy Tan, Sandra Cisneros, Pam Houston, Terry Tempest Williams and Ann Zwinger. With the exception of Cather, none had sufficient support to be called “important.” For my list of significant Western women writers, I chose the four I find most unforgettable, four women I have spent many evenings with and who belong in the library of any well-read Westerner. 1. Mary Austin’s The Land of Little Rain Mary Austin’s The Land of Little Rain (1903) will not tempt you to hoist the family bungalow onto a flatbed truck and move to the Mojave Basin; however, Austin can lead you to wonder why you live where you live. The Mojave hills, the colors, the seasons of the place “trick the sense of time, so that once inhabiting there you always mean to go away without quite realizing that you have not done it.” Austin treats individuals—the Basket Maker, the Pocket Hunter, the Mule Driver on the borax wagons—as the equals of the coyotes, the scrawny rabbits, the soaring hawks and cruising vultures. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/paperbacks_for_spring_reading_literary_conference_season_kicks_off/C132/C132/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/paperbacks_for_spring_reading_literary_conference_season_kicks_off/C132/C132/ Wed, 04 May 2011 08:02:52 MST Helen Thorpe‘s Colorado Book Award-winning Just Like Us is out in paperback now, and it includes an update about the lives of her subjects, four young Mexican women who grew up in Denver, two with U.S. citizenship and two without. On May 12, Thorpe will speak at the Arvada Public Library, and on May 15 she will participate in the Dean’s Forum at St. John’s Cathedral in Denver. In October, Just Like Us will be the featured book for One Book One Town in Carbondale, Colo. • Brady Udall‘s excellent novel The Lonely Polygamist is out in paperback now too. Udall will appear at the Jackson Hole Writers Conference, along with Cristina García, Gary Ferguson, and Stephanie Elizondo Griest from June 23-26. The conference is open for registration now. (Check back on New West in late June for David Abrams‘ report on the conference.) Also in the Roundup: Robin Black is this year’s Lighthouse Fly-By Writer, the new Mountain West Poetry Series, lit champ Jennifer Egan to headline the Literary Sojourn in Steamboat Springs, and Women Writing the West conference tickets are on sale now. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/mild_mannered_wine_steward_turns_to_crime_in_kevin_desingers_debut_novel/C132/C132/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/mild_mannered_wine_steward_turns_to_crime_in_kevin_desingers_debut_novel/C132/C132/ Mon, 02 May 2011 08:01:14 MST Kevin Desinger‘s debut novel, The Descent of Man (Unbridled Books, 272 pages, $24.95), jumps off to a brisk start when a forty-year-old man named Jim wakes up in the middle of the night and looks out his bedroom window to see two men attempting to steal his Camry. His wife Marla tells him to call the cops, but instead he heads outside to try to foil the theft. He observes them for a moment, then, as Desinger writes, “something in the Camry broke off with a loud snap, and one of the car thieves swore. At the same time something in me snapped too.” Jim, a mild-mannered man suddenly filled with rage, hops into the men’s truck, drives it down the road into a ditch, and beats it with a galvanized pipe. Jim can’t account for his own actions, and begins to craft a series of lies to cover up what he did from Marla and the police. Kevin Desinger will discuss The Descent of Man in Portland at Powell’s on May 3 (7:30 p.m.), Woodstock Wine & Deli on May 7 (7:30 p.m.), and Broadway Books on May 10 (7:30 p.m.). http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/two_poems_from_katie_phillips_driving_montana_alone/C132/C132/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/two_poems_from_katie_phillips_driving_montana_alone/C132/C132/ Fri, 29 Apr 2011 08:00:27 MST New West closes out National Poetry Month with two poems by Katie Phillips, whose Driving Montana, Alone won the 2010 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. Phillips grew up in Maryland and Colorado and lived in Montana before moving to a suburb of Chicago. She has a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Iowa and feels fortunate that she can walk to work with her dog, Sasha. Her poems have been published in the Cider Press Review, the Raintown Review, the White Pelican Review, and elsewhere. Driving Montana, Alone is illustrated by several of Phillips’ photographs of Montana, and the title poem was recently featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. Moab I can see myself growing lonely at the corner of Uranium and Main. http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/kiss_and_tell_claudia_sternbachs_reading_lips_a_memoir_of_kisses/C132/C132/ http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/kiss_and_tell_claudia_sternbachs_reading_lips_a_memoir_of_kisses/C132/C132/ Mon, 25 Apr 2011 08:07:21 MST Claudia Sternbach’s moving memoir Reading Lips: A Memoir of Kisses (Unbridled Books, 224 pages, $12.95) is composed of essays about the memorable kisses in her life. It’s a clever concept, but what makes this book so easy to love is its offbeat execution of this idea—you never quite know how the kiss will turn up in the stories. Will it be a comforting kiss, an ominous kiss, a romantic kiss, or a missed kiss?  Sternbach has written newspaper columns for many years, and her breezy prose has a natural, effortless quality that is surely the result of great care. One of the strengths of Reading Lips is Sternbach’s ability to capture the evolution of her thoughts, emotions, and sensory perceptions at each age. The voice is recognizably the same, but in the early chapters the details convey the quirky viewpoints of a child’s perception, free of the rote language adults use to describe common objects and experiences, like this moment from a visit to her mother’s office: “She showed us her desk, stacked with papers and in and out boxes. And the machine she used to do all of the adding and subtracting. She showed us how it worked. I liked the sound it made. Noisier than a typewriter. A fatter noise.”