Western Writers

One Friday last April at a Denver restaurant, the attention of every woman at the table was riveted to Sara Megibow, a literary agent four months into a surrogate pregnancy.  She told of how she agreed to do it for close friends, a breast cancer survivor and her husband.  Her story resonated not because anyone present was in the market for a good surrogate.  But most there were always in the market for a good story.  At least two of the women weighed Megibow’s experience as potential material to write about.  One said it might make a good article for a woman’s magazine.  Another thought it might fit into one of her series of inspirational books.  This was a table of women with ink in their blood.

Its web site describes Literary Ladies Luncheon as “A loose association of women writers. Or an association of loose women writers...and editors and literary agents.” The group—started by writer and publicity consultant Bella Stander— meets monthly at a designated Denver-area eatery, and often about a dozen attend for chow and chat, but twice that many may dined together at more prolific times.  The emailed invitees number up to 45; some show up for every lunch, others appear most of the time, and a few drop in occasionally.

Stander and a small circle of friends started the lunches in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1996.  “I was bored and lonely,” she says.  “As a writer you sit home and work alone, so it’s good to get to know other writers.” Stander founded a Colorado branch less than a year after she moved to the state in 2005.  The southern chapter still flourishes.  “We want to take over the world,” she says.

Western Book Roundup

I have a lot of good news to report this week about regional writers:

• Last week Pen Center USA announced that Moscow, Idaho’s Kim Barnes has won their award for Fiction for her novel A Country Called Home. (A complete list of winners is here.) Conveniently for those who may have missed this absorbing, lyrical novel, the paperback edition just hit bookstores last week.  Last year I spoke to Barnes about her inspiration for the book and her difficulty with the term “regionalist,” among other topics.

Pen USA will also honor Elmore Leonard with a lifetime achievement award.  According to the organization’s website, “In a career spanning 60 years, Leonard has published 43 novels and numerous short stories, creating a distinct literary style that has delighted readers and influenced a new generation of writers.”

• The winners of the Willa Awards for “for outstanding literature featuring women’s stories set in the West” were announced recently in Los Angeles.  Jana Richman won in the contemporary fiction category for her novel The Last Cowgirl.  (A complete list of winners is here.) I spoke with Richman last year about the Utah environmental issues that fuel her fiction.

• Harper Perennial will publish Denver writer and engineer Nick Arvin‘s new novel, The Reconstructionist, in the fall of 2010.  According to Publisher’s Marketplace, the book follows “a forensic investigator who specializes in car crash sites, and who enters a haunted affair with the wife of his mentor in the profession,” and the sale was “a six-figure deal.” Fox has purchased the rights to make the story into a TV series.  I spoke with Arvin in 2007 about his first novel, Articles of War, which was a One Book, One Denver selection.

Also in the Roundup: Casper College Lit Fest, a Hemingway celebration in Idaho, Tom Miller’s brush with Hemingway’s Nobel Prize Medallion, Kevin Canty reads in Missoula, a new Poet Laureate for Montana, a new children’s book review blog, and Maria’s Bookshop in Durango celebrates its 25th.

Western Book Roundup

The final day of the 2009 Mountains and Plains Independent Bookseller Association Trade Show in Denver, Saturday, September 26, featured a breakfast with presentations by four authors to benefit literacy organizations in the region.  Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper introduced his wife, Helen Thorpe, the author of Just Like Us, describing how each of them were initially reluctant supporters of the other’s chosen career path.

Hickenlooper explained that Thorpe is “as much of an introvert as I am an extrovert,” and said she had consented to his run for mayor because “she would meet people through the process of the campaign that she would never otherwise meet,” and because there “was absolutely no way in God’s green earth that I would ever win.” During the campaign, when Hickenlooper went ahead in the polls, Thorpe looked over her copy of the Rocky Mountain News at him and said, “You never told me you were going to win.”

Hickenlooper described Just Like Us as “a book about four Hispanic girls whose parents are illegal immigrants,” adding, “as an elected official, that’s not the topic you’d choose for your wife to write.” But he became more enthusiastic as he realized she could “create a narrative that was as compelling as fiction, with characters that grow on you and unfold, just as in a novel.  To witness this was one of the most rewarding processes, more rewarding even than getting elected mayor.”

Western Book Roundup

This weekend I attended the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association (MPIBA) annual trade show, which was held in Denver.  For all the doom and gloom I’ve been hearing about the book business in recent years, I found the booksellers at this conference to be a fairly contented lot.  Maybe they just seemed upbeat because they enjoy this event, or maybe they’ve been cheered by all the popular books publishers have released this fall, which have brought in renewed traffic to their stores. 

Several people, including Charles Stillwagon of the Tattered Cover and Arsen Kashkashian of the Boulder Book Store, told me Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol and Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory have been selling briskly.  Both of those stores hosted packed readings with Krakauer this month, and Stillwagon said he was surprised by how well the Dan Brown book is selling at the Tattered Cover, given that it’s the sort of book a reader could buy anywhere—and at a great discount online.  But as I learned in a session entitled “Surviving Tough Times,” every independent book store has been hit hard by the recession, so maybe these booksellers seemed happy to me simply because they enjoy what they do for a living, and are thankful to still be doing it.

Western Writers

Journalist Helen Thorpe brings a unique perspective to her riveting first book, Just Like Us, which follows the lives of four Mexican girls as they graduate from high school and attend college in Denver.  Two of them are legal U.S. residents, while the other two, whom Thorpe calls Marisela and Yadira, do not have papers.  Thorpe’s work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Texas Monthly, and 5280.  Thorpe’s husband is Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, and this allows Thorpe to portray the city’s many layers, and brings an additional dimension to the story when an illegal immigrant, Raul Gómez García, murders a Denver police officer, and it turns out that Gómez García was employed in a restaurant owned by Hickenlooper.  I interviewed Thorpe via email about how she chose and wrote this story, how she convinced the four girls to open up to her, and her trip to a Mexican nightclub.

New West: You’ve said that you were interested in the topic of immigration in part because you grew up in the U.S. as an Irish citizen with a green card.  Was there also a more recent event that prompted you to begin work on this book, or did it grow out of topics that had always intrigued you?

Helen Thorpe: Yes there was an additional prompt. It was that I was curious about how Denver was changing, and I started looking at the demographic shifts in the city over recent decades. That actually led me to think about writing about immigration, because the numbers of immigrants coming to the city was so huge.

Western Book Roundup

I’ve got a lot of odds and ends to mention today, many good excuses to get out of the house and enjoy some bookish activities across the region this week:

Montana

The Helena Festival of the Book kicks off tomorrow and runs through the weekend, September 24-26 at the Holter Museum of Art and the Montana Historical Society. Participants include Steven Rinella, Wendy Parciak, Samuel Ligon and Laurie Lamon.

A few weeks ago I shared my enthusiasm for Thomas Savage’s The Pass.  O. Alan Weltzien, who teaches at Western Montana College of The University of Montana, wrote the forward for the new edition of the novel, and he’s going to be discussing Savage as part of the Helena Book Festival. His lecture, entitled, ”Not Always Happy Endings: Thomas and Elisabeth Savage,” will be held at the Montana Historical Society (Sept. 24, 6:30 p.m.).  On September 25, Weltzien will participate in a Thomas Savage panel along with Sue Hart and Karl Olson (Montana Historical Society, 12 p.m.).  If you can’t make it out to Helena, the three Savage buffs will reprise their panel at the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula in October.

Also in the Roundup: Events and news from Colorado, Idaho, and Utah.

Western Writers

Janet Skeslien Charles grew up in Shelby, Montana and studied English, French, and Russian at the University of Montana, where she had a part time job translating letters from Montana men to their prospective Russian brides.  After graduation, she moved to Odessa, Ukraine as a Soros Fellow, where she taught English for two years and began to research the mail-order bride industry, which became the topic of her winning debut novel, Moonlight in Odessa.  The book follows Daria, a smart, ambitious Odessan woman whose English language skills earn her a coveted office job.  She moonlights as a translator for a matchmaking service, and then attempts to make an international love match of her own.  Since 1999, Skeslien Charles has worked and lived in Paris, where she has taught writing classes at Shakespeare & Company.  She will discuss and sign Moonlight in Odessa at Hastings in Great Falls on Sunday, September 20 (2-4 p.m.) and on the University of Montana campus in Missoula on Wednesday, September 23 from 12-1:30 p.m. (Tickets are available at Fact & Fiction.)

New West: One of the distinctive aspects of Moonlight in Odessa is a contrast between the book’s lighthearted subject matter and the darker themes it addresses throughout—it’s the story of Daria, a pretty, plucky young woman who wants to succeed in work and love, and the tone is often comic, but then she has to deal with things like anti-Semitism, murderous gangsters, poverty, and the deprivations that come with living in Odessa.  How did you balance these contrasting aspects of the book?  Did you know when you started writing it what tone you wanted to strike?

Janet Skeslien Charles: When I lived in Odessa, Ukraine, I was struck by the way Odessans used humor as a way of dealing with painful situations. When a coworker got an abortion, it was gossiped about and the other women joked, “She’s doing her part to keep the population down.” I thought they were barbarians. It was only much later that I realized that most of the women sitting at the table had had an abortion. It was the only option available to them in Soviet times. They joked about it to cover up their own sadness, and it was a form of bravado. When I set the book in Odessa, the humor capital of the former Soviet Union, I knew my characters had to have the same tough reactions. It was important to show the daily difficulties that people there encountered. 

Western Book Roundup

After a two-year hiatus, the Wyoming Book Festival will return to Cheyenne on September 19, with a streamlined list of presenters.  The festival hosted 70 authors during its first year, 2007, but this year it’s focusing on eight writers: Margaret Coel, Tina Forkner, Gene Gagliano, Craig Johnson, Zak Pullen, Cindy Reynders, Peg Sundberg ("Cowgirl Peg"), and Cat Urbigkit.  Readings, book signings, and discussions will take place at Lions Park in Cheyenne from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Tina Lackey of Wyoming State Library told the Wyoming Arts Blog: “Festival goers told us the past festival was too spread out, which made it difficult to attend all the events. This time we made it much more convenient for them.” The Wyoming Book Festival Blog features profiles of all the participants.

Randy Dotinga recently wrote in the Christian Science Monitor that this year’s fall season in books is “chock-full of star authors, a bounty that could pull the publishing industry out of its doldrums or leave few winners and many losers…Add other complicating factors, such as the rise of books in electronic form and the desperate struggle of some booksellers, and the fall looks to be one humdinger of a season for publishers, stores, and authors, not to mention ordinary readers.”

But when he spoke to Arsen Kashkashian, the book buyer for the Boulder Book Store, Kashkashian demonstrated “perhaps the most calm of anyone in the industry,” saying the fall book season has “a little more sense of urgency to it,” and that the book store has “adapted to what the economy is.” Kaskashian offered some extra commentary in his Twitter feed: “I just seem calm, because anything the book industry can throw my way doesn’t compare to the chaos of having a baby in the house.”

Also in the Roundup: Jon Krakauer’s Boulder appearance, “The Dude” is in talks to play Rooster Cogburn, and a couple saves Libby’s Cabinet Books and Music.

WORLD WANDERER

OK, so this guy walks into a bar in small-town New Mexico. He sits at the counter, turns to the guy beside him and says something like, “Hi, I’m Tim Cahill, famous adventure writer.”

Their conversation changes the other guy’s life. He’s so moved, he zaps Cahill an email thanking him for inspiring him to follow his dream.

That’s very nice, Cahill shoots back, only I’ve never been to that bar, or that town, and I’ve never met you. The punch line? Tim Cahill is so cool, other people walk around pretending to be him.“Some guy is getting laid using my name,” Cahill laughs. “I’m not even getting laid using my name.”

Cahill has the job the rest of us dream about. As a travel writer, he has bounded across the planet in high-adrenaline pursuits. His writing is so funny it’s easy to forget how insightful it is, but by the end of his essays, readers find themselves transported not just across the globe, but into a whole new way of thinking about the world around them. 

Western Book Roundup

Has anyone else out there ever been on a hike gone awry that feels like something out of Cormac McCarthy‘s No Country for Old Men is about to happen?  Over the weekend my family and I decided to explore some nearby open space.  We pulled off on the side of a road in a rural area outside of Boulder and hiked up a yucca-and-prickly-pear-filled hill.  We discovered that the baby had pitched his baseball hat somewhere along the way.  We looked for it on the way down and couldn’t find it.  There was no trail, the vegetation was scratchy, and I was the only one wearing jeans, so I went back to search for the hat while my husband fed the kids snacks by the car. 

I didn’t find the hat, and on my way back down a man that sounded a few yards away yelled a string of expletives at someone else, startling me because I thought I was alone.  A man emerged from the underbrush and started walking down the road toward my family while I watched from the hill.  He didn’t look like the hiking sort—stocky and dressed in black urban clothes, dark-haired, with a whisker-stubbled, scarred-up face. 

I thought, where have I seen this before?  And I remembered the scene in No Country for Old Men where Anton Chigurh is about to dispatch a guy pulled over on the side of the road with a cattle bolt gun.  So I start to gesture at my husband to convey I don’t know what—a Cormac McCarthy villain is approaching?  What would the sign for that be?  I just sort of waved my hands and mouthed “NO.”

Chigurh approached my husband and I couldn’t hear what he said.  I hoped it wasn’t, “You know how this is going to turn out, don’t you?”

Also in the Roundup: Montana book events for Dennis Dunn and Janet Skeslien Charles.