Western Writers

Charles Wilkinson has written several notable books on a wide range of issues facing the modern West. His latest book, The People Are Dancing Again: The History of the Siletz Tribe of Western Oregon (University of Washington Press, 576 pages, $35) is a fascinating, at times heart-wrenching, historical account of the tribe he worked to help restore in the seventies. The book traces the long history of the Siletz, from the days preceding contact with Euro-American settlers, through war, relocation, and eventual termination as a federally recognized tribe. It continues into the modern era with the tribe’s restoration and subsequent revival of traditional heritage, arts, and language. Widely regarded as one of the nation’s pre-eminent experts in tribal and natural resources law in the West, Wilkinson is Distinguished Professor and Moses Lasky Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School, and is the author of many books, including The Eagle Bird: Mapping a New West and Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations.

New West: This book obviously grew from a deep personal regard for the Siletz people, and for their remarkable survival amidst immense adversity. How did this project first come about?

Charles Wilkinson: I was an attorney at the Native American Rights Fund here in Boulder in the seventies, and had represented the Menominee tribe of Wisconsin in being restored. Congress had terminated tribes in the fifties, broken the treaties, sold off the land, and ended all federal services, with the idea that they’d just blend into the larger society. The policy was a colossal failure. When the Menominee were the first tribe to be restored, people from Siletz came out and said they wanted to achieve restoration, and I was assigned to the case.

Very soon after that, by coincidence I went to teach at the University of Oregon Law School and I was now within two hours of the reservation. That meant that I got to see a lot of the Siletz people. It was the time of the fish wars in the Northwest, when tribes had been awarded fifty percent of the salmon runs, so Indian issues were very sensitive and there was strong opposition from the fishing community to the bill.  There were a lot of public meetings, at which the tribal members and I would go to explain that the bill didn’t affect fishing rights. There were a lot of late night meetings and I just got to know people really well.

Western Book Roundup

Boise’s Anthony Doerr continued his winning streak last weekend, collecting the The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award for his story “The Deep,” which came with a £30,000 prize. (Last month he won the $20,000 Story Prize for his collection Memory Wall). Doerr spoke with the Boise Weekly just before the win, and noted that the award ceremony was to be held in the Great Hall of Christ Church College at Oxford University, “where they film the great hall of Hogwarts.” It’s like I’ve been telling you these past months--literary Boise is en fuego.

• Craig Johnson reported in his newsletter that filming will begin this month on a television pilot based on his Walt Longmire mysteries. Johnson notes that the crew is filming in the “Las Vegas/Taos/Santa Fe area of New Mexico, since it was deemed that Wyoming’s weather was too unstable for shooting a series and had too much snow to appear to be spring.” The show, for Warner Horizon and A&E, will be called “Longmire.” Johnson explains if the pilot gets picked up, they will film a dozen episodes for the first season, “borrowing chunks of the novels, but following their own tales because of the amount of stories they need to tell and the time constraints in which to tell them.” (Via Wyoming Arts Blog.)

Also in the Roundup: Chris Abani speaks in Utah, Western readers snap up eBooks, and Philip Connors visits the Boulder Book Store.

Western Writers

On Thursday Ted Conover will be awarded the Evil Companions Literary Award, the longest-running literary prize in Denver, honoring distinguished writers with ties to the West. According to the website of the Denver Public Library Friends Foundation, “the award pays homage to a group of Denver writers who met in the 1950s and ‘60s to drink and discuss writing, and dubbed themselves the Evil Companions.” Conover grew up in Denver and has produced five engrossing, acclaimed works of investigative journalism, beginning with 1984’s Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes, which he published when he was 26. Conover’s Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent book, The Routes of Man: Travels in the Paved World (Vintage, 352 pages, $15.95), is now available in paperback. I invited Conover to take a look back at his accomplished career, and he answered some questions via email about his books and how he sought to “move beyond the interview, that staple of journalism, to a deeper understanding, a felt knowledge.”

New West: You attended Denver Public Schools and graduated from Manual High School. In Rolling Nowhere, you mention that your father was a lawyer with a large downtown firm, but you went to school with students from less privileged circumstances. Did attending diverse schools contribute to your desire to immerse yourself in other cultures?

Ted Conover: Yes. It showed me that some important things were not on the curriculum—but suggested that maybe I could teach myself about them, nevertheless.

Books of the West

Writing the Great American Novel seemed out of the question. So instead I set out to write the Decent Denver Novel. Why Denver, you ask? Why not Denver, I say. New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, even Santa Fe, Missoula, and Las Vegas have scores of writers telling their stories. There are plenty of authors in Denver writing literary novels, but many of them choose to set their work elsewhere. Why shouldn’t Denver be the star?

I grew up in Denver, and I’ve always loved my hometown unreasonably, so I wanted to honor it by telling a big, sweeping story about its inhabitants. Okay, I’m not the first to write a Denver novel. If you search the Library of Congress catalog for “Denver fiction,” you’ll find dozens of romances, science fiction novels, and mysteries set in Denver by such writers as Sarah Andrews, Robert Greer, Margaret Coel, Suzanne Proulx, Manuel Ramos, and Michael Stone.

Jenny Shank will discuss The Ringer at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on April 8 (7:30 p.m.) and at the Boulder Book Store on April 27 (7:30 p.m.).

Western Writers

Boise writer Alan Heathcock’s impressive debut short story collection Volt (Graywolf Press, 208 pages, $15) examines the gritty realities of life in a small town called Krafton, somewhere in rural America. The New York Times called Volt “galvanizing proof of [Heathcock’s] talent,” and the book, which is in its third printing, received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. I recently interviewed Heathcock via email about how movies influence his fiction, why he thinks ”Volt is basically an episode of Roy Rogers, just with the blood on-screen, and without the singing away of pain,” and why Boise should be declared New West’s new Literary Capital of America. (Are you listening, Cody, Wyo.?)

New West: Your stories made me think of movies. There are several references to movies in Volt, such as the moment in “Smoke” where Vernon imagines or hallucinates that he’s talking to Roy Rogers in the middle of moving a body, or “Fort Apache,” which begins in a movie theater and addresses the contrast between the dreams movies offer people and the realities of life. Even the structure of “Peacekeeper” reminded me of a technique sometimes used in film, the way it flashes back and forth in time and gradually reveals the mystery at its center. Are movies an influence on your writing?

Alan Heathcock: I have no hobbies.  I raise my kids, love my wife, read books, write, and watch movies.  I watch a lot of movies.  I’ve kept a movie log for the past 15 years and as of today I’ve watched 3,061 films during that time.  That’s not to say that I’m not equally influenced by books, or by life itself, but film is absolutely an influence.  Some of the most important literature of the past 100 years has been on celluloid.  I feel compelled to pay close attention.  In fact, whenever I see a scene in a film, or even a moment, I take out my notebook and try and write that scene, to translate cinema into words, taking it from the external sensory medium and into the empathetic medium that is fiction.  I find this exercise to be highly rewarding.  I once wrote out the entire film, Winter Light, by Ingmar Bergman.  It taught me a great deal—for example, I was surprised the entire film could be written out in only about fifty pages, which made me then worry less about the idea that a shorter work couldn’t be completely full and rewarding.  The film Following by Christopher Nolan, is directly responsible for the structural decisions I made when writing my story “Peacekeeper”.  I’ve studied dialog from There Will Be Blood and have taken images from Scorsese and The Coen Brothers, worked to discover how David Lynch builds tension through environment.  Sometimes I think it’s easier to learn from film because it’s not fiction, because I have to think my way in deciding how it could/would/should be written to its highest effect, how words operate to create theme music and lighting and subtle gestures of the finest actors.

Western Book Roundup

Boise fiction-writing powerhouse Anthony Doerr just won the $20,000 Story Prize for his recent collection Memory Wall, and now he’s made the shortlist of six finalists for an award with a very long name: The Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. Why does it have such a long name? Because according to the press release, it’s “the world’s most valuable short story award” and the winner gets £30,000 so they can call it whatever they want. My handy pound-to-dollar converter tells me that’s $47,954--for one story! And you thought writing short stories was a career destined to result in penury. For chumps maybe, but not for A-Dog, which is the name I’ve just invented for Mr. Doerr. If he wins, he needs to get a necklace with a solid-gold £ symbol hanging from it. We’ll find out how Doerr’s story “The Deep” fared on April 8 when the winners are announced at the The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival.

Also in the Roundup: The Whitefish Review hosts a fundraiser at Turner Mountain, Montana-raised Kim Baker’s book about Afghanistan earns rave reviews, and Craig Lancaster’s 600 Hours of Edward is this year’s One Book Billings selection.

Western Writers

Jenny Shank’s debut novel, The Ringer (The Permanent Press, 352 pages, $29), begins with a tragic mistake when a police officer shoots and kills a man on a no-knock warrant that’s been written for the wrong address. The shooting intimately affects the two families involved—the police officer’s and the slain man’s—but it also sparks an outcry from an entire community concerned with larger issues of justice, race, and class. The fictional setting for this novel is Denver, and the drama plays out against the backdrop of championship Little League baseball. Baseball fans should note that The Ringer’s publication coincides with the beginning of Major League spring training, but this book will appeal equally to baseball fans and to those who just want to read a great story that combines police drama with personal loss and a community’s quest for redemption.

Jenny Shank is an award-winning writer who grew up in Denver and currently lives in Boulder with her husband, daughter, and son. The Ringer, her first novel, was a semi-finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship and the Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel Award. I recently caught up with Jenny Shank to find out more about The Ringer’s real-life influences and to understand what makes this accomplished young writer tick. Shank will discuss The Ringer at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on April 8 (7:30 p.m.) and at the Boulder Book Store on April 27 (7:30 p.m.).

New West: Jenny, you’re not shy about admitting your upbringing in the Denver public school system. In The Ringer’s acknowledgments, you give a shout-out to your hometown, saying: “Denver, I love you.” How did your close ties to this city help you construct Denver as the setting for The Ringer?

Jenny Shank: There’s a chance that I would have still been a writer if I hadn’t gone through the Denver Public Schools, but I have no idea what I would be writing about. I attended school in Denver during the period of court-ordered desegregation for integration. Many white families left the district at that time, but mine stayed, so starting when I was six years old, I rode the bus thirty minutes across town to a school in west Denver that had a majority Mexican-American population. Later, the Mexican-American kids were bused to my neighborhood. Then in middle school I was bused to Five Points, Denver’s historically black neighborhood. That was in the early ‘90s, during the height of gang violence between the Crips and the Bloods in Denver, and my middle school was a recruiting ground for Crips. 

Western Book Roundup

The beginnings of a spring thaw must have mobilized the region’s writers, because most of what I have to report today has to do with regional book tours:

• Denver author Cara Lopez Lee will visit Fact & Fiction in Missoula at 7 p.m. tonight to discuss her memoir They Only Eat Their Husbands: A Memoir of Alaskan Love, World Travel, and the Power of Running Away (Ghost Road Press, $19.95). The publisher describes the book in this way:

“At twenty-six, after a lover threatens to kill her, Cara runs away to Alaska. In the Last Frontier she lands in a love triangle with two alcoholics: Sean the martial artist and Chance the paraglider pilot. Nine years later, sick of love, she runs again, to backpack around the world alone. They Only Eat Their Husbands is a memoir of her yearlong trek, against a backdrop of reflections on her life and loves in Alaska.”

Also in the Roundup: Book tours for Tim Sullivan and Ruth McLaughlin, Ted Conover wins the Evil Companions Literary Award, and I’ll talk to Chérie Newman on this week’s The Write Question on Montana Public Radio.

Western Book Roundup

Filmmakers Alex and Andrew Smith (the sons of Montana writer Annick Smith) are adapting James Welch’s signature novel, Winter in the Blood, into a movie, according to a recent article in the Missoulian (via Twitter.com/Submishmash). Jamie Kelly interviewed Welch’s wife Lois, who said that he had always dreamed of seeing Winter in the Blood become a movie. They hope to begin filming this summer in Montana, and will work with several actors with Montana ties, including Chaske Spencer and Lily Gladstone, according to the cast list on the film’s website.

• On March 19, a number of writers’ organizations from Colorado will host a “Writers Fest” at the Tattered Cover (LoDo), from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. (free). The event, sponsored by the Colorado Authors’ League and Denver Woman’s Press Club, will bring representatives from Women Writing the West, Mystery Writers of America, Rocky Mountain Children’s Writers, Romance Writers of America, Lighthouse Writers, ACC Writers Studio, Pikes Peak Writers, Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, and Author U, along with several literary agents together to talk to people about local writing groups. Speakers include Anita Mumm of Nelson Literary Agency, who will discuss ‘What Agents Look for in a Query Letter,” and Michael Henry of the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, who will discuss “Writing the Image: Using Details to Make Your Writing Vivid and Memorable.”

Also in the Roundup: Denver to host 2012 Women of the World Poetry Slam, Marcia Hensley reads at Grand Valley Books in Grand Junction, and The Bookery Nook in Denver exhibits rare nude Madonna photos.

Western Book Roundup

Listen up: Western writers kicked butt last week.

First, Boise’s Anthony Doerr won The Story Prize for his collection Memory Wall. The Story Prize awards $20,000 annually to one writer of an outstanding collection of fiction in English published during the prior year.

Next, the finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction were announced, and the shortlist includes--straight out of Laramie--Brad Watson’s Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives.

Then, Denver novelist Carleen Brice traveled to Los Angeles Friday for the NAACP Image Awards, where Sins of the Mother, a Lifetime original movie based on Brice’s first novel Orange, Mint and Honey, was nominated for Outstanding Television Movie, Mini-Series or Dramatic Special. Did she win? You bet your Rocky Mountain oysters she did. (Visit her fabulous blog, White Readers Meet Black Authors, why don’t you?)

Meanwhile, The Weird Sisters by Denver’s Eleanor Brown and West of Here by Washington state novelist Jonathan Evison are hanging out together on the New York Times Best-Seller List for Hardcover Fiction. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Montana’s Jaime Ford has been on the paperback fiction list for forty weeks now.

See? It’s all about training at altitude.

Also in the Roundup: A reading to commemorate the six-month anniversary of the Fourmile Canyon fire in Boulder, and the Tuscon Festival of Books.