New West Book Review

Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel
by Jeannette Walls
Scribner, 288 pages, $25

In her author’s note, Jeannette Walls explains how she came to write this novel about her singular grandmother: “This book was originally meant to be about my mother’s childhood growing up on a cattle ranch in Arizona.  But as I talked to Mom about those years, she kept insisting that her mother was the one who had led the truly interesting life and that the book should be about Lily.” Walls’ mom was right: Lily Casey Smith is a one-of-a-kind horse-breaking, whiskey-drinking, poker-playing, moonshine-selling, ranch-running, airplane-flying, pistol-packing, school-teaching, indomitable pioneer. 

The Phoenix-born Walls previously wrote a bestselling memoir, 2005’s The Glass Castle, about her unconventional childhood.  Although Half Broke Horses records the actual events of Lily Casey Smith’s life, Walls writes it in the first-person and creates vivid scenes that she wasn’t present for, so as she puts it, “the only honest thing to do is call the book a novel.” Whatever you call it, it’s a fascinating book, packed with harrowing situations, colorful characters, and beautiful description of the southwest landscape that Lily knew intimately from her years ranching it.

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.

New West Book Review

The Financial Lives of the Poets
by Jess Walter
Harper, 290 pages, $25.99

In his hilarious and timely new novel, Spokane’s Jess Walter explores the maxim that there’s nothing more dangerous than an unemployed man, even though the primary person in danger may be the man himself, as is the case with protagonist Matt Prior.  Several years before The Financial Lives of the Poets begins, Matt was a business reporter for a daily newspaper and he decided to pursue his ill-conceived dream: starting a website that reports business news in poetry form.  When Poetfolio.com tanked before it was even launched, something that everyone but Matt could see coming, Matt scurried back to his newspaper job.  But because he’d left, he lost his seniority at the paper, and was one of the first to be laid off when the paper downsized.

Matt couldn’t afford to lose his job: he’s got an enormous mortgage on a big house, a car payment, a garage full of supposedly collectible crap that his wife purchased in a compulsive shopping binge on eBay, and two non-Catholic young sons who attend Catholic school because the neighborhood public school reminds Matt of Sing-Sing.  One evening when Matt has just received a letter from the mortgage company threatening foreclosure in a week, he is becoming increasingly suspicious of his wife’s Facebook conversations with her old high school boyfriend, and his unemployment benefits are about to run out, Matt heads to a 7-Eleven to buy some milk.  “Two tattooed white kids in silk sweat suits step to the line behind me and I tense a little, double-pat my wallet,” Walter writes.  As Matt walks outside, one of the guys offers him “a hit on a glass blunt.”

Jess Walter will discuss The Financial Lives of the Poets at Powells Books in Portland, Ore. on October 29, in Missoula at Fact and Fiction on November 5, and at the University Bookstore in Moscow, Idaho on December 3.

New West Book Review

Tree Spiker: From Earth First! to Lowbagging: My Struggles in Radical Environmental Action
by Mike Roselle with Josh Mahan
St. Martin’s Press
252 pages, $24.99

Mike Roselle is a co-founder of the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network, Earth First!, and the Ruckus Society.  Tree Spiker details his life as an environmental activist and outsider agitator.  In his acknowledgments, Roselle notes that this book doesn’t completely cover the movement or even his memories, but that we should think of it as “a series of campfire tales and late-night bar talk.” And that’s exactly how it reads: like sitting next to a great storyteller and hearing his fascinating experiences.

Anyone living in the West, or anyone even remotely interested in the environment or environmental groups, should read Tree Spiker.  When I looked at the gothic-like cover with spooky trees and horror writing yellow font, I wasn’t sure how much I would like it.  In college I read Edward Abbey’s books and found Hayduke’s slovenly sexism and tossing aluminum cans out car windows unattractive, and I figured Roselle would be more of the same.  But then I read he spent part of his childhood in Butler County, Kentucky, where a billboard with a picture of three hooded Klansmen burning a cross welcomed people to Klan country.  That intrigued me, but Roselle hooked me with:

“I heard a rumor that my father, Stewart Lee, was in town.  I hadn’t seen him since my step-grandfather chased him out of our house with a pistol he kept for that purpose.  The last time I saw him, he was running down South Eighth Street toward the bars on Magnolia Street.”

Mike Roselle will read from Tree Spiker at Back of Beyond Books in Moab on October 15th (7 p.m.), in Jackson at Valley Book Store on October 20 (5 p.m.), in Missoula at Fact & Fiction on Tuesday, October 27 (3 p.m.) and at a fundraiser at The Badlander (7 p.m.), and in Portland at Julia’s Cafe on October 30 (7 p.m.).

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.

New West Book Review

Nine Ten Again
by Phil Condon
Elixir Press, 186 pages, $17

Looking out the window each day at peaceful American streets, it’s difficult for many of us to tell that our country is at war.  But the characters in Missoula writer Phil Condon’s sharply-written new story collection, Nine Ten Again, are all too aware of the far-away wars that the U.S. has participated in over the past few decades, which have affected them in ways both tangible and intangible.  Yellow ribbons appear throughout the book not as symbols of hope but as symptoms of malignancy, signs of the wars that rob people of their lives, mental health, self-respect, and peace of mind.

Most of Condon’s characters work blue-collar jobs, and so they are not as insulated from war as are those with more money.  They are veterans too scarred by their service to hold down a job, or people desperate enough for money to contemplate signing up for a hitch as contractors in the Middle East.  As a character in the title story says, “She ain’t ever gonna be 9-10 again, boys.”

Phil Condon will read from his new book at Fact & Fiction in Missoula on Friday, September 25 (7 p.m.).

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.