Western Photographers

Stephen Strom has been photographing the deserts of the American Southwest for thirty years, creating arresting images of forbidding, breathtaking landscapes containing geological formations and striking colors like nothing else on earth. Strom worked for over a decade as an astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, where he first began to “love the desert.” Strom’s photography has been featured in several books, including the recent Otero Mesa: Saving America’s Wildest Grassland and the new Earth Forms (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 96 pages, 43 photographs, $45), which collects his entrancing photographs of multi-colored mudhills in New Mexico, the red rock formations of Canyonlands National Park in Utah, and canyons, cliffs, and desert lands throughout California, Nevada, and Arizona. This fall, Strom will present Earth Forms at several galleries, including Tucson’s Etherton Gallery (book signing on October 17, 3-5 p.m.), the Tubac Center for the Arts in Tubac, AZ (book signing on October 28), and Santa Fe’s Verve Gallery of Photography, which will display Storm’s photos from November 13 through January of next year.  I recently interviewed Strom via email about his work process, his explorations of the desert, and how the desert at times becomes “a two-dimensional painting.”

New West: What first attracted you to the desert landscapes that you photograph?

Stephen Strom: The time I spent in Tucson from 1972-83 (as a staff astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory) transformed me into a confirmed desert rat. I learned to love the desert, and over time, began to see and feel the subtle rhythms – color, sculptural, floral – of what appears to most people to be desolate and lifeless. 

Western Book Roundup

The winners of this year’s Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Regional Book Awards were announced last week:

• Adult Fiction: Another Man’s Moccasins: A Walt Longmire Mystery by Craig Johnson (Penguin)

• Adult Nonfiction: American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon by Steven Rinella (Random House)

• The Arts: Colorado’s Wild Horses by Claude Steelman (Wildshots, Inc.)

• Regional Reference: Staking Her Claim: Women Homesteading the West by Marcia Meredith Hensley (High Plains Press)

• Children’s Chapter Book: Go Big or Go Home by Will Hobbs (HarperCollins)

• Children’s Picture Book: The Illuminated Desert by Terry Tempest Williams, illustrations by Chloe Hedden (Canyonlands Natural History Association)

I have only read one of the above books—Rinella’s American Buffalo, which I thoroughly enjoyed and felt certain would win some prizes because it was so entertaining and distinctive.  Plus, who doesn’t like buffaloes?

The selection that interests me the most is the Adult Fiction winner, Craig Johnson’s Another Man’s Moccasins.  I’m sorry to say I haven’t yet read anything by Johnson, and it’s interesting to note that this is the first time since the MPIBA started giving these awards in 1991 that this category has been won by a genre novel rather than a work of literary fiction.  Some of the best contemporary books with Western settings have won this award—including Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses, Larry Watson’s Montana 1948, Rick Bass’s The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness—so I’m sure that Johnson’s work must rise above regular mystery genre conventions.  Clearly I’ve been missing out.  If there are any Craig Johnson fans out there, leave a comment and let me know what captured your attention in his books. 

Johnson wrote a classy thank you on the MPIBA blog, which begins, “All right, there are a few awards I figured I’d never get, and I got both of them this year—one was the Western Writer’s of America Spur Award and the other is the Mountains & Plains Independent Bookseller’s Association (Regional Book Award - Fiction) Novel of the Year.”

Speaking of genre vs. literary novels, a while back I pondered why it seemed like there were more genre novels set in Colorado, and more literary novels set in Montana.  But lately a number of genre novels with Montana settings have come to my attention: 

Western Book Roundup

White House Press Secretary Bill Burton announced a list of five books that President Obama is bringing on his vacation in Martha’s Vineyard.  Among them is Kent Haruf‘s Plainsong.  Now, during last year’s Democratic National Convention in Denver, Jeff Lee of the Rocky Mountain Land Library asked a bunch of notable Western writers and…me to contribute a “reading list for the President-Elect: A Western States Primer for the Next Administration.” The Tattered Cover featured many of these suggestions in a display.  One of the books on my list was Plainsong.  (Rick Bass and Laura Pritchett also assigned Plainsong for presidential reading.)

More than just a coincidence?  Isn’t it pretty to think so?

The vegetation is getting crispy around here, and so it’s appropriate that Stephen Pyne is coming to Boulder to discuss his book, Flame and Fortune. A Brief History of Fire in America for the Center for the American West on September 3 (CU Boulder campus, Eaton Humanities 150, 7 p.m.).  According to a press release, Pyne will talk about “fire in America and…the issues it raises about the interface of wild lands and urban development.”

Also in the Roundup: A forthcoming book set in a Colorado boys’ reformatory, and Elmer Kelton is remembered.

Western Writers

Malie Meloy grew up in Helena, currently lives in Los Angeles, and has become one of the most acclaimed young American fiction writers in recent years, with two novels (2003’s Liars and Saints and 2006’s A Family Daughter) and two short story collections (2002’s Half in Love and the new Both Ways Is The Only Way I Want It) to her credit.  Granta listed her among the 21 ”Best Young American Novelists” in a 2007 feature, and she has won several awards including The Aga Khan Prize for Fiction from The Paris Review, a PEN/Malamud Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Meloy will appear in Missoula at this year’s Montana Festival of the Book on October 22 (Wilma Theater).  I recently interviewed Meloy via email about her new story collection, her writing process, and the difference in word choice between her and her brother, The Decemberists‘ Colin Meloy.

New West: Eight of the eleven stories in this collection are narrated by or written from the perspective of male characters.  Why did you decide to write mainly from the male perspective?

Maile Meloy: The stories were written over several years, so I didn’t realize how prevalent the male perspective was until I was putting the book together.  There was a while when I was first writing stories when I didn’t feel I could write a man’s voice, but now it feels almost more comfortable, maybe because it’s easier to keep myself out of it. 

Tester Wilderness Bill

Acclaimed writer Rick Bass, author of The Wild Marsh and Why I Came West—a 2008 finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography—has published an interesting essay about the Forest Jobs and Recreation Act proposed by Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont.

The essay in Yale Environment360, a publication of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, gives Bass’s perspective as a longtime conservationist, Yaak Valley resident and member of the Yaak Valley Forest Council.

“It would be a good dramatic story if this bill was a sellout, but it’s not,” Bass writes.

Western Book Roundup

The Association of Writers & Writing Programs will hold its annual conference in Denver next year, April 7 thorough 10. Michael Chabon will give the keynote address, and some well-known Western writers (as well as some not-so-Western ones) will be there. Rick Bass, Joy Harjo, Robert Hass, George Saunders, Danzy Senna, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gary Snyder, Terry Tempest Williams, David Wroblewski, and many others will be on hand to read from their work and discuss literature.

Farther down the food chain, I'll be moderating a panel called "To West or Not To West," organized by Colorado fiction writer Steven Wingate, author of one of my favorite books from last year, Wifeshopping. The authors on the panel will be Wingate, Laura Pritchett, Marilyn Krysl, Robert Garner McBrearty and Janis Hallowell. Wingate described the topic in this way:

"Fiction writers in the West inevitably find themselves face to face with two forces: the region’s role in America’s cultural mythos and the shadow of 'the Western' as a genre in fiction and film. Many writers with roots in the West do not write 'western' fiction, yet feel their aesthetics and subject matter being influenced by the life of the region. This panel will explore the variety that Colorado fiction writers respond to the West at a time when the identity of the region is shifting."

Also in the Roundup: The Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Trade Show and Barnes & Noble opens a new store in Boulder. [more]

Western Writers

Reading Christopher Cokinos’s new book, The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars (Tarcher/Penguin, 528 pages, $27.95), is like taking an adventurous romp into the realm of meteorites and their hunters. Passion, science, dreams, and desire are all brought together in this book, which makes it an exciting study of the human psyche as well as an in-depth exploration of nature and science. Cokinos currently lives with his partner Kathe Lison along the Blacksmith Fork River in Northern Utah’s Cache Valley. He teaches creative writing at Utah State University, where he has appointments in English and Natural Resources. I recently caught up with Christopher Cokinos to get the scoop on where this book took him (Greenland! Antarctica!), how it gave him a deeper love of his Utah home, and why—despite the far-flung research he conducted for this book—he still considers himself a “reluctant adventurer.” He will read from The Fallen Sky in Salt Lake City on August 27 at King’s English Bookstore (7 p.m.).

New West: You say that your new book, The Fallen Sky, is “an intimate history of shooting stars.” What do you mean by that?

Christopher Cokinos: Well, it’s a way to indicate that this is not traditional science writing or natural history. The book has a strong memoir thread—much stronger than I had anticipated—because as I was researching the passions, the lives, the successes and heartbreaks of meteorite hunters, I was in the midst of a new love, a divorce, a parent’s death, a move across the country, and more. [more]

Western Book Roundup

This week fans of short stories with Western settings are in luck. The New Yorker published a story by a young New Mexico writer, Kirstin Valdez Quade, in its July 27 issue, and the annual summer fiction issue of the Atlantic Monthly is out now. The Atlantic has always featured plenty of fiction by Western writers, and this issue is no exception, with stories by Montana's Rick Bass, Ouray, Colo.-based Kent Nelson, and Oregon State University teacher Wayne Harrison.

I enjoyed all the stories, but Kirstin Valdez Quade's "The Five Wounds" especially stands out for its vivid imagery. In it, a 33-year-old man named Amadeo Padilla is going to portray Jesus in a Good Friday reenactment of Christ's passion in a small New Mexico town where this is an annual event. She captures the excitement of the townspeople as they gather to watch Amadeo drag a wooden cross up a hill. She writes:

"This is no silky-haired, rosy-cheeked, honey-eyed Jesus, no Jesus-of-the-children, Jesus-with-the-lambs. Amadeo is pockmarked and bad-toothed, hair shaved close to a scalp scarred from fights, roll of skin where skull meets thick neck. You name the sin, he’s done it: gluttony, sloth, fucked a second cousin on the dark bleachers at the high school." [more]

Western Book Roundup

Billings-based writer and teacher Russell Rowland wrote in recently about an anthology he and Lynn Stegner are putting together. The book "will explore what it means to each of these writers to have lived or grown up in the West, as well as how they see the identity of the West changing over time." The University of Texas Press will publish it this spring. Rowland reports the tentative title is The Sum of These Parts, but that could change. It almost doesn't matter what they call it, because they've managed to convince dozens of talented writers to contribute.

I immediately looked to see whether Rick Bass and Barry Lopez are in: Check. As I've written before, a Western anthology just isn't an anthology without contributions from the Bass-Lopez duo:

"I picture Rick Bass and Barry Lopez sitting side by side at a desk in a spare cabin in the wilderness, dressed in their anthology superhero outfits: identical red plaid shirts. A light on the telephone between them starts blinking. They meet each other’s eyes. It’s the Western anthology hotline, summoning them for duty. Lopez reaches for the receiver. 'Lopez here,' he says. 'What’s the assignment? Ptarmigan? Alpine bryum moss?' He waits. 'Cougars?' He and Bass begin to laugh. 'Give us ten minutes,' Lopez says, hanging up the phone. Bass cracks his knuckles, opens a notebook, takes up his pen, and gets to work."

Besides Bass and Lopez, the book will include contributions from Tobias Wolff, Larry McMurtry, Paige Stegner, Jim Harrison, Annick Smith, Bill Kittredge, Kim Barnes, Judy Blunt, Charles D'Ambrosio, Kevin Canty, Rudolfo Anaya, John Clayton, and Laura Pritchett, just to name a few. Come to think of it, Laura Pritchett is turning up in lots of anthologies these days—maybe Bass and Lopez could add an extra chair in their anthology hotline cabin for her. [more]

Western Book Roundup

I came across a funny passage in "Real Romance," Lauren Collins' profile of Nora Roberts for the June 22 issue of The New Yorker:

"She never makes an outline, and she does most of her research on Google. Before she wrote 'Montana Sky,' her editor suggested that she go to Montana. 'Why would I want to go to Montana?' Roberts said."

Perhaps it's for the best—Montana might not have room for another writer. Last year I noticed a curious lull in the literary output from Montana—usually half the books on my year-end best of the region list are connected to the state in some way. But last year there were more books set in Colorado. Now I realize why there weren't more Montana books—all the writers were preparing them for publication this July.

This week I reviewed a new book by Montana man of letters and woods, Rick Bass, The Wild Marsh, which is my favorite of his nonfiction books…so far.

Up for next week, a new collection of short stories by Maile Meloy, who grew up in Helena and has made a name for herself as one of the best young writers working today. Granta listed her in its "Best Young American Novelists" issue in 2007.

Next, I'm looking forward to reading the new short story collection by Kevin Canty, who teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Montana. [more]