Boulder
Western Book Roundup
Guy from Albuquerque Wins Nobel Prize in Literature
This year's Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a French citizen, or as I prefer to think of him, a guy from Albuquerque. According to the Nobel Prize website, "Since the 90s Le Clézio and his wife share their time between Albuquerque in New Mexico, the island of Mauritius and Nice."
The American literary blogosphere has been abuzz for a couple weeks over the comments that Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, made to reporters from the Associated Press. Engdahl said: "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature…That ignorance is restraining."
Since he is the "top member of the award jury," his beliefs would seem to put any American writer out of contention for the Nobel until Engdahl resigns. When Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was announced as the winner last week, most took it as a sign that Engdahl had made good on his promise to exclude Americans, but the guy lives part time in Albuquerque. How non-American can he be?
Also in the Roundup: The University of Nebraska Press has reason to celebrate, the Women Writing the West symposium kicks off in Denver, and the Colorado Book Award winners are announced.
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watching the polls
Obama Pulling Away in Colorado
Barack Obama now leads John McCain by nine points in Colorado, 52 percent to 43 percent, according to a poll released Tuesday. It's among the widest margins of any poll conducted in the state so far.
The Quinnipiac University poll also surveyed voters in Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, all battlegrounds, and Obama leads by double digits in each.
"They key to winning elections in Colorado is independent voters and Sen. Obama has blown open the race there with his 11-point lead among them. These same voters say 3-1 that the Democrat won the last debate, which drives one more nail into McCain's coffin," said Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.
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Western Writers
An Interview with Kim Barnes, Part Two
In the second half of my interview with Idaho novelist and memoirist Kim Barnes, we discuss the character of Elise, the 17-year-old girl whose difficulties are at the heart of the second half of Barnes' new book, A Country Called Home, how Barnes thinks that the term "regionalist" can diminish Western writers ("This isn't about cattle, people!"), and her current project, a novel set in Saudi Arabia. Barnes will discuss her book on October 15 at the Tattered Cover (Colfax, 7:30 p.m.) at the Montana Festival of the Book on October 25 (Wilma Theater, 7:30 p.m.), and at the University of Idaho on October 29 (7:30 p.m., Law School Courtroom).
NW: In your essay "Why I Wrote In The Wilderness," you write, "I hope to make the connection between being in the literal wilderness and the wilderness that was something other than physical: the wilderness brought on by physical isolation; the wilderness that is the sexuality of a girl coming of age in such an isolated environment; and the wilderness of our souls." Although this is about your memoir, it seems equally applicable to A Country Called Home. The wilderness of sexuality seems to apply to Elise.
KB: Yes, it does. When I start telling the story of Elise coming into her young womanhood, I cast back into my own sense of what that was like as a young woman coming into puberty, and how dangerous I became to the people around me.
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Tough Times for Nonprofits
Without Cash, Western Progress Closes Its Doors
Leading funders of the nonprofit group Western Progress backed away, prompting the nonpartisan thinktank to close its three offices in Missoula, Denver and Phoenix and lay off all 10 of its employees.
"We ran out of money," said board president Alice Madden.
Former Montana U.S. Rep. Pat Williams, who helped found the group almost two years ago, said, "I don't know what to call it. A reneging? It's a delay in funding of two of our biggest contributors. We had thought we had three years of $500,000 contributions from each of the two big contributors. As of yet, neither has come through on what we thought was a promise."
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Western Writers
An Interview with Kim Barnes, Part One
Kim Barnes is a Moscow, Idaho-based novelist and memoirist who teaches at the University of Idaho. Her first memoir, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country, was a finalist for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize. Barnes recently published her second novel, A Country Called Home, and I spoke to her over the phone about her inspiration for the book, how some of the events of her life have informed the novel, and whether or not it's possible for women to be hermits. Barnes will discuss her book on October 15 at the Tattered Cover (Colfax, 7:30 p.m.) and at the Montana Festival of the Book on October 25 (Wilma Theater, 7:30 p.m.). Check back tomorrow for part two of the interview.
New West: How did the idea for A Country Called Home first come to you?
Kim Barnes: I was in between books, which is always a very dangerous time for a writer. I had been working on my first novel, Finding Caruso, and had gotten all the edits done and shipped it off to the publisher. After months and often years in the writing process of being so obsessed with this one project, suddenly it's just gone. For that kind of post-partum depression there's only one cure, which is you have to start writing another book.
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Wildlife Destruction Dept.
Never Let a Bear Drive Your Car
When she went outside on a brisk morning in mid-September, Mary Randall got a rude surprise.
"I noticed the windshield wiper was hanging down and I went, 'Hmm, that's odd.'"
Odd doesn't begin to describe it. Along with a broken wiper, the interior of Randall's car – parked outside her home in the Sugarloaf area in the canyons above Boulder – had been completely destroyed by a scavenging bear.
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Western Book Roundup
Helena, Moab, and Denver Host Literary Festivals
It's literary award and festival season across the region. Colorado Humanities and Colorado Center for the Book will announce the winners of the 17th annual Colorado Book Awards tonight at the Tivoli Turnhalle on the Auraria Campus in Denver (6-10 p.m.), and tickets are available for $75. As I mentioned before, several of the books we've reviewed over the past year are finalists for awards.
Meanwhile in Utah, Confluence: A Celebration of Reading and Writing in Moab will be held from October 14 through 19.
Farther north, the Helena Festival of the Book kicks off today. Authors scheduled to participate include Hipólito Rafael Chacón, whose book Brian D'Ambrosio recently reviewed for New West, Russell Rowland, a writing teacher at MSU-Billings and the editor of The Smoking Poet and Stone's Throw magazine (which is accepting submissions now), and Missoula essayist Susanna Sonnenberg.
Also in the Roundup: Boulder Book Store celebrates its 35th Anniversary, and even more festivals are to come in Missoula and Denver this month.
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New West Book Review
Marathon Woman: Rachel Toor’s “Personal Record”
Personal Record: A Love Affair with Running
By Rachel Toor
University of Nebraska Press, 164 pages, $24.95
Rachel Toor, who earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana and currently lives in Spokane, came late to the sport of running. She writes that she was "a bookish egghead who ran only to catch a bus," never competing in high school or college meets or even casual jogs, and didn't lace up her sneakers until encouraged to do so by a boyfriend when she was "on the edge of thirty." But then she took to the sport with the fervor of a convert, hiring a coach, joining running groups, and participating in marathons, ultramarathons, and a sport called "Ride and Tie," in which two runners and a horse complete a course of between 30 and 40 miles. In her new essay collection, Personal Record, Toor immerses the reader in the world of long-distance running, examining her bruised, muscular body, the contents of her closet, her pantry jammed with energy gels and protein bars, and her love life in the process of explaining what running means to her and describing the experiences the sport has given her.
Rachel Toor will discuss her book in Missoula at Shakespeare and Company on October 14 at 7:30 p.m.
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TROUBLE IN GLITTER GULCH
Meltdown Hits Snow Country
While Wall Street was trying to regain its staggering losses and Congress was reaching for a way to prop up the economy’s tumbling dominoes, it was party time at Vail.
At the foot of Beaver Creek Mountain, 1,000 people came last Friday to nibble caviar and sample from the ice-carved vodka bar at its newest luxury lodge: a half-a-billion-dollar world of ski valets and spa treatments, all in a LEED-certified, eco-friendly setting.
The world’s woes can seem far away in these playgrounds of the Masters of the Universe. But the economic meltdown is having its effects here, too. Foreclosures are rising. The once-meteoric real estate industry is sputtering.
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'The Dirtiest Fuel on the Planet'
Oil Shale Ban Dropped
Along with the ban on offshore drilling in U.S. coastal waters, the Congressional moratorium on leasing federal lands for oil-shale exploration expired last night at midnight. Which will have a larger impact on America's energy future is debatable.
Environmentalists are alarmed about the oil-shale slowdown ending, because they fear it will open the door for taxpayer funding for "the dirtiest fuel on the planet" (as the Natural Resources Defense Council put it) to be exploited at huge expense and with great damage to environment in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, where the world's richest deposits of kerogen lay trapped in rock deep underground.
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