Books & Writers
Western Book Roundup
Oprah Picks Wroblewski’s “Sawtelle” and “Brokeback” Porn Aggrieves Proulx
It's getting to be all David Wroblewski all the time around here at the Roundup, but heck, this is big news: Oprah has named The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by the Westminster, Colo. writer as her next Book Club selection. Check out my interview with him, which I conducted a few weeks before the book was published, and my review of it for the Rocky Mountain News here. Patti Thorn, Books Editor at the Rocky, has the post-Oprah announcement scoop with Wroblewski.
Earlier this month, Robert J Hughes of the Wall Street Journal interviewed Annie Proulx about her new story collection. Proulx said that this would be her final collection of Wyoming stories, because she wants to avoid the "regional-writer" label. She also remarked on how the film version of "Brokeback Mountain" affected her life: "'Brokeback Mountain' has had little effect on my writing life, but is the source of constant irritation in my private life."
Also in the Roundup: Book news from Idaho's Joan Opyr and Kim Barnes and Oregon's Floyd Skloot, and Missoula mourns the death of crime novelist James Crumley.
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New West Interview
An Interview with Amy Shearn
In Amy Shearn's debut novel, How Far is the Ocean From Here, Susannah Prue, a nine-month pregnant surrogate mother for a wealthy Chicago couple flees to the desert "somewhere between West Texas and East New Mexico" and installs herself at the “godforsaken fleabag” Thunder Lodge motel, where she tries to sort out her complex emotions and makes a set of quirky friends. I recently interviewed Shearn via email about the inspiration for her book, writing from the perspective of a pregnant woman, and how she "always felt like anything could happen in the southwest."
New West: How did you come up with the idea to build a novel around a nine-month-pregnant woman fleeing to the desert?
Amy Shearn: It really all came from an image that just popped into my head of this pregnant woman driving alone through the desert. I had a vague idea that somehow the baby wasn’t hers, which obviously didn’t make any sense, so the whole process of writing the book was really an exercise in picking apart this mystery I’d set up for myself. Also, I’m just interested in those weird things that the human body can do. Pregnancy itself is surreal enough, but surrogacy sounds like science fiction.
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NEW WEST BOOK REVIEW
Stephen Trimble’s “Bargaining for Eden”
Bargaining for Eden
by Stephen Trimble
University of California Press
319 pages, $29.95
The contemporary story of the American West is being written in town halls across the region where neighbors stand at odds with one another over their vision for the prized landscapes that surround them.
Every area has its Eden besieged by developers, and each one inevitably becomes buried in controversy, and sometimes scandal.
For author Stephen Trimble, the Eden was northern Utah’s Snowbasin, and its controversies, complete with a billionaire developer, backroom Congressional deals and the Olympic scandals that would soon mar the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics, outdo most.
Stephen Trimble will present his book at the Tattered Cover (LoDo) on October 4 (2 p.m.) and at the Utah Humanities Book Festival at the Salt Lake City Main Library on October 25.
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Western Book Roundup
Wyoming Reads, Wroblewski Takes His Time on Film Deal
It seems like every week I have some new information to mention about bestselling Colorado writer David Wroblewski, so here's today's tidbit: Rachel Deahl of Publishers Weekly reports: "…48-year-old debut author David Wroblewski has made an unusual request—he's asked would-be producers to pitch their film ideas to him in person so he can choose who’s most deserving of the film rights. The unusual (and demanding) move, if nothing else, will make a quick acquisition unlikely." This seems to be characteristic of Wroblewski, who took over a decade to craft his hit novel. He continues to be more concerned with quality than speed. (Via Texas Pages.)
The September 11 edition of The Economist reported that libraries and reading are thriving in Wyoming. (Via The Book Bench.) The article featured Burns, Wyoming's library, noting, "This town of just 300 people has a public library containing 11,500 books."
Also in the Roundup: Casper College hosts the 22nd annual Equality State Book Festival, The Wasatch Journal sponsors a Western short story contest, and the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association's annual trade show hits Colorado Springs.
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headwaters summit
David James Duncan and Reciprocal Restoration
There is of course no better person to commence (and, it seemed, consecrate) a conference on the confluence of water resources and climate change than David James Duncan, the Lolo-based author of The River Why, River Teeth, and My Story as Told by Water, a self-described small-scale activist who, as he wrote in My Stories, "has waded the flow of hundreds of wild streams, held thousands of trout and salmon in (his) hands, watched a million silver rises."
Keynoting the Headwaters Summit that's continuing over the next two days in Missoula, near the largest river restoration project in the world, Duncan said, "True restoration is a slow, careful, reciprocal conversation with nature."
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New West Book Review
25 New Mexico Photographers Featured in New Book
Photography: New Mexico
Edited by Thomas F. Barrow, Kristin Barendsen, and Stuart Ashman
Fresco Fine Art Publications, 284 pages, $95
In the first half of the twentieth century, New Mexico's rugged landscape, rich culture, and generous sky attracted a throng of photographers who came to define the form, including Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. As Stuart A. Ashman writes in his introduction to Photography: New Mexico, Mabel Dodge Luhan invited artists and writers to Taos to visit the "desert salon" she maintained, and many came, including D.H. Lawrence, Paul Strand, and Georgia O'Keefe.
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New West Book Review
Alan Gottlieb’s “Ultimate Excursions”
Ultimate Excursions
by Alan Gottlieb
Paandaa Entertainment
323 pages, $16.95
Alan Gottlieb, author of In The Shadow of the Rockies, a book about the inaugural season of Denver’s Major League Baseball team, makes his novel debut with Ultimate Excursions, published by Boulder’s Paandaa Entertainment. Gottlieb lives in Denver and has been a journalist and public education advocate for over twenty-five years, and has worked for The Denver Post, but Ultimate Excursions takes place in Ecuador, Peru, as well as some less exotic locations in the United States, including Denver.
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letter from the editor
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Western Book Roundup
Denver Picks Dead Author and U.K. Publisher to Print Missoulian’s Controversial Book
Yesterday, Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper announced that this year's pick for One Book, One Denver will be Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man.
A few weeks ago I mentioned that Random House had dropped plans to publish former Missoulian Sherry Jones' novel, The Jewel of Medina, because the publisher feared that the book, told from the perspective of one of Muhammad's wives, could "incite violence." According to AFP, a British publisher, Gibson Square, announced that it will publish the book, releasing it in the U.K. next month. (Via Galleycat.)
Also in the Roundup: Another honor for David Wroblewski, Denver short stories in the Rocky Mountain News, and readings by Doreen Orion and Stephen Trimble.
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New West Book Review
Annie Proulx’s Wyoming Is “Fine Just the Way It Is”
Fine Just the Way it Is: Wyoming Stories 3
by Annie Proulx
Scribner, 240 pages, $25
In an award-studded writing career now in its third decade, Annie Proulx has made the remarkable transition from east-coast-based Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist to much lauded Wyoming short story writer, and she's brought her devoted readership along with her. Who says the short story is dead? In Proulx's formidable hands, the short story is thriving, a form that is by turns muscular and lithe, perfectly suited to portraying rough lives cut short that she makes so entrancing and heartbreaking.
Proulx's third collection of Wyoming stories, Fine Just the Way it Is, includes several tales that are masterpieces on par with her best-known tale, "Brokeback Mountain," and one, "Tits-Up in a Ditch," that has to be in early contention for status as a classic of America's Iraq war period. Proulx's prose has never been better, infused with a specificity of landscape and emotion and marked by distinctive yet clear diction, such as in one story when a cowhand who was being unusually chatty and helpful realized it and "grouched up."
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