 America, meet Wilma the worm. And Baby, a velvet blue jumpsuit-clad plastic doll with a strangely bendable head. And dust fairy sequins. And John T Price, who knows how to bend a sentence like Baby bends that head—"completely backward, allowing him to stare at you upside down with his glassy eyes." Which is to say, the ordinary ups and downs of Iowa family life will amaze and sometimes smite you with joy in this loving memoir called Daddy Long Legs: The Natural Education of a Father.
You will also meet Steph, John's tolerant, positive wife and the mother of his two rambunctious nature-loving boys. You will never meet the novel John is never working on, due to teaching creative writing, repairing an old house with too many levels of decay, resisting doctor's visits (who needs the bad news?), and wondering why he feels so cut off from life (AKA exhausted) when daily his boys deliver muddy earthworms to his bed, shout at him to save every praying mantis in every Walgreens parking lot, declare a no-kill zone around their entire neighborhood (mosquitoes included?) and radiate so much joie de vivre in their buck naked red rubber boot clad explorations of John's back yard you want to lie down with him for a good long nap. But no, the next chapter brings new pleasures. New views on family life that make you say "oh, yeah, that's it!" Price's memoir is realism that redeems. And we could use some redemption, these days, help pulling our heads out of our own sorrows. If you've never had kids, there is the added bonus of gaining access to the adorable and maddening and crazy-great things toddlers say and do. I loved sharing the insider's view. (And not cleaning up any messes!) I met John Price at a literary conference in Kansas, and then heard him read in Denver. That's where I met Baby. And Pengy, his nemesis. And Gramma K. and her grouchy chihuahua. Do yourself and your dad and your best friends a favor—read this charming book and pass it along. Reading Daddy Long Legs felt like a huge nudge to pay attention to wonder and kindness and the release of self-interest. To join the family. But watch out for Baby—that blue velvet schemer has Pengy in his sights!
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 “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.”—Tim Cahill I made two lifelong friends on a journey of a thousand miles, Jana Richman and Erica Olsen. I also discovered the deep beauty at the heart of the state of Colorado. The quiet strength of writers. And the profound curiosity and kindness of strangers.  Barb, Jana and Erica at Maria's Bookshop in Durango, before we meet and greet and read. Erica hosted us at her place in Dolores, a little arty town in the southwest corner of Colorado. We felt gloriously spoiled, ate well, stayed up late, talked favorite authors, and shared the book readings with her the first two nights. Erica's new full-time job kept her in meetings after that. Wonder who had the better time?!  We drove ridiculous snowy distances to read at outstanding indie bookstores, during International Women's Week. And we actually felt pretty phenomenal.  Between the Covers in Telluride hosted our reading. It's a sparkling ski town with one ferocious mahjong contingent. We took turns quelling fears and triggering laughter. That wasn't hard, because our hosts for the first two nights were the outlandishly high-spirited Great Old Broads for Wilderness. You won't find a stronger, more dedicated crew of outdoorsy women anywhere. And they "do it in the wild."  With Libby, our Maria's Bookshop host, and Shelley, the great new executive director for the Great Old Broads. The tour turned three introverted writers into extroverts, who spoke on air and fluffed our hair and kept our readings to eight minutes each to keep our listeners riveted. We signed and sold our beautiful books, too.  The trip held surprises. Rowdy old-time Texans danced in the bar in Durango. Wine flowed at the reading in Telluride. Crested Butte runs on a laid back friendly energy that soothed us on day three. Thanks, Townie Books, for giving us a most pleasant intimate reading experience. And then at last, Jana and I drove the long and winding road to Paonia, where we were welcomed by our own marquee!  Intrigued, one Paonia man said to his wife, "We're going to that Grateful Dead tribute band!" They showed up at the reading and stayed to listen, asked questions and bought two books. The mountain-clad rural town of Paonia pulled out all the stops for us: lunch out with High Country News editors, two farm goats trundling down the dirt road that led to our cabin—shy as we felt most nights before our readings, a home-cooked dinner with our host librarian, a hefty library crowd and over an hour of questions about the writing life. (It is amazing what a person will admit to when the question is asked just right.) Then, at our small off-the-grid cabin, heavenly quiet under a multitude of stars.  Pit stop at Ouray, so beautiful all our cares melted into naught. A book is not finished when the printer binds it or the publisher ships it. The little nipper still needs attention. Sometimes that attention cries out ROAD TRIP! So women pack their bags, check their tire pressure, consult MapQuest, put on sunglasses and go. Three women launched a book tour to meet audiences and sell books. We fell in love with strangers' questions, writers' minds and the state of grace called Colorado. Deepest thanks to Between the Covers, Maria's Bookshop, Townie Books, Delta County Library in Paonia, Torrey House Press, High Country News, The North Fork Times/Delta County Independent, KDUR and KSJD, KVNF, Tom Yoder, Nancy Stoffer, The Durango Herald, The Durango Telegraph, The Cortez Journal, Shelley Silbert, Libbey, Danica, Daiva and Laura Lee! And to those two adorable goats who shared the road with us.  Yes, that's Jana and me with Cookie Monster and radio host Tom Yoder, at the beautifully restored offices of KSJD in downtown Cortez. And inside the bank vault? A recording studio built for two. I love America.  "When six-year-old Clair Martin is found parentless and penniless in a 1859 Utah Territory mining town by a member of the Mormon brethren who takes her safely into the fold, one might be prompted to note that God works in mysterious ways. But Clair doesn’t see it that way. Raised for the next twelve years within the patriarchy of the Latter-Day Saints and schooled in the home skills of cooking, cleaning, and sewing, Clair is destined to become a sister-wife during Brigham Young’s colonizing heyday in spite of a rose-colored “mark of sin” that spreads across her left cheek and down her neck. It is only Clair herself who stops it from being so.
"In her second novel, Barbara K. Richardson brings us in the form of Clair Martin one of the strongest and most complex female characters since Charlotte Bronte gave us Jane Eyre . . . Read the entire review. The Copperfield Review is devoted to historical fiction.  I’m going to let Jana Richman’s characters speak for themselves. All women. All different. All stubborn and flawed and as real as your elbow wrinkles. There’s a 300-mile-long pipeline about to drain the aquifer from under eastern Nevada. That’s not fiction. That’s headline news. The Jorgensen clan inherits this problem, and it’s none too simple addressing it, as they are already torn apart by old family schisms. What Kate and Ona and Nell and Cassie Jorgensen say about that pipeline and their lives in the Schell Creek Mountains of Nevada—that’s the draw of The Ordinary Truth.  Kate—the Las Vegas Water Manager "I’ll be sitting in my corner office—like I’m doing now— tinted glass from floor to ceiling, watching the sun drop behind the boxy horizon of Las Vegas skyscrapers and anticipating the neon dawn of evening, when for no good reason an image of my father will appear. A cloud, a shadow, a reflection, and there he is relaxed forward in the saddle atop Moots, his palomino gelding, arms crossed over the horn, looking amused to find himself surrounded by glass and steel. Moots stands lazily, his long-lashed lids drooping over soft brown eyes, one back leg bent so my father tilts slightly to the right. Dad holds an easy smile and seems as if he has something to tell me. On a good day, I’ll lean back with a cup of tea gone cold, kick my heels off to prop my feet on the garbage can, and exhort him to speak. And he does. Soft and soothing, like he’s speaking to a ten-year-old. 'How you doing, Katydid?' he says to me. I smile and tell him I’m doing fine, and for a moment we both believe it." Ona—Kate’s quiet ranching aunt "Sometimes, when a spring day turns unexpectedly warm and the house feels like an unrinsed plastic milk jug lying in the sun, I set a lawn chair in the fine dirt under the budding cottonwoods on the west side a the working pens and ponder the perplexities a life. From here, I can watch the goings on a Nate, Nell, and Skinny. Today they’re preg testing cows. I don’t spend much a my time this way, mind you, I have work a my own to get done. But every so often I sit here just to chew on things awhile." Nell—Kate’s cranky ranching mother "If an old woman pushing up against the far end a life has any sense at all, she won’t spend too many a her few remaining days trying to figure out how things ended up the way they did. Apparently I ain’t got that kinda sense. Course it don’t help that all the folks in Omer Springs are asking me, “What’s going on with Katie?” as if that’s a question can be answered with some degree a certainty like the current price a hay. When I shrug in response, folks get downright snippety. “She’s your daughter, Nell!” they proclaim as if that’s something mighta slipped my mind." Cassie—Kate’s college-age daughter "There’s something about a Nevada whorehouse can make a girl weepy around the edges. Near the third pass of Waylon Jennings’ Honky Tonk Heroes, I can barely talk myself into sticking with the plan. I do have a plan—a long-range plan. . . . To be honest, and I almost always am, my long-range plan is short on details. It basically consists of sitting on a barstool in a Carson City brothel until Mama and Grandma Nell start speaking to each other. How long that might take is anyone’s guess. But this idea that they can use me as a conduit to communicate—if you want to call it that—instead of speaking directly is beginning to piss me off. In fact, both of them as good as drove me here themselves. And if I’ve inherited anything from them at all, it’s their obstinacy. I don’t know what happens when three stubborn women each take up ground waiting for the others to move, but I aim to find out. Everybody pretends this is all about water rights and Mama’s job with the Nevada Water Authority, but I know damn well there’s more to it. Not that water isn’t enough to tear families apart in this state. I’ve seen grown men beat each other bloody over a diverted irrigation ditch. But I’ve been watching Mama and Grandma Nell all my life, and over the span of those twenty-one years, their conversations have been steadily dwindling like a spring creek at the end of a long, hot summer. It seems the two of them have simply exhausted themselves, run underground. So I have to ask myself: what is it between them that takes so much effort? I don’t know the answer to that yet, but I intend to find out. Hence, my radical—and possibly impulsive—plan. I know of only one thing that will undoubtedly force them to the surface. Me. More specifically, my safekeeping. What better threat to an innocent girl’s welfare, I figure, than a Carson City whorehouse?" I hope you’ll read this novel. And read this article to learn about the pipeline. And visit the Goshute’s website to meet the people this pipeline will harm. We need to raise a ruckus.  There’s a dustbowl waiting behind our indifference. Jana Richman spent years caring with all her heart.
 In 1966, I ran the 100 yard dash alongside Dilaun Terry and all of the boys in our fifth grade class. I won. In sixth grade, Dilaun won the pentathlon. Fleet of foot, tiny, slender, with straight flying dark hair, she outran, out-jumped and out-threw every strapping young adored boy and girl Adelaide Elementary School placed at the starting line. (OK, it was a five-way tie with a basketball toss tie-breaker. Still, she won!) 43 years later, Dilaun and I re-met on Facebook. 45 years later, Dilaun read and reviewed my novel Tributary. She doesn’t normally read literary fiction. She’s a sculptor and a painter. She didn’t think she could write. She sent the review to me to see if it would do as an online review. I said, Oh my goddess—she’s outpaced the professional bloggers. I love this review.
Thanks so much, Dilaun. The stronger the woman, the better the tale.
* spoiler alert * this book review tells all *  Jesus was not an intellectual. The narrator of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, the Reverend John Ames, is. His discourses on things Christian explore the subtleties of grace and love and God’s light, but he himself cannot act to save his godson, the lying, selfish, devious, no-account son of Ames’ best friend the Reverend Boughton. When the prodigal son Jack Boughton returns home to Gilead, Iowa, he receives precisely no help in his attempt at starting a new life. He receives a cold reception, a pointedly critical sermon, unflinching attention to long-held gospel principles and, in the end, one blessing.
I would not call this Christian behavior. For the first illegitimate child Jack Boughton abandoned, early in his life, the Reverends Ames and Boughton expended great efforts to assist the mother and child. But for the second illegitimate child, which Jack fathered in mid-life with his black common-law wife—a woman and child he loves and longs to support and live with—nothing. His elderly father cannot be told about the mixed-race couple for fear the news will kill him. He is dying, and in the year 1956 miscegenation is a scandalous thing. The Reverend Ames, also in failing health, does nothing with the knowledge but assess and bury it. The tastiest bits of the novel involve Ames’ grandfather, an abolitionist preacher who harbored John Brown in his Kansas church and used his ministry to end slavery and save the United States’ soul, violently. Whereas our Reverend Ames refuses to forgive Jack Boughton for abandoning his first child, for squandering fatherhood “as if it were nothing,” and cannot be stirred to assist the older, humbler Jack whose mixed-race family needs a decent place to spend their days together. Jack comes to lay his burden down—could he and his wife and child find a place to live in Gilead? To me that is the central question of this book. But Robinson’s Gilead is a “hill of testimony,” pages and pages of delicate reflection on a spiritual life, so there is no place for Jack. Jesus spent his ministry with sinners, prostitutes, the poor, the weary and outcasts. John Ames does not even feel the lack of Christlike care offered to Jack Boughton. He uses Jack as a tool for self-examination, a theological sticking point. The only warmly compassionate person portrayed in this novel is Ames’ uneducated wife Lila, who says, “A person can change. Everything can change.” If religion is not effective in relieving suffering and opening closed doors into grace, why is it worth our attention? For all Ames’ artistry of thought and expression, I would rather have read the life of Ames’ wife. Or his driven grandfather. I’m with the Bible on this one: To him who asks, give. P.S. Poking around in the history and life of John Brown, I found he created an anti-slavery group called The League of Gileadites. I doubt this is an accidental link. Brown said at the founding of the League, “Nothing so charmes the American people as personal bravery.” Wikipedia explains that “In the Bible, Mount Gilead was the place where only the bravest of Israelites would gather together to face an invading enemy.” Robinson’s town of Gilead, like the aging failing Ames, is the opposite of this. I hope she intended the irony. What was great about this summer? I stumbled on a few fine reads, herewith shared.  Lilies of the Field—William E. Barrett Bold simple tale of a man who finds his calling with a flock of German nuns. The Wild Birds—Wendell Berry Strikingly true agrarian views of life, delivered by the lawyer of a rural town in Kentucky. Stargirl—Jerry Spinelli Ever want to be a free spirit? Remember anyone in high school who ever dared? Stargirl shows you how. The Beast in the Jungle—Henry James You may think nothing happens in this novella, until the work explodes inside you the next day. Cranford—Elizabeth Gaskell Doilies and tea in a small English town, simpler days and ways. The dramatic ardency of Gaskell’s novel North and South gives way to gentle portraits of country women at home and in company. One recounting of a brother's waywardness brought me to tears. IBS Cookbook—Heather Van Vorous This woman knows great food. Amazing fallen chocolate soufflé with raspberry sauce. Scrumptious orange flower bread. Zesty fresh mango salsa on grilled shrimp. Delectable roasted cauliflower soup. I cook from this book all of the time for guests, who never guess the dishes are low fat. Unless the recipe says it’s from Van Vorous’ mother or grandmother, it will likely be delicious. Van Vorous' recipes are pure food love. Tattoos on the Heart—Father Gregory Boyle An oasis of human caring, Boyle works with fatherless young men in East L.A. To quote a friend, Father Boyle “is a fascinating human being, doing more positive good than all the government agencies combined." Bask in compassion. Read his book. And treat yourself to another compassionate hard-working man, Sydney Poitier in Lilies of the Field. The first words from the Mother's mouth when he hops out of his dusty car,  "God is good, He has sent me a big strong man."
Thanks to the best picture project for the Poitier photo.  Hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park yesterday, I sang—heaven help me—“Rocky Mountain High." I pondered a Henry James novella I’d just read, “The Beast in the Jungle.” Because I wore brown-tinted sunglasses, the beetle-kill pines stood out on every slope, and I could not feel anything but implicated in and convinced of our changed planet.
In James’ story, the hero John Marcher misses the event of his lifetime. He feels chosen by an obscure destiny, waiting as if anointed for some beast to leap onto him and render his life profound. May Bartram, the only friend who knows of his obsession, stands beside him for decades, waiting, but Marcher’s self-absorption is so complete he only realizes when flinging himself on May’s grave that he has missed out on her love. That was his unrecognized beast. The twists and turns of James’ syntax far exceed plot points, and I dismissed “The Beast in the Jungle” as a windy staid study in the human ego; profound—the beast is within not without us—and a dated sleeper written by a man who spent all his time indoors. But as I hiked the thousand feet up toward Lake Helene, surrounded by vast browning slopes, the power of his novella came at me from an unexpected quarter, haunting my climb. James’ protagonist fit perfectly our environmental dilemma: we cannot really love the earth, though it offers itself, so we use it and simultaneously feel cut off from it, valuing our self-importance more than the opportunity to genuinely live, which makes us unable to stop pillaging, unable to stop missing the point, and we're just about to throw ourselves on its grave in misery and cowardice, like James' hero. Empty, when what is offered us is so full. I have found no good way to face such a grand-scale environmental demise. Which leaves me in the Jungle with John Marcher. Whatever you can do to plunge into this love, do it now.  I am reading Tattoos on the Heart with tears in my eyes, every chapter. Maybe it’s because I’m fifty-five. Maybe it’s because I know humankind can be kind. Maybe it’s one of those exceedingly rare stories of raising hearts into hope in the midst of a seemingly hopeless situation. Or maybe I just love bread. Father Greg Boyle planted himself in a tough barrio in Los Angeles many years ago, and like any good Jesuit, he let the sisters in his parish whip up a community salad of caring. Gang activity was overtaking their ‘hood, but these women were mothers with Jesus in their hearts. Whatever the trauma, they were mammas. And mammas didn't close their church's doors to sorrow, violence, poverty or fear.  Two decades later, Homeboy Industries is one result, a place where former gang members can learn a trade, lose tattoos and bake and serve sourdough bread. Father Boyle masterminded this gang intervention program, touring and talking about his work to raise awareness and funds.  If you need a steady dose of goodness, let G-dog give you a tour of his calling among the stressed and oppressed. He believes so strongly in the power of god's unconditional love, that he can hold that space and wait for gangbangers to come into the grace of it. He knows they can come into the grace of it. I love this book for precisely that, Boyle's snapshots of the infallible power of “not two.”* My favorite quote so far: “Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a covenant between equals.”   *From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Zen demands the practitioner to overcome the dualism operative in the everyday standpoint, which it speaks of by using the phrase “not two.” The use of the phrase “not two” expresses Zen's proclivity to favor the simple and the concrete, such that it is not expressed as a negation of dualism.
And here are two great videos of the Homeboy Industries. A documentary is in the works. Torrey House Press is a welcome new press in Utah. Browse their website awhile! Here's my review along with other book reviews of great Western reads. “The Last Cowgirl” is a page-turner of a different sort. Or rather for a different audience. If you love the land, puzzle over our abuse of it, and wonder why you continue to live in (or near) Utah, the “Land of Cognitive Dissonance,” take a ride with Jana Richman. It’s a rough-and-tumble ride over dessert terrain just west of the Salt Lake Valley but unknown to many. If you listen closely, you’ll hear you can’t deny the land.  Young Dickie Sinfield sets her heart against life in the rural backwater of Clayton, Utah. Her father George wants nothing more than to live a cowboy’s life, so he packs up his family of five and moves them onto a ramshackle ranch when Dickie is just eight years old. Due to a string of ranch-related accidents, Dickie sees herself as a fragile outsider in her father’s rugged life. Dickie won’t go native. But no one in her beleaguered family is better suited to the stark beauty of the Onaqui Valley—sixty miles west of Salt Lake City—than Dickie, and it’s her own self-betrayal that makes “The Last Cowgirl” sing. Told in alternating present tense and flashbacks, this story works backward into your heart like cheatgrass in an unsuspecting sock. Dickie Sinfield is middle-aged, cranky and moderately successful as a journalist in Salt Lake City when she gets news that her big brother Heber’s life was snuffed out in a nerve gas explosion at Dugway Proving Grounds. This takes a very reluctant Dickie back home. In Clayton, we meet Bev, the strongest wisest rancher in the valley, George, Dickie’s tough angry father, Holly, the best friend you wish you’d never had, and Stumpy, a red-headed cowboy raised by his grandpa and chock-full of the range.  It is one of the mysteries of good novels, how they won’t let you go. Won’t let you leave them sitting alone for more than a few hours, covers closed. Yes, there are times when the smart-assed closed-off Dickie makes you want to shake her, but “The Last Cowgirl” isn’t only her tale. Richman writes men beautifully. Richman does not flinch from exposing family conflict. Richman knows the secrets of a land so spare the military slaps No Trespassing signs around hundreds of thousands of acres. There are caves in the Onaqui Mountains, there are secret springs, there are wild horse herds handsome with muck and bruises.
It is one of the mysteries of human nature, that we can find our home in a place, in people, and be the last one to recognize it. Dickie Sinfield is “The Last Cowgirl.” Drive out past the Oquirhh Mountains to the Onaquis. Sit quietly awhile. Let the silence inform you. Then read Richman’s novel for the backstory. It’s a sad Utah tale very likely to grab your heart. South Onaqui Loop, photos and hiking information BLM Onaqui Herd Management, photos and viewing information Dugway Proving Grounds Survivors, info and articles about chemical, biological and radioactive open air testing |
