Tomorrow, my novel Tributary is one year old. Cake, candles and Doo Wops? Nope, we're going to float sunflowers down Boulder Creek just as we did to launch her.

She won the WILLA Finalist Award for 2013 in historical fiction, so thanks are in order. I'm feeling grateful she's out on bookstore shelves, and relieved that a new book's in the oven. 

What new book? It's a dirty secret. I'm cooking up mud pies. Planting little cupcake flags in the soul of soil. I did love taking a break from blogging to get this new book begun. But here's the real dirt on what else happened this summer . . .


A fuzzy browed baby house finch took up residence in the newly dug garden patch, to recover from a nest fall. Four days of friendship, shared watermelon, mashed up dog kibble and sharp peeps of hello, and that bird flew off across the neighbor's long backyard once we'd all assembled to marvel and wish her well. We nicknamed her Brandi after Ms. Carlile.

I feel like I should save this book for winter, read it like a seed catalog to warm my imagination. But that ain't happening! It's inspiring. We all do grassroots activism, yes? Well, Kayann takes you to its source: "a vast web of fibrous grass roots" that anchor her farm's soil with tentacles ten feet deep! Even though this particular prairie grass would swallow up her whole farm in a heartbeat if they stopped cultivating, and even though Smooth Brome Grass is a thuggish Eurasian invader, she finds it comforting. This grass that "thumbs its nose at all things human." (A fine metaphor, as some environmental activists have been know to do that, too.)

So I am celebrating the toddlerhood of my novel with great reading . . .

suburban gardening, and trips to the neighborhood Oz on my old five speed Schwinn.

I hope your end of summer blooms as abundantly!

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!   

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

My dear friend Ed Kanze, naturalist and writer extraordinaire, just wrote a column so informative I have to share it.

We think we are such hotshots. Without bats, where would we be? Lunch as we know it would be greatly diminished. Tequila would vanish. And domestic ease would shortly follow it, if I had to live without chocolate.

Here is Ed's latest All Things Natural article: BANANAS FOR BATS

Sink your teeth into a banana. Savor the sweet, soft flesh. Now is a good time to think about bats. Together, bats and tall leafy plants worked in concert over a vast stretch of time to invent the long yellow fruits we enjoy.

Yes, we'd have no bananas without bats, or at least banana plants. Bats pollinated the original wild ones, but  commercially grown bananas require no such services. Without bats, other food plants might not exist, too, or exist in such diminished quantity that market forces would push up their costs. We are all beholden to bats, whose wings are really their hands.

There would be no Tequila Sunrises in a world without bats. Bats are chief pollinators of the agave plants whose fermented floral parts give rise to the alcoholic drink.

In the original draft of this story, I explained that bats have much to do with the production of mangoes, avocados, dates, coconuts, peppercorns, cloves, vanilla, and chocolate. I gleaned my information from internet sources one would be inclined to trust: websites maintained by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bat Conservation International, for example, and ones not quite so reliable but still often excellent, such as Wikipedia. Yet a tropical biologist friend who read the early draft passed it along to Neotropical bat biologist friends, and egad! They tell me that nearly all the claims I relayed from my sources were wrong.

While the bats in our part of North America specialize in catching bugs, it's those bats of warmers parts of the world that serve plants as pollinators and seed-dispersers. In addition, their droppings, or guano, are sometimes used to enrich soil, and more remarkably, to produce saltpeter, an essential ingredient of gunpowder.

Some of the bats of the tropics and subtropics that contribute to our cuisine are known as flying foxes and fruit bats. Some are as large as red-tailed hawks. The best-looking, which are exceedingly handsome indeed, look like well-bred, well-groomed Chihuahuas in black capes, perhaps out for a night at the opera.

If you're a plant and you want to attract flying animals as big as miniature dogs to pollinate your flowers and to carry away your fruit, it's in your best interests to be sturdy and large. A great many plants that have such relationships with bats are trees or tree-like, and their flowers tend to be big, too. Flowers pollinated by hummingbirds are brightly colored and trumpet-shaped, at least for the most part. Flowers pollinated by flying foxes are often white or blandly colored and shaped like bells or dinner plates. They tend to radiate a strong sweet or musky smell suggestive of overripe fruit.

Not all bat-pollinated plants provide humans with food. South American balsa trees, the source of the buoyant trunks explorer Thor Heyerdahl used to build his raft Kon Tiki, are pollinated at least partly by bats. Bats also play Cupid to the flowers of kapok trees, whose fruits yield fibers used to stuff bedding, pillows, and life jackets. Africa's baobab trees, which bear great aggregations of stamens likely adapted for dusting bats with pollen, are also bat pollinated. So are saguaro and organpipe cactuses.

Bats are widely credited on bat-related websites with the pollination or distribution of the seeds of chocolate, almonds, cashews, figs, and allspice. But the bat scientists who wrote me say this isn't true. This serves as a reminder that that facts can be slippery, and we must be careful where we get them. It also goes to show that while scientists are doing an extraordinary job of learning about bats, they're keeping most of the information to themselves and not sharing it effectively with we who pay their salaries.

Remember when Ronald Reagan cried, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" I say, Tear down the barriers of arcane and thorny language that separate science from the rest of us, and let's have a free and democratic exchange of learning  and ideas.

Ed has so many talents they're hard to list. His wildlife photography rivals and sometimes accompanies the books he has published on the Adirondacks, Australia and New Zealand. I deeply love his photo-biography The World of John Burroughs. Burroughs, not John Muir, was THE naturalist writer of his time. Makes me want to build my own log house and chronicle its wildlife and seasons.

P.S. I am both glad and sad to report that Ed's richly illustrated hardcover The World of John Burroughs, while out of print, can be purchased for .33 cents on Amazon. To quote Ed regarding Nobel Prize winner Patrick White's forgotten books—"the fate of great literature these days."

Kent Nerburn's Neither Wolf nor Dog is a great read with checkered origins. I enjoyed the book immensely. Nerburn's writing can be both simple as dirt and poetic as hell when it needs to be. His description of a massive storm in the Badlands towards the end of the book — gorgeous.

I started out loving this book. It was exactly what I'd been hoping to find since reading Lisa Jones' Broken: A Love Story, an exploration of Native American spirituality that was gritty and real. Nerburn can certainly write. But reading his last pages, I felt a slight suspicion and did a bit of research. The book is not non-fiction; Nerburn carefully chose and constructed this tale, populating it with people and events to suit his aim: to inspire in Anglo hearts a real understanding of Native points of view. He could have written this story of Dan and Grover, the Lakota road warriors, and their seemingly humble white amanuensis as a novel. It could have been a smashing novel. Apparently, it's being made into a movie soon. I have no comment on that.


Nerburn has defended the authenticity of the book as a work of art, a carrier of spiritual truths. But his defense showed no humility. And his fabrications have undercut the trust of this reader.

All authors are liars. Novelists lie blatantly, it's our trade. We lie to get at truth. Writers of non-fiction... well, I hope they still have standards of truthfulness. Neither Wolf nor Dog is a hybrid, it's spiritual road fiction, certainly not the first of its kind. But because the long haul tale was told and sold as truth, I stopped hitching. I'm actually kind of angry, the book was that good. I don't know which parts to trust.

Is Neither Wolf nor Dog worth reading? I think so. Fools gold shines like gold, just don't bite it.

Make baby bibs.

I took one to my dear pal Maddie last week, and her mom said, "I want a dozen more!" Her dad said, "We need a million of 'em." Maddie is one enthusiastic eater.

The monkeys started the whole project. I couldn't leave them all alone at JoAnn's among their flannel buddies.

I chose a handsome houndstooth check for the ties. You can use Velcro or ties at the neck, but Maddie is so strong Velcro is no match for her.

I could not resist the yellow rick rack, which actually catches spills!

I think the designer knocked it out of the park with her great fabric choices, including a soft chenille back. I just used good old flannel front and back. And muslin instead of interfacing.

When the literary world seems like a jungle, there's no better business than makin' monkey bibs.

My favorite new TV drama series is old. And completely engrossing. Make sure to watch The Guardian through Episode Eight. Yes, Simon Baker brings a young Paul Newman to mind, but it is the content here that is so winning. Tough shark lawyer meets vulnerable kids as a reluctant public defender. Netflix has the series on Instant Download. My admiration grows with every episode.

Favorite novel of 2012 is, hands down, The Ordinary Truth by Jana Richman.

For a few years now, my favorite TV comedy series has been Modern Family.
With this year's Phils'osophy, the writers reached new heights. I would buy multiple copies of this book to give away, if only someone had published it! Phil for the holidays!

My favorite cause of 2012: Utah's Goshute Indians claiming their water rights against a proposed Las Vegas pipeline that will decimate their arid homeland. The Goshutes ARE Spring Valley. And Spring Valley needs to keep its water under its own very beautiful dry feet.

If you have any gift-giving ahead in your holiday, the Goshute Legal Fund deserves
to hear from you.

"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.

High Country News revels in books about the West every October, to get readers all stoked up for winter days indoors, and this year Tributary made the review list.

"The landscape becomes as much a character as the men and women who populate Tributary. As wild and isolating as the determined, defiant Clair, the prairies and mountain ranges seduce both narrator and reader."

Yes, my novel sings northern Utah's praises. Be seduced. Share the news with friends!

And Becca Rowan of All Things Girl hopes to whip up interest in Clair Martin and Tributary, with her heartfelt review "One Woman's Journey in the Wild, Wild, West."

"What I loved most about Clair was her bravery. She faced down every hardship, was open to every new venture, and even when she felt herself to be 'drenched in losses,' she shook herself off and started over. 

Her goal in life was to 'find her own line to follow,' and 'then follow it every day.'"

Books need champions. High Country News and All Things Girl are certifiable champions.