Seeking out a roadside shrine that touched this writer decades ago.
Communities
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
A puzzle of memory and vision
Boneland: Linked StoriesNance Van Winckel196 pages, softcover: $16.95.University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. Loss — real and potential — casts a shadow over the lives of the characters in Washington writer Nance Van Winckel’s poignant, deeply interconnected short stories. At the center of the collection is Lynette, who seems as trouble-prone as she is resilient. In […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
Desert solitude, desert community
Brother and the DancerKeenan Norris266 pages, softcover:$15.Heyday Books, 2013. Gang wars, drive-by shootings, drug sales, poverty — San Bernardino County was, as Keenan Norris explains in his debut novel, Brother and the Dancer, “one of the most violent places in America” at the millennium. The area surrounding his hometown of Highland, Calif., he notes ruefully, […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
Heart-Shaped River: Craig Childs finds his center in Canyonlands
“Not all maps are made of paper. The best ones are spooled in memory.”
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
Mountain goats, cats, glampers — that’s short for glamorous campers — and more
What have you heard?
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
Reconstructing a volatile past
Son of a Gun: A Memoir Justin St. Germain 256 pages, hardcover: $26. Random House, 2013. Murdered in her trailer just days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, sensationalized on TV news, labeled a “black widow” by a marshal — Justin St. Germain’s mother was judged for her lifestyle both in life and in death. […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
See you in October
As we do four times a year, High Country News is skipping an issue. We’ll be back in your mailbox around Oct. 14. In the meantime, keep up with us at hcn.org, and eat as many homegrown tomatoes as you can; they won’t last forever. Summer visitors Longtime subscriber Brian Jatlin came by our Paonia, […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
The reading season
After the summer’s whirl of activity, after the mountains have been hiked and the rivers have been run and the garden has been weeded for what we hope to God is the final round, it’s a good time to kick back with a book. Fall invites a slower pace, gives us lazy afternoons by the […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
The ‘wrong kind of Indians’
Cowboys and East IndiansNina McConigley195 pages, softcover: $15.95.FiveChapters Books, 2013. In her captivating debut story collection, Casper-raised author Nina McConigley examines with wit and empathy what it means to be “the wrong kind of Indians living in Wyoming.” Although prejudice and ignorance surface, there are few bad guys in this game of cowboys and Indians, […]
Posted inSeptember 16, 2013: Intimate Geographies
What do you know?
Author Percival Everett defies categories and generalizations.
Posted inWotr
Why don’t you relax, already?
Some vacationers take days before they finally notice the natural world and truly let go.
Posted inSeptember 2, 2013: Of Sparrows and Sodbusters
New musical celebrates the nation’s first openly transgender mayor
‘Stu for Silverton’ debuted this summer in Seattle.
Posted inGoat
Forgiving Winslow, Arizona – not just another Marfa
Winslow, Ariz. has been described as sad, depressed, quiet, dead and creepy. Buildings once housing bustling businesses were abandoned and not even secured, left to the pigeons. A local gas station reportedly had spelled out “God Hates Winslow” on its sign. That’s probably not fair: The reservation border town of 10,000, once the economic and […]
Posted inRange
Rants from the Hill: The Washoe Zephyr
“Rants from the Hill” are Michael Branch’s monthly musings on life in the high country of western Nevada’s Great Basin Desert. Those of us who live out in the western Great Basin Desert, up in the foothills on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Range, are all too familiar with a wind that is […]
Posted inSeptember 2, 2013: Of Sparrows and Sodbusters
The Latest: Megaloads to Alberta incite protests
BackstorySouth Korean-made mining equipment destined for Alberta’s tar sands is too massive to squeeze under interstate overpasses. So energy companies propose to float it up the Columbia and Snake Rivers to Lewiston, Idaho, and then haul it up narrow Highway 12, which winds along federally protected rivers and over the Continental Divide into Montana. That […]
Posted inSeptember 2, 2013: Of Sparrows and Sodbusters
What’s the nerdiest roadtrip you can think of?
ARIZONAComing back to Las Vegas from the Grand Canyon Skywalk on Arizona’s Hualapai Reservation, 32 Chinese tourists and their guide got more adventure than they planned for. Their driver, Joseph Razon, suddenly — and unintentionally — morphed into the captain of a floating barge when his bus was engulfed in a flash flood estimated at […]
Posted inSeptember 2, 2013: Of Sparrows and Sodbusters
A President in Yellowstone
A President in Yellowstone: The F. Jay Haynes Photographic Album of Chester Arthur’s 1883 Expedition, Frank H. Goodyear III, 192 pages, hardcover: $36.95. University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. No sitting president had traveled so far west before President Chester A. Arthur joined an expedition to Yellowstone National Park in 1883. Frank Jay Haynes, a young […]
Posted inSeptember 2, 2013: Of Sparrows and Sodbusters
A world of hunger and desire
A Guide to Being BornRamona Ausubel195 pages, hardcover, $26.95.Riverhead, 2013. When an innovative style is a writer’s main goal, emotional subtleties tend to fall by the wayside. Ramona Ausubel, raised in New Mexico and now based in California, crafts literary fiction that manages to keep out the chill. The stories in A Guide to Being […]
Posted inSeptember 2, 2013: Of Sparrows and Sodbusters
Exceptional accounts of the ordinary
Middle Men Jim Gavin240 pages, hardcover: $23. Simon & Schuster, 2013. The stories in Jim Gavin’s debut collection, Middle Men, are darkly comedic accounts of defeat. A second-rate teenage basketball player, a Meals-on-Wheels driver, and a toilet salesman, among others, aspire to reach beyond mediocrity in love and work and play. But failure, that great […]
Posted inSeptember 2, 2013: Of Sparrows and Sodbusters
Summer Visitors
Here in HCN‘s hometown of Paonia, Colo., the peaches and sweet corn are ripening, and we’ve been welcoming lots of visitors from around the West. Longtime subscribers Phyllis Hasheider and Jim McKee of Longmont, Colo., stopped by on their way home after a drive on the San Juan Skyway, a scenic route that passes through […]