Band of Thebes

Reading the West Awards & Irish Novel of the Year

 

Earlier today the Mountains & Plains Booksellers announced their annual awards for the best writing of the West.

Fiction: The Son by Philipp Meyer (also a Pulitzer finalist)

Nonfiction: The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon by Kevin Fedarko

Children's: The Last Ride of Caleb O'Toole by Eric Pierpoint

Earlier this week came the announcement of the Irish Novel of the Year, which turned out to be yet another honor for Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, the unstoppable debut that was written in six months then languished unpublished for nine years. Previously, it won the Goldsmiths Prize, was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, and is currently a finalist for the Orange Baileys Women's Prize.

Another Republican For Gay Marriage: "It's Very Simple"

Seven months ago Sen. Alan Simpson came to our wedding reception and toasted my brand-new husband as "a smooth-talking son of a bitch." Now this. USAToday reports the ad "will run in Colorado, Oklahoma and Wyoming TV markets, as well as on the Sunday morning talk shows in Washington."

Tom Spanbauer's I Loved You More

Not a contest but however you're celebrating today's release of Tom Spanbauer's I Loved You More [Kindle], his former writing student, the super-successful, long-closeted, now openly queer Chuck Palahniuk has outmanned you: He sent gift baskets to 50 indie bookstores to promote the novel.

Huffington Post named it one of eight small press books to watch in 2014.

Wild author Cheryl Strayed calls it "a wrenching and beautiful masterpiece," saying, "intelligence, wit, generosity, love, wisdom, insight, humility, guts, heart-crushing truth and spirit-lifting grace—it’s all there in I Loved You More."

Having successfully mapped the historical western (The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon), the aids novel (In the City of Shy Hunters), and the 60's rural gay bildungsroman (Now Is the Hour), Spanbauer again charts fresh territory in his fifth book. Hawthorne calls it "a love story triangle akin to  The Marriage Plot and Freedom only with a gay main character who charms gays and straights alike. I Loved You More is a rich, expansive tale of love, sex, and heartbreak, covering twenty-five years in the life of a striving, emotionally wounded writer. In New York, Ben forms a bond of love with his macho friend and foil, Hank. Years later in Portland, a now ill Ben falls for Ruth, who provides the care and devotion he needs, though they cannot find true happiness together. Then Hank reappears and meets Ruth, and real trouble starts. Set against a world of struggling artists, the underground sex scene of New York in the 1980s, the drab, confining Idaho of Ben’s youth, and many places in between, I Loved You More is the author’s most complex and wise novel to date."

Bluntly, Spanbauer is yet another big gay talent who used to be published in hardcover by eminent New York houses and now is published as a paperback original by a fine small press. Your support is doubly needed.

Starting tonight in Portland, Tom tours eight dates in Oregon or Seattle and New York City on May 13 at the LGBT Center.

Tom Spanbauer's Now Is the Hour

Now Is the Hour unfolds in 1967 as gay 17 year-old Rigby John hitchhikes from his small town in Idaho to San Francisco. 

Starred Booklist: "This sophisticated, funny, poignant, sexy coming-of-age novel is ... [an] absolutely nimble narrative, related by Rigby himself. Rigby is bound and determined to break away from the bonds of his repressive home environment,.. Rigby's storytelling voice is natural, warm, and positively addictive; the many pages of this breathtaking, romantic, and unpredictable novel fly past. Rarely does such a gripping story match with such a lovable character.

David Duncan: "...a liturgical eroticism that alternately mesmerizes, shocks, and nourishes...Now Is the Hour is a literary triumph and a coming of age heartbreak."

Natalie Goldberg: "There is no one like Tom Spanbauer writing in America. I dare you to read this and still hold onto the old way you see the world. He turns things inside out, into a deeper ground of being.  What a terrific novel! What a huge talent!"

Starred PW: "...straightforward but luminous tale of a country boy's self-liberation...From his first school-yard fight to first experiences with sex (of various sorts), cigarettes, alcohol, pot, jealousy and love, Rigby John's first person is at once reliable and highly ironic; we may know better, but he truly doesn't, and the distance is delicious."

A.M. Holmes: "I love this book, and more importantly I love Tom Spanbauer, he is inventive, original and one of the most talented authors I’ve come across... It is a story about reconciliation, about family bonds and the need to break free. It is rich with knowing—the prose is deft, funny, heartbreaking and the story stays with you."

Tom Spanbauer's The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon

Too many excellent readers are still unfamiliar with Tom Spanbauer. In anticipation of his fifth novel coming next week, each day let's look at one from his backlist.

Among the 20th century's great Western gay fictions -- Brokeback, Richard Amory's Song of the Loon, Thomas Savage's The Power of the Dog, William Henderson's Native -- the most daring in both its prose style and its raw sex is Tom Spanbauer's The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon. Vividly narrated by a half-white, half-native teenage orphan named Shed in the time of the Idaho gold rush, the book chomps on classic American themes of self-discovery and identity. The wild ride begins in a whorehouse where he's raised by Ida Richilieu (who "always said she couldn't sleep if there was a hard-on in the room") and soon young Shed falls in love with an early customer, a white rancher who may technically be his father. 

Ultimately, no praise can be more convincing than this: For its first decade or so after publication, each year The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon sold more copies than previously. Trust word of mouth. The NYT Book Review said, "The miracle of this novel it that it obliges us to rethink our whole idea of narration and history and myth. Tom Spanbauer's wild West is the hurly-burly of the mind. He takes us into territories where few of us would ever dare to go." And PW, "Spanbauer fuses raunchy dialogue, pathos, local color, heartbreak and a serious investigation of racism in this stunning narrative."

Spur Awards 2014

The Spur Awards honor the year's finest western books:

Contemporary Novel: Light of the World, James Lee Burke

Historical Novel: Silent We Stood, Henry Chappell

First Novel: Spider Woman's Daughter, Anne Hillerman (daughter of Tony)

Contemporary Nonfiction: Vacationland: Tourism and Environment in the Colorado High Country, William Philpott

Historical Nonfiction: Shot All to Hell: Jesse James, the Northfield Raid, and the Wild West's Greatest Escape, Mark Lee Gardner

Biography: Jack London: An American Life, Earle Labor 

YA Novel: Papa's Gold, Ellen Gray Massey

YA Nonfiction: Eagle of Delight: Portrait of the Plains Indian Girl in the White House, Jean A. Lukesh

Click for all the Spur winners.

(photo via tumblr)

Quick Stop in Colorado

 

After Charlotte, NC and NYC last week, yesterday I got to show my pard Rocky Mountain National Park. For the better shot, go here then click the upper right corner to see it full screen.

Montana & Wyoming

Paraphrasing LL Cool J: Don't call it a honeymoon. After ten years together, we got married in DC on Monday, happily -- with a splendid gathering including my sister as my best man and several favorite Thebes readers, which meant the world to us -- and flew early Tuesday morning to Wyoming for my pard's semi-annual board meetings. Wolves, elk, moose, hawks, black bears, a lone grizzly, a heavy snowstorm, and last night His Serene Highness the Prince of Monaco.

Gay Man's "Return to Oakpine"

In 1969, high schoolers Jimmy, Frank, Craig, and Mason formed a garage band in Oakpine, Wyoming. In 1999, Jimmy, now a writer in New York, unable to afford the cost of his aids care, comes back to die. His dad won't let him in the house and his mom calls Craig to refit the garage into a spare room. At the same time, newly-divorced multimillionaire Mason comes back from his life as a good-guy lawyer in Denver, and, now pushing fifty, they reform the band. Jimmy is too sick to play but Craig's son takes his place. Old secrets, hurts, and girlfriends are revisited, and new relationships formed. The characters' core decency and quiet humor make Return to Oakpine [Kindle] ideal comfort food -- perfect for an easy read, say, if you are doped up on cold medicine or simply want to spend a couple hours with nice people. Longtime fans of Ron Carlson, and you should be one, will be disappointed that this book lacks the originality and verve that made Five Skies such a stunner or The Signal so compulsive.

Queer readers new to Carlson's work will also be disappointed. His saintly Jimmy is yet another example of a well-meaning straight writer who has zero feeling for the interior lives of gay men. Missing entirely are any sort of fear of being found out, any form of coming out to himself or friends or family, and any hint of a sexual impulsive at any point in his life. A gay New Yorker coming home to die in Wyoming in 1999 might dwell on Matthew Shepard who was murdered in Laramie in October 1998. Better drawn are the earnest, super-clumsy questions of his straight friends: "When two gay guys go out to dinner, who pays?"

Also a little earnest and clumsy is Salon's recent essay about the lack of high profile gay novels and the pitfalls of straight authors' attempts at queer lives, citing The Interestings, The Art of Fielding, and The Emperor's Children. 

If you're keeping score, Viking degayed and de-aidsed the Oakpine flap copy.

Gay West

6:00am this morning on String Lake, Tetons National Park

If you wish you were in the West this week, read Thomas Savage's novel of a gay and straight brother on a Montana ranch in the 1920s, The Power of the Dog. The brutish, repressed Phil isn't happy when George marries a woman. Then her "sissy" teen son comes to visit from his Eastern prep school. An unsentimental story in the spirit of Annie Proulx, who wrote the afterword to the rereleased edition.

A newish nonfiction book about the gay frontier of the 1840s is Men in Eden: William Drummond Stewart and Same-Sex Desire in the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade [Kindle]. Previously the author won a Stonewall award for Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships covering roughly one hundred years from the 1770s to the 1870s.

Decades before Stewart, Lewis & Clark penetrated unknown areas. Brian Hall's novel I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company recreates Merriweather Lewis's struggle as a gay man exploring.

A terrific straight book about the West is Ron Carlson's short novel Five Skies. I don't know any reader who has disliked it.

Absaroka Hike

In Wyoming this counts as progress: The trailhead pit toilet graffiti said "J__ Is Gay!" and roughly half the scrawled responses were supportive, as in "live and let live."

Reading the West Winners: Loren, Iversen, Bell, Haruf

Formerly the Mountains and Plains bookseller's award, now renamed Reading the West Book Awards, announced their 2012 winners, and the best novel is one Lucy Jane Bledsoe chose for Thebes' queer lit poll. She called it "gorgeous." Give it a try.

Fiction: Theft by BK Loren

Nonfiction: Full Body Burden by Kristen Iversen

Children's: Kepler's Dream by Juliet Bell

Spirit of the West: Kent Haruf

Gretel Ehrlich on Facing the Wave

If you were a novelist you could retire after creating a character like Gretel Ehrlich. She has twice been struck by lightning (see A Match to the Heart). She has spent months dogsleding across Greenland (see This Cold Heaven). Born in Montecito, growing up staring at the Channel Islands from her bed, she transplanted herself forty years ago to an isolated stretch of the country's least populous state, Wyoming, where, between bouts of award-winning writing and freelance sheepherding, she deepened her love of all things Japanese. The themes of her brave and beautiful new book, Facing the Wave [Kindle], about the resilience of the coastal people in the aftermath of the tsunami, amplify ideas dating back at least to her 1989 essay "The Bridge to Heaven" (in Islands, the Universe, Home) recounting her December pilgrimage to the sacred mountain Osorezan. After an arduous, many-day journey, the truck's final passage was blocked by a locked gate and she decided to walk the rest of way in a blizzard -- twenty-six miles roundtrip. 

Okay, you say, so she's a brilliant writer, and a hearty traveler, but what makes her worthy of a great character in literature? Her original vision. Sunday night at Washington's Politics & Prose, during her first reading from the new book, she discussed witnessing, at a tiny inland river temple, survivors bringing bodies of the dead in wheelbarrows, and her reaction was, This is so cool. Not for her any wallowing in sorrow or sticky pieties of optimism. She writes, "neurotic suffering is only the flapping of ego." She believes in action, in "movement: life’s extraordinary experiences entwined with the ordinary, and from that littered ground, the courage to leap."

Her own action is to start a partnership between American architects and Japanese builders to get some fast, responsible housing for the more than 300,000 people still displaced. So far, no website where you can donate but as soon as it's up, you'll find a link on this site.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune says, "In sum, Facing the Wave is a masterpiece of narrative reportage that balances Ehrlich’s own reaction with the voices of the victims."

If somehow you are unfamiliar with her previous fourteen books of essays, travel, poetry, fiction, and biography, start with the new book or her powerful collection The Solace of Open Spaces or This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland.

She's on tour this week: Aspen, Santa Barbara, SF, Corte Madera, Santa Cruz, Seattle, and Portland. On March 11 she will appear on the PBS NewsHour, followed by readings the next two nights in Albany and Manchester, VT. 

Frontier Fur: Gay, Footloose, and Free in the 1830-40s

If you've been pining for an elaborate gay Circuit Party for outdoorsy dudes in an idyllic setting like the Platte River, you're exactly 170 years too late. Restless and oppressed in his native Perthshire, Scotland in the early 1830s, William Drummond Stewart set off for manly adventures in the Rocky Mountains and found plenty of men who were just his type. He liked it so much he extended his brief excursion more than a decade. Before the frontier was settled, men could live together freely in a world without women and with no questions asked. There was no need to hide because there was no one to hide from. Stewart took many lovers and enjoyed a long relationship with a French Canadian - Cree Indian trapper named Antoine Clement. And, yes, they really did party. In 1843, Stewart "organized, fully outfitted and recruited dozens of willing participants to engage in a spectacular and bedazzling Renaissance-themed costume party," says the Billings Gazette. Stewart's biographer William Benemann calls it "one last all-male hurrah before the wagon trains and the families and the plows changed everything forever."

Benemann is a Berkeley Law School Library archivist by day and spends his weekends and vacations in other libraries to track down source material for his gay history books. His newest is Men in Eden: William Drummond Stewart and Same-Sex Desire in the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade [Kindle].

Previously he won a Stonewall award for Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships covering roughly one hundred years from the 1770s to the 1870s. Benemann's debut was A Year of Mud and Gold: San Francisco in Letters and Diaries, 1849-1850.

Decades before Stewart, there was Lewis & Clark. Brian Hall's novel I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company recreates Merriweather Lewis's struggle as a gay man exploring.

Howdy, Cowboy #1

Does America's least populous state, Wyoming, have the highest number of good writers per capita? Annie Proulx, Gretel Ehrlich, Alexandra Fuller, Alison Hagy, C.J. Box, William Haywood Henderson (and his gay novel Native), and Craig Johnson. Last night we went to the library expecting Johnson to read; instead, he screened the pilot of the record-breaking new A&E series based on his novels about Absaroka County sheriff Walt Longmire. 

Johnson's first novel The Cold Dish [Kindle] won France's Le Prix du Polar Nouvel Observateur, and his fourth, Another Man's Moccasins [Kindle] won the Spur Award and was named the Mountains & Plains Book of the Year. He recently published the series' ninth volume, As the Crow Flies, which USA Today called, “a top-notch tale of complex emotions and misguided treachery… a superb novel steeped in the culture of the American West.” The Houston Chronicle said, “The pleasure of the series rests in Walt’s narration, with its laid-back, observant, bemused recounting of events…  Solid landscapes, a mélange of fully fleshed characters (familiar and new), drily laconic dialogue, and assorted power struggles keep the latest in this rich and satisfying series on engaging course.”

Howdy, Cowboy #3

See 15 photos from my 18th trip to Cody: mountains, rivers, fire signs, smoke, autumn leaves, antelope, pack mules, and my pard.

Wyoming Smog

The blue sky ought to extend down to the horizon. That's smoke from the forest fires.

Boleto by Alyson Hagy

The flinty, fighting lesbians on the neighboring ranch may be the happiest couple in Alison Hagy's fine novel of the new West, Boleto [Kindle], unless you count the hero, 23 year-old Will Testerman, and his beloved but unnamed filly. In the opening scene, he spends all his savings to buy her, and plans to train her in order to sell her, yet even so their relationship is deeper and more respectful than most of the human pairings. Will's father is a bitter, failed rancher who runs a dying printing shop; his mother is struggling with her second bout of breast cancer; his brothers are selfish and stubborn; and his one serious girlfriend got pregnant by someone else. The action follows Will and his horse through three seasons in different places: spring with his family in Lost Cabin, Wyoming; summer at a just-barely-hanging-on guest ranch east of Yellowstone; fall at an absent Argentine's polo estate in California. These shifts allow Hagy to explore the overlapping clashes of the mythic old West and the new reality, working families and the very rich, dependence and power, injury and redemption. Most of the novel is surprisingly, wonderfully open-ended and under-explained, which may make the too-neat ending seem simplistic.  

The Wyoming sections take place in an area I've visited eighteen times in the past nine years and I can attest to Hagy's skill in evoking the dry grandeur of the landscape and her talent for illuminating the complex inner lives of the tight-lipped locals. Especially recommended for fans of elegiac yet clear-eyed fiction from Annie Proulx, Wallace Stegner, Ron Carlson, and Kent Haruf (who finally has a new novel coming next March). Hagy's Ghosts of Wyoming won a High Plains Book Award.

My West, Essays by Patricia Nell Warren

If things were different, I would be in the Rockies now, posting new photos and finally reviewing Patricia Nell Warren's fine essay collection My West: Personal Writings on the American West -- Past, Present and Future, which she sent me several months ago.

In the same way her classic novel The Front Runner shattered stereotypes of gay athletes, her nonfiction is a major myth-buster. Felice Picano says, "As Warren makes clear early in her preface, this book is about her West, and not the West of movies and cliché bestsellers. If she has any peers in what she knows and writes of, it would be Larry McMurtry, Annie Proulx and perhaps Louise Erdich. Like them, in her novels, and now in this compendium, she extends our own knowledge deep into this least truly understood part of America..." Mykola Dementiuk agrees, "...not just movie Cowboys and Indians fighting it out but actual people building their lives for themselves on a day to day basis. Warren looks at everything, old time haying, horse teams, forage plants, bobcats, Oriental rugs, etc., etc. Her wealth of knowledge is encyclopedic but never does she intrude by showing off... A sheer delight." Amos Lassen concludes, "She is above all else a Westerner and her love for the West is totally obvious in almost every sentence. I love the diversity here and whether she writes about making hay or sexual orientation, Warren captures the reader."

Read a sample chapter, Gates. Or watch her lecture at the Autry.

Postcard from Wyoming

I've been to the [straight] cowboy dance bar in Cody many times but never before have I ended up talking with America's first gay Jewish Republican presidential candidate. Like us, Fred Karger is in town for the weekend's non-politcal events. Ten days ago he published his memoir, co-authored with Steve Fiffer, FRED WHO? Political Insider to Outsider. Among other topics, it covers his acting days in Hollywood, his closeted decades, and his leading fight against the Mormon funding of Prop 8, as well as "lessons learned working for the likes of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush." At the bar a 55 year-old woman, a painter from Jackson, urged me and my partner to dance together to the band playing George Jones and Pat Benatar because "no one gives a s**t."