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Maile Meloy
Excerpt from A Family Daughter:
In the summer of 1979, just when Yvette Santerre thought her children were all safely launched and out of the house, her granddaughter came to stay in Hermosa Beach and came down with a fever, and then a rash. Yvette thought it might be stress: Abby was seven, and her parents were considering divorce, and she must have sensed trouble. At bedtime she cried from homesickness, and Yvette asked if she wanted to go home. Abby said, “I want to go home, and I want to stay here.”
The rash got worse, and Yvette’s husband said they should tell Clarissa her daughter was sick. But Clarissa had gone back to Hawaii, where she had lived in Navy housing before Abby was born. She said it was the last place she had been happy, and she was staying somewhere without a telephone. So Yvette called Abby’s father, up in Northern California.
“Oh, man,” Henry said, when he heard.
“Was she exposed to anything?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Let me talk to her.”
“I think she has chicken pox.”
“No, she can’t have chicken pox,” Henry said. Yvette imagined him on the other end, big and sandy-haired and invincible. It was one of the infuriating things about Henry: he thought he was immune to bad luck, and by extension his daughter was, too.
“Has she had it before?” Yvette asked.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“Well, then, she can have chicken pox.”
“Did you take her to the doctor?”
“I raised three children, Henry,” she said. “I don’t need a doctor to recognize chicken pox.” Mrs. Ferris next door had already quarantined her own daughter from Abby. Yvette hadn’t heard anything about an outbreak in Los Angeles.
“Put Abby on,” Henry said.
Yvette gave the phone to the child, who held the receiver to her ear with both hands. Abby nodded, in answer to some question of her father’s.
“You have to say it aloud,” Yvette said. “Say yes.”
“Yes,” Abby said, into the phone. She turned toward the kitchen wall to have the conversation on her own.
Yvette washed Teddy’s breakfast dishes and thought her husband seemed annoyed to have a sick child in the house again. It took her attention and drained her energy. She didn’t want a divorce for her daughter, she wanted a time machine. There would be no Abby, without that dominating Henry, but there would be some other child -- a happier child -- and a marriage that wasn’t doomed from the start. Her older daughter, Margot, had a husband who was kind and stalwart and patient: if only Clarissa had found a man like that. Yvette tried to accept that the way it had gone was God’s plan.
Abby said good-bye to her father, and Yvette took the phone.
“I want you to take her to a doctor,” Henry said.
“He’ll want to know when she was exposed.”
“Well, I don’t know that,” he said.
“Do you know where I can reach Clarissa?”
“Clarissa won’t know.”
“It’s not going to be a very nice summer for Abby.”
“Look,” Henry said, “if she has chicken pox, it’s not my fault. Kids get it sometime, right? And if she got some mystery rash at your house, it’s really not my fault. Just please take her to the doctor and find out.”
Yvette said tightly that she would. (Scribner 2007)
Reviews of A Family Daughter:
“A thoroughly original and undeniably brilliant companion piece to Meloy’s debut novel, Liars and Saints… Each novel stands alone; together they pack a seismic wallop.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“In evanescent scenes distinguished by clean, wry prose, Meloy observes the Santerre family, whom readers met in 2003’s Liars and Saints, from a crafty new angle.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Riveting and engrossing, Meloy’s tale of a family struggling with guilt and forgiveness spans decades and crosses continents, proving her status as one of the best literary observers of contemporary American life.” —Booklist (starred review)
“[Meloy is] a wise and astonishing conjurer of convincing realities.” —The New Yorker
“A seductive, absorbing read...The tone is by turns wry, ironic, affectionate - and consistently engaging.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
Debra Magpie Earling
Excerpt from Perma Red:
On the day Louise’s great grandmother had died Baptiste foretold her death. It was in the spring, on a day so clear clouds faded overhead like wide ghosts. Louise’s great-grandfather was branding horses in the high field and, she remembered, Baptiste had come over with his grandfather to watch. Louise was six years old at the time but she still remembered Baptiste, because it was one of the few times she had seen him out of school then. But she remembered him most because of what had happened that day. And that day Louise sat up on the hillside with her mother, her grandmother and Old Macheese—her great-grandmother. Louise thought at first Baptiste was frightened of Old Macheese and had chosen to sit away from her. (Blue Hen Books, 2003)
Reviews of Perma Red:
“...Earling is a truly gifted writer, and Perma Red is a wonder-filled gift to all of us.” —James Welch
“This book was great in all its pieces. In totality, it’s epic.” —Sherman Alexie
“...a terrific novel, tough-minded, gritty, and powerful...” —James Crumley
“It is my pleasure to welcome Debra Magpie Earling’s boldly drawn and passionate novel, Perma Red.” —Louise Erdrich
“A love story of uncommon depth and power.” —Booklist
Christopher Howell
A Poem from Light’s Ladder:
Keats
When Keats, at last beyond the curtain
of love's distraction, lay dying in his room
on the Piazza di Spagna, the melody of the Bernini
Fountain “filling him like flowers,”
he held his breath like a coin, looked out
into the moonlight and thought he saw snow.
He did not suppose it was fever or the body's
weakness turning the mind. He thought, “England!”
and there he was, secretly, for the rest
of his improvidently short life: up to his neck
in sleigh bells and the impossibly English cries
of street venders, perfect
and affectionate as his soul.
For days the snow and statuary sang him so far
beyond regret that if now you walk rancorless
and alone there, in the piazza, the white shadow
of his last words to Severn, “Don't be frightened,”
may enter you. (University of Washington Press, 2004)
Reviews of Light’s Ladder:
“No excerpt of any of the poems will help you understand the poignancy and meaning in these poems. Read them. Read them all. It will change your life.” - Salem Statesman Journal
“Chris Howell is probably the most gifted poet in America. He tends to write magnificent lyrical poems, but Light’s Ladder is filled with narrative poems and they are tremendous.” - Redactions: Poetry and Poetics
Kim Todd
Excerpt from Chrysalis, Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis:
The life in these glades was truly nothing she'd seen before, and she took a stab at capturing it on paper. On a bone-colored branch, its few leaves chewed to tatters, a dark tarantula emerges from a webbed egg, and grasps an ant in its pincers. Other ants scurry, just out of reach. A second tarantula, also black and hairy, lunges over a hummingbird lying prone, throat exposed. The spider is feeding, and one leg dangles into a nest with four eggs that the hummingbird may have been warming moments before. Another spider sits at the center of her tawny web, young spiders fanning out before her toward ants that dwarf them in size. Life barely gets its start before it is preyed upon. An insect, only one wing remaining, is tangled in the web. The ants are hard at work: attacking a plump bug, building a bridge of their bodies to crawl from twig to twig, grasping a fourth spider in what looks like a wicked bite. The dying hummingbird holds most of the brightness in the picture with its red head, blue wings, green body. The spiders, the ants, the web are all in black, and they are winning. It is a world of voraciousness, of consuming hunger. It's hard to tell, sometimes, who is eating whom. (Harcourt, 2007)
Reviews of Chrysalis
“A breathtaking example of scholarship and storytelling, enriched by ample illustrations of Merian’s work.” —Kirkus, Starred Review
“Todd’s writing itself is lush, almost poetic, whether she is describing the science of metamorphosis or Merian’s own personal metamorphoses throughout her life.” —Library Journal, Starred Review
“In this spellbinding biography, Todd interweaves the life of Maria Sibylla Merian, a German artist and naturalist who became famous in the seventeenth century for her engravings of caterpillars, with the intellectual and scientific history of metamorphosis.” —The New Yorker
“Todd’s book is a portrait of the metamorphosis of an age, a society, and a woman whose passion to see the world through the metaphor of moths and butterflies would not abate… The illustrations reproduced in this fine biography affirm Merian’s vision; the range of Todd’s research and the eloquence of her writing give that vision voice.” —Bookforum
Melanie Rae Thon
Excerpt from Sweet Hearts:
Brilliant girl, once upon a time my mother had been the darling of the nuns in St. Ignatius, the one child of a hundred with a gift for learning, the one girl quiet and serious enough to follow in their patient footsteps. The good women of St. Ignatius would have been amazed to hear the catechism we recited. When her teachers praised her, she never bragged, never said, I'm going to college. This secret was too strange and too valuable. Nobody she knew had ever done it. When the nuns whispered that she was the smartest student they'd ever taught, they didn’t add the words female or Indian. They didn't qualify her intelligence. She didn’t confide in her girlfriends who refused to study, who were not as clever as she was. She didn't tell Baptiste Thomas, who was Baptiste Little Knife, the boy who made love to her in the grass by the river. They would laugh; they would taunt her. Junkman’s daughter. (Houghton Mifflin, 2001)
Reviews of Sweet Hearts:
“The range of emotion Thon has her narrator intuit in other characters’ lives – and share with us – is remarkable.” —The Los Angeles Times
“Episodic, intensely imagined and darkly portentous.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“In this novel, as in the most bracing of her short stories, Thon gives voice to the inarticulate, making vivid the yearning of those left out in the cold... Through the wildness and longing of her characters, she turns what could be a tale of grim endurance into a cry against forgetting.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Brilliantly imagined and infused with a raw spirituality that cuts to the bone... Thon writes with a lyric power about the lives of lost souls who nonetheless passionately believe in a God "no longer capable of even the smallest miracles.” —Kirkus Review, Starred Review
Joseph R. McGeshick
Excerpt from short story collection Never Get Mad at Your Sweetgrass:
They didn’t know what was going on or the reason for it. He didn’t need one.
He was always right.
The black specks floated in the caramel liquid and he rolled down his window and threw the coffee out. He looked at the braid of sweetgrass in his hand.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
He put the braid back up in its place and pulled out onto the Frontage Road and headed east. The Bridger Mountains seemed right in front of him. The clouds still hung low and everything was gray. (PublishAmerica, 2007)
Reviews of Never Get Mad at Your Sweetgrass:
“…It’s all there—dispossession, loss, regret—but we feel rich for knowing the hope and resilience, too, through McGeshick’s tough and tender prose. A great book that is sure to take an important place in contemporary Native American literature!”
—Kate Shanley, Chair, American Indian Studies, The University of Montana
“Raw, funny, honest prose punctuates the stories in Joe McGeshick’s Never Get Mad At Your Sweetgrass. But more than that, his characters cross the boundaries of our staid political correctness, our social awkwardness, and cut to the heart of living the hard, vivid experiences of day-to-day life. McGeshick’s voice speaks of his American Indian heritage and, like all good fiction, resonates with truth.”
—Seabring Davis, Editor Big Sky Journal, Bozeman, Montana
Neil McMahon
Excerpt from Lone Creek:
I'd only ever seen Laurie Balcomb a few times, usually glimpses while I was working and she was passing by on her way to someplace else. I'd never met her or spoken with her. She and her husband were the new owners of the Pettyjohn Ranch, and they didn't socialize with the help.
But when she came into sight on this afternoon, riding horseback across a hay field, there was no mistaking her even from a quarter mile away. Her hair was auburn shot through with gold, she was wearing a brindle chamois shirt, and the way the sunlight caught her, she looked like a living flame.
I hadn't paid much attention to Laurie before this, other than to notice that she was a nice-looking woman. The sense I'd gotten from her was subdued, distant. Even her hair had seemed darker.
But now, for just a second, something slipped in my head-the kind of jolt you got when you were walking down a staircase in the dark and thought there was one more step at the bottom.
I shook it off and slowed my pickup truck to a stop. This was September, a warm afternoon at the end of a dry Montana summer, and I'd been raising a dust cloud the size of a tornado. I figured I'd let it settle so Laurie wouldn't have to ride through it.
But instead of passing, she rode toward me and reined up. The horse was one of the thoroughbreds she'd brought out here from Virginia, a reddish chestnut gelding that looked like he'd been chosen to fit her color scheme. Like her, he was fine-boned, classy, high-strung. A couple hundred thousand bucks, easy.
“Are you in a fix ?” she called. She had just enough accent to add a touch of charm. In a fix, I remembered, was Southern for having trouble. (HarperCollins, 2007)
Reviews for Lone Creek:
“The only negative thing about Lone Creek is that it ended.” – Amazon.com
"Neil McMahon is lifetime expert in the tranquilities and bloody-handed twists and brutalities of working class life in the northern Rockies. And he's one of our finest fast-action storytellers. Lone Creek will keep you up and dodging through the night, and send you to sleep with a sense of relief and pleasure. Sure worked for me." William Kittredge
"Lone Creek is a Montana writer's soaring tribute to the people, sorrows, and great beauty of that state. It's also a riveting crime story, an elegy to a passing era, and an exploration of the nature of long friendship. In taut and graceful language, Neil McMahon gives us all that and makes us sorry when it's over. A terrific read." Deirdre McNamer
"In prose as smooth as worn saddle leather, Lone Creek captures the old Montana verities: the days when a man's word was his bond; the time when neighbors stood together against the forces of weather and outsiders; and when a man was judged by his good work, his bravery, and his moral character. When faced with the lies of the modern world, a man with these qualities doesn't just endure, he triumphs. This is a lovely novel, smart and exciting, set in a landscape that throbs with beauty. I loved it." James Crumley
Fred Haefele
Excerpt from Fred Haefele’s Rebuilding the Indian: A Memoir:
Parts are the reason I’m here at the county fairgrounds this gorgeous spring evening in Missoula, Montana. These American Motorcyclist Association (AMA) flat-track races are the first I’ve attended in more than twenty years. Flanked by snowcapped mountains, this small university town at the confluence of three rivers looks green and fresh. After a long, dreary winter, Missoula on a spring night looks about as good as it’s ever going to get.
I’m here shopping for an Indian basketcase. An Indian is a make of motorcycle, defunct since 1953. A basketcase is biker argot for a quantity of parts that, when bolted together, comprise the greater part of a motorcycle. My reason is simple: I’m a fifty-one-year-old tree surgeon, an ex-professor with an unsuccessful novel under my belt. It took me six years to write my novel, four years to not sell it. I’ve come into $5,000 dollars and I’m in the mood to do something foolish. (Bison Books, 2005)
Reviews of Rebuilding the Indian: A Memoir:
“This remembrance of turning a box of junk into a gleaming Indian Chief has a universal roar. Just the right mix of gearhead details and personal reflections.” —USA Today
“What Haefele writes about wonderfully, in his mellow, understated way, is how the Indian project became a test of his love and resolve.” —Esquire
“Haefele describes how his search for vintage parts eventually involved an entire community of fanatical mechanics, impoverished motorcycle collectors, and renegade bikers—a collaboration, he realizes, that gave him skills as much social and spiritual as practical.” —New Yorker
“Haefele was a writer who couldn’t get his book published, an arborist whose livelihood just might kill him, and an expectant father for the first time in 20 years when he tackled the restoration of a 1947 Indian Chief motorcycle. The book chronicles the restoration of the bike — and the resurrection of a dream.” —Missoulian
“You don’t have to love motorcycles, midlife crisis stories, or even redemption to love the good writing by Missoula’s favorite arborist in this gently humorous memoir reissued, like an orchid, after its first flower in 1998” —Montana Magazine
Greg Patent
Excerpt from Greg Patent’s Baking in America: Traditional and Contemporary Favorites from the Past 200 Years:
America’s love affair with baking stretches back only two hundred years, yet in this relatively brief period we’ve developed a large and varied tradition rivaling that of countries that have been around for thousands of years. Where did all these recipes come from? I became fascinated by this question as I leafed through Seventy-Five Receipts, for Pastry, Cakes, and Sweetmeats in the cozy wood-paneled rare book room of the Los Angeles Public Library. There, in the earliest American baking book, written in 1828 by Eliza Leslie (“A Lady of Philadelphia”), an unusual recipe called Indian Pound Cake grabbed my attention: Eight eggs. The weight of eight eggs in powdered sugar. The weight of six eggs in Indian meal, sifted. Half a pound of butter. One nutmeg, gratedor a tea-spoonful of cinnamon. Stir the butter and sugar to a cream. Beat the eggs very light. Stir the meal and eggs, alternately, into the butter and sugar. Grate in the nutmeg. Stir all well. Butter a tin pan, put in the mixture, and bake it in a moderate oven. Pound cake, a traditional English cake normally made with fine white flour, had been transformed into something new by the substitution of an authentic American ingredient, cornmeal, known at the time as Indian meal, for the flour. And it was flavored with an entire nutmeg to boot. Intrigued, I wondered what the texture would be like. And would the nutmeg overwhelm the flavor? I couldn't wait to get into the kitchen to find out. (Houghton Mifflin, 2002)
Reviews of Baking in America:
“(A) remarkable book containing recipes from the past plus many contemporary recipes. It’s also a valuable course... that you can take at home without going to baking school.” —Marion Cunningham, author of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook
“Although rooted in the past, all the recipes ring with a note of welcome surprise. Baking in America is certainly destined to last.” —Deborah Madison, author of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
“Old-fashioned never seemed so hip. This is the first book I’ll go to when I want to bake.” —Jill Melton, senior editor, Cooking Light
“Traditional American cuisine has gotten short shrift for far too long. Greg Patent has made a valuable contribution by bringing to our attention its long and delicious history.” —Russ Parsons, author of How to Read a French Fry and food editor of the Los Angeles Times
“From time to time, the right writer finds the right subject and after a long time - usually - a book appears that is so solid and true and timeless that it may become a classic. Such is the case with Greg Patent and his new book... (Baking in America is) a good read and a clarion call to the kitchen.” —William Rice, Chicago Tribune
M.L. Smoker
Excerpt from “The Necessary Bullet”
"can you hear the sound of old women clacking
their old tongues to the roofs
of their mouths in the dust?
this is prophecy so never
ask the Indian whether she'd take
the million dollars or the match.
gasoline is on the shelf in all our houses."
Reviews of Another Attempt at Rescue:
"M.L. Smoker's poems are tough, funny, magical, but not in a goofy way. This is blue-collar magic. Unemployed magic. Living on government cheese magic. I highly recommend this collection"--Sherman Alexie
“An impressive first book, though there is nothing here that reminds me of a first book. This is the work of an accomplished and mature poet with a rare and first-rate mind."—Jim Harrison
Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel
Excerpt from Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel’s article “Young Moguls Make the Sale at Farmers’ Market”:
This week at the Missoula Farmer’s market, I walked up to the smallest booth where cucumbers were four for a dollar. The hand written sign exclaimed that cucumbers were “usually three for a dollar!”
“I’ll take eight,” I told the three young girls behind the table. And then, as if we were at a farmers’ market drive-thru, one of the girls said, “Want sorrel with that?”
Her sense of commerce and the “upsell,” seemed fairly well developed for a ten year old. But I declined, mostly because I had never heard of sorrel.
“Give her a taste,” nudged the other girl. “It’s so good.”
“We have a recipe for sorrel soup too. It’s very good and easy,” she nodded.
She tore a small piece off the green leaves that looked a bit like thin, floppy spinach. “It’s good,” she repeated.
They watched as I took one bite and smiled politely when, quite suddenly, the clear taste actually hit my tongue. I stopped smiling in complete amazement of the zesty leaf that tasted like lemon spinach.
Stunned, I asked the girls, “Do you grow these vegetables?”
“Our grandma grows them,” one said, “but we go over to her house every Friday and help her. Then we come here on Saturday and sell it.” (NewWest.net; July 10, 2007)
Ari LeVaux
Excerpt from Ari LeVaux’s “The Garden Cheerleader”, an article in his Flash in the Pan column:
There are many reasons to dump your garden right now. It’s dried up, stunted, worm-eaten, lost in weeds, or already forgotten. I’m very aware of these possibilities because they are all manifest in my own extra-humble garden.
As usual, my garden was ambitiously conceived. As usual, the follow-through was mañana in spirit, and “cut and run” in practice. Weeds flourish in the many edges and pockets of my garden. Many of my sorry plants had troubled upbringings in my ghetto greenhouse, followed by late plantings.
My garden is probably uglier than yours, and less productive than hundreds of gardens around the valley tended by people who don’t bite off more than they can chew, and can finish the many little jobs that together constitute gardening. To those real gardeners, who turn their yards into oases of edible diversity, hats off. (Missoula Independent, July 2007)
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