Helena Bookfest 2008

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Why these authors are so great

Read excerpts and reviews of works by a few of
our guest authors

Hattie Kirby Larson

Excerpt from Hattie Big Sky:

In all my sixteen years, Charlie Hawley was one of the nicest things to happen to me. It was him who’d stuck up for me when I first came to live with Aunt Ivy and Uncle Holt, so shy I couldn’t get my own name out. He’d walked me to school that very first day and every day after. Charlie was the one who’d brought me Mr. Whiskers, a sorry-looking tomcat who purred his way into my heart. The one who’d taught me how to pitch, and me a southpaw. So maybe I did spend a night now and then dreaming silly girl dreams about him, even though everyone knew he was sweet on Mildred. My bounce-around life had taught me that dreams were dangerous things—they look solid in your mind, but you just try to reach for them. It’s like gathering clouds.

The class had voted to see Charlie off at the station. Mildred clung to his arm. His father clapped him on the back so often, I was certain he’d end up bruised. Miss Simpson made a dull speech as she presented Charlie with a gift from the school: a wool stocking cap and some stationery.

“Time to get aboard, son,” the conductor called.

Something shifted in my heart as Charlie swung his foot up onto the train steps. I had told myself to hang back—didn’t want to be lumped in with someone like Mildred—but I found myself running up to him and slipping something in his hand. “For luck!” I said. He glanced at the object and smiled. With a final wave, he boarded the train.

“Oh, Charlie!” Mildred leaned on Mrs. Hawley and sobbed.

“There, there.” Charlie’s mother patted Mildred’s back.

Mr. Hawley took a bandanna from his pocket and made a big show of wiping his forehead. I pretended not to notice that he dabbed at his eyes, too.

The others made their way slowly down the platform, back to their cars. I stood watching the train a bit longer, picturing Charlie patting the pocket where he’d placed the wishing stone I’d given him. He was the one who’d taught me about those, too. “Look for the black ones,” he’d told me. “With the white ring around the middle. If you throw them over your left shoulder and make a wish, it’s sure to come true.” He threw his wishing rocks with abandon and laughed at me for not tossing even one. My wish wasn’t the kind that could be granted by wishing rocks. (Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 2007)

Reviews of Hattie Big Sky: “Larson creates a masterful picture of the homesteading experience and the people who persevered.” — School Library Journal, Starred Review “A marvelous story about courage, loyalty, perseverance, and the meaning of home. I gave my heart to the brave and determined Hattie, and I think you will, too.” — Karen Cushman, author of The Midwife’s Apprentice, Newbery winner and Catherine, Called Birdy, Newbery Honor winner “

If you're interested in what it was like back home during World War I, or what it was like for homesteaders in the west, or you just generally like survival stories, you should absolutely pick up Hattie Big Sky. And if none of those things are true for you, you should pick it up anyway. You won't be disappointed.” — Jen Robinson's Book Page “This is a great read for anyone who appreciates history or learning what life was like for teens in years past.” — Detroit Free Press

LongKnives Joseph Marshall III

Excerpt from The Long Knives are Crying (Book II in the Lakota Western Series):

June 23, 1920

John Richard Cloud stood, hat in hand, at the fence in the east ditch on the side of the road and gazed into a long-wide, shadowy gully that stretched away from the narrow highway. they were on the Crow Reservation, enemy country. He had not seen a Crow Indian for more than forty years, though he knew they were still around. Something stirred inside of him, an ancient, inherent sense of wariness. It was an instinctive response left over from the old days when he and other Lakota warriors had ridden into Crow territory.

But things had changed, and there was no way to avoid the fact that their destination, the site of the Greasy Grass Battle, was on land that now belonged to the Crow Tribe. He knew a Crow war party would not charge out of the gully, but part of him almost wished it would.

He sighed and looked up to the ridge above the gulch where a thick stand of tall pine trees covered the jagged crest. Behind him and below the road was the town of Lodge Grass, Montana. On the narrow shoulder of the road, his grandson Justin Fontonneau was putting a spare tire on the car. They had been chugging along steadily, albeit slowly, when a tire blew. Justin finished and lowered the jack, then stood and walked around the car to inspect the other tires.

“This tire is torn and the tube has a hole in it,” the young man said. “I think we ran over something sharp. I want to mount the other spare before we go.”

Justin was twenty-two, a strong man who stood just over six feet tall and bore a striking resemblance to his grandfather. In April, he had been honorably discharged from the US Army after a three-year enlistment that included service on the battlefields of France in 1918.

A few yards from the car, Katherine Fontonneau and Anne Hail, Cloud’s daughters, sat on a blanket beneath the shade of Anne’s umbrella.

“Dad,” Katherine called out, “Come sit with us while Justin fishiness fixing the tires.” ….

…”Yes. We will sit here, and I will tell you what happened.”

After removing his coat, he untied the black bandana from his neck and wiped his face. He gazed across the land below them and across the river. But justin knew it was not the land he was seeing. He had seen that kind of look many times on the faces of men who reluctantly look deep within themselves, carefully approaching the dark memories of battle.

As Katherine and Anne joined them, a warm, gentle breeze crawled up from the river along the bottom of the valley. It was nearly noon.

Cloud returned his gaze east toward the outline of the Wolf Mountains. Suddenly, he law a long line of mounted Lakota and Cheyenne fighting men riding up the broken slopes. He could feel the horse beneath him as it picked its way up the narrow trail.

“People forget,” he began, “that we fought a column of Long Knives before Long Hair attacked us. We fought them on Rosebud Creek, fifty miles from here, eight days before we killed Long Hair. We rode through the night and fought them all day. Then we rode through the night again to get back.”

Cloud plucked a blade of grass and stared at it. “No. But when Sitting Bull sent out the call, a lot of Red Cloud and Spotted Tail’s people broke away from the agencies and joined us.” He paused to sort through the memories that swirled behind his eyes like windblown leaves of autumn. “It was good,” he murmured. “When we got together, we were powerful again. When the enemy came, we defeated them. But after the battle, we had to fight a different kind of power in order to survive, so that there will always be Lakota in the world.”

Anne leaned forward, offering a drink of water. “What do you mean, Dad?”

Cloud smiled as he took a cup of water. “I will tell you,” he said resolutely. I will tell you. It is a good day for remembering.” (Fulcrum Publishing, 2008)

Reviews of Hundred in the Hand (Book I of the Lakota Western Series): “Marshall has tapped into an old form and infused it with a slightly different brand of knowledge to produce a swift, compelling read. Simply put, if you like Westerns, you’ll love this one.” –Washington Post

“A fine historical novel in a class with Larry McMurtry’s tales of life on the Western frontier. Highly recommended.” – Library Journal

LastDeath Susanna Sonnenberg

Excerpt from Her Last Death: A Memoir:

The phone shouldn't ring this early. When I answer, my aunt Irene rushes into the news. "Your mother's been in an accident. She's been in surgery all night. She's probably going to die."

This can't be true, of course. I'm waiting for the story. Irene will laugh her exasperated laugh and say my mother used to date the surgeon. Or she's already secured a better hospital room. But Irene says my mother's in a coma, and when she finishes that sentence, I stop moving around the kitchen and sit. She usually calls her sister Daphne, but she keeps saying "your mother." My mother had a head-on collision after a dinner party. I want to ask if she was sober. Irene probably asked the same question of the person who called to tell her.

"The police have a record this time," she says. "The hospital has a chart."

The adrenaline of true emergency goes through me, and I draw a blank. I keep thinking, "My mother had an accident," but the thought has nowhere to settle and stick.

"Susy?" my aunt says. She's worried for me.

If I speak, I'll say, "Do I have to go?" So I mustn't open my mouth. I try to think what other people say in this situation.

I'm afraid my mother will die. I'm afraid she won't.

In a house in Montana thousands of miles from my mother, I am thirty-seven, leading an unremarkable life. My mother lives in Barbados, where she stayed after her third husband died. I've never seen her house. She plays tennis and has houseguests, I hear, but we don't speak. Instead, I concentrate on the organic granola my two boys like, the seascape mural I'm about to paint on their bedroom wall. I preside over their school board and review movies for the paper. I send the photos of Halloween costumes and birthday parties to my father and stepmother. Last night, like most nights, my husband and I read books to each of the boys, crossing back and forth between their beds with kisses for them and patient hugs for their stuffed animals. This morning my husband will pack the lunch for our six-year-old, and I'll play with the two-year-old until his nap. We've just purchased this hundred-year-old house. On moving day I realized we would never invite my mother to see it. We live in sunny rooms messy with socks and books, a bathroom scattered with tub toys that are always drying, never dry. Christopher and I wonder before sleep at our boys' happiness and their invisible trust. Sometimes I'm jealous of them.

Over the years my aunt Irene and I have wearied together of the stories that start "Guess what Daphne did?" I tell a couple of them myself, rarely now but sometimes at a dinner party. My mother gave me cocaine! You wouldn't believe what she said to my new boyfriend! She had an affair with a mobster! These aren't stories I tell my children.

The boys' voices topple down the stairs before they come into the kitchen. I'll need to hang up when they start to tug at me with their small demands. Irene says my grandmother, also in Barbados, has not gone yet to the hospital. "She's hopeless. A complete wreck." I should ask for the hospital's number but say, "Let's talk later," and hang up the phone. I tell Christopher enough to give him a sense of the news and go to another room to call my sister. What she knows will be different from our aunt's story. This is how we move forward in my family, calling one another in almost every configuration five people can make. One woman gets a call, puts down the phone, picks it up again, repeats the story, hears another version. We fold in the new details that are not yet our own and patch together pieces until a certain sense emerges. My younger sister and I have an uneasy truce on the subject of our mother. We don't want to fight, so we don't mention her. (Scribner Book Company, 2008)

Reviews of Her Last Death:

“...Writing in sharp, crystalline prose, Ms. Sonnenberg... plung(es) readers into a sort of perpetual present tense in which we are made to experience, almost firsthand, the inexplicable and perverse behavior of an impossible woman from the point of view of her aghast, bedazzled — and immensely gifted — daughter." — Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"An irresistible book that is shimmering with life and the portrait of a glorious, frenzied, seductive woman who of necessity has been left, along with Susanna Sonnenberg's young womanhood, behind. Her mother.” — James Salter, author of Last Night and Burning the Days

“Riveting, sexy, smart, and brazenly honest, Her Last Death is a memoir that demands and rewards total immersion. I couldn't put it down, didn't want to, and was sorry when it was over. Susanna Sonnenberg is a wonderful writer, and this is a marvelous debut.” — John Burnham Schwartz, author of Reservation Road and Claire Marvel

“Her Last Death is an emotional thriller. It is a manual for men and smart, searching individuals of any age or economic levels. For most of the book it is a disturbing story, yet at the end you might feel like cheering. It is a beautiful, beautiful book and I plan to give it to my nearest and dearest.” — Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes and Teacher Man

Flamingo Greg Pape

Excerpt from American Flamingo:

Idling

Sitting on the seawall at the southern end
of Key Biscayne, with a line in the water,
he moves his gaze like a sable brush
from the breast of an idling gull
to the weathered gray wood of the houses
on stilts out in the bay,
from the long swaying branches of Australian pines
that will blow away in the next hurricane
to the endangered coral rocks and white sands
that turn the blue of the sky to the blue green of the bay,
from the spiny rock lobsters (for the taking of which
may result in fines and imprisonment)
to the horse conches (also illegal),
from the long white expensive boats
to the rainbowed fabric of sails,
from the flashing towers and banked glass facades
of vacant condominiums to the stuttering path
of a police helicopter, unsure if he’s guilty
or innocent, feeling the pull of local currents
and solunar tides, he holds his line,
lightly, between forefinger and thumb,
not to keep from falling, believing falling is
half the secret, but to feel the tug
of the other half when it comes for its prey.

Reviews of American Flamingo:

“You want to be the poet’s friend, because he makes you cry and laugh, to share his shadow and nuanced eye as he bends above a small spider that walks inside the snow track of a deer—within the shadow of the poet, that spider pauses. In the manner of James Wright and Horace before him, Greg Pape celebrates the delicate and daily exchange living beings make with each other. This is a beautifully compassionate book.” — Sandra Alcosser, author of Except by Nature

“My happiness is the poetry of Greg Pape. He’s Lorca’s demon in Frisco Jeans and a Chino shirt, praying on a Tejano squeezebox a poet of work and cantinas, love of place and family, and a spirit that redeems all sorrow in its plenitude. I can as easily do without Greg Pape’s poems as the high deserts and mountains of which he writes can do without rain and lightning. His American Flamingo is pure splendor.” — Garrett Hongo, author of Volcano

TrueKeepsCalm Rusty Morrison

Excerpt from the true keeps calm biding its story:

please advise stop

attempting again proximity with the dead as though they stay in place unmoved stop

as though I could measure closeness if I scratched it with tiny marks stop

opened again the fine pleating that opening each time damages stop

as if it were a stranger's hand my hand again replaying the reaching out it failed to do stop

gauging the weight of each inherited object ignoring the object itself stop

dwelling increasingly on the floor between memory and involuntarily pushing memory away stop

a few darknesses are inward a few are outward pointing branches in a stand of poplars stop

reason can't bring over something on the verge of real but unwilling to become it stop

I can paint any blue on a ceiling and none on the sky please advise

“Rusty Morrison's the true keeps calm biding its story brilliantly restores the energy of telegraphic communication, launching line after line toward a potentially infinite horizon of meaning. Her careful handling of form allows knowing to remain both openly discrete and discretely open. This is a joyous read and a remarkable book.” — Peter Gizzi, judge of the 2007 Sawtooth Poetry Prize

“In the nine groups of six poems, all titled ‘please advise stop,’ that form Morrison's remarkable Sawtooth Poetry Prize-winning second volume, the now-archaic yet ever-mechanical language of the telegram is used to plumb the vicissitudes of grief and grapple with the death of the speaker's father. Each line of these unpunctuated, nine-line poems ends with ‘stop,’ ‘please’ or ‘please advise,’ appealing to some ghostly reader for assistance. The rhythm and torque Morrison (Whethering) creates is exquisite and evocative. Often dark and aphoristic, these lines shift between momentary observation (‘the water puddle sways like an earthbound kite stop’), pained seeking (‘night might still be floating somewhere above us its blood supple and aromatic stop’) and near action, perhaps in the hope of relief (‘I stare until I consider the scene truly acknowledged stop’); always, anguish is an instrument for change. Most haunting are the poems' final, pleading words: ‘into the dark trees invite the darker birds please advise.’ Morrison's vamp on grief not only draws readers' attention to the tenuous capacity of language to manage loss, but also leaves the reader moved by what comes to feel like an intensely intimate work.” — Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

OpenSpaces Russell Rowland

Excerpt from In Open Spaces:

In our country, there is a quietness, a silence that surrounds you and fills you up, beating inside like blood until it becomes a part of you. The prairie is quiet even during the day, except for the sounds of work - the snort of horses, the clang of a plow’s blade against rock, and the rhythm of hooves pounding the ground. But even these sounds drift off into the air, finding nothing to contain them. It’s quieter still at night, when you can sit for hours at a stretch and hear nothing except the crickets, or the occasional chicken cluck. It is a silence that can be too much for some, especially people who aren’t fond of their own company. And it seems that living in such silence makes you think twice before speaking, or laughing, or crying. Because when sounds are that scarce, they carry much more weight.

So like most people I know, we Arbuckles don’t say much, especially in times of tragedy, when no one knows what to say anyway. When something leaves us wondering, we mostly sit and stare off across the prairie, as if somebody might come along and explain a few things. This stoic silence does not come naturally to some people. In those early homestead days, it led to frequent cases of the "loneliness," or suicide. And although most of us talked about these afflictions as if they only happened to newcomers, we all knew better. We all lived with a constant awareness of how vulnerable we were. All of us.

Reviews of In Open Spaces: “A heartfelt debut...[An] unpretentious, involving story told with unfaltering authority.” — Kirkus Reviews

“A family epic that has a muted elegance. ... A gracefully understated novel.” — New York Times Book Review

Medicine Tony Rees

Excerpt from Arc of the Medicine Line: Mapping the World's Longest Undefended Border Across the Western Plains:

It had taken more than two centuries of blood, bravado and barter, of grand imperial designs and even grander battles fought half a world away. But in the end, it had all come down to this one small moment.

The men who gathered on the grassy bank beside the Red River of the North on that bright, late summer day were British, American and Canadian. Together, over the next two years, they would arc a precise, pencil-thin line across nine hundred miles of forest, swamp and high plains desolation and, with it, draw the long course of empire in North America to a close. Over the following decade or so, the boundary would take on its popular name: the Medicine Line. It was probably the Sioux who first began to use the term in the late 1870s after Sitting Bull and his people crossed into Canada following the battle of the Little Bighorn. Although it was never more than a string of widely spaced markers with no continuous barrier between them, the line was said to have “strong medicine” since it seemed to have the power to stop the pursuing U.S. Cavalry in its tracks.

The members of the United States Northern Boundary Commission had been moving into camp at Fort Pembina, Dakota Territory, for more than a month. Their opposite numbers, the officers and men of the Royal Engineers, representing the British North American Boundary Commission, had only just arrived early that morning at the end of a voyage from their headquarters in Chatham, England. With their twenty tons of baggage unloaded and stacked beside an old Hudson’s Bay Company trading post, the British officers set off for their first official meeting with the Americans. At some point along the course of their half-mile walk to the south (though they could not have stated with any certainty exactly where) they crossed the 49th Parallel.

Leading the march was thirty-seven-year-old Captain Donald Roderick Cameron, chief commissioner of the British and Canadian contingent. Cameron differed from his fellow officers in two significant details: his career had been made in the Royal Artillery, rather than the Royal Engineers, and his appointment to the boundary commission was based not upon his field experience as a surveyor but on his political and social connections in Ottawa.

Born in Scotland and given his military education in France, Cameron was commissioned in 1856 and spent the first part of his career in India, distinguishing himself in the Bhutan campaign of 1864–65. He left India soon after and found himself posted to the British garrison at Halifax in Nova Scotia, which had just become one of the founding provinces of Canada in 1867. It was there he met and, in 1869, married Emma Tupper, daughter of Sir Charles Tupper, the long-time Nova Scotia politician then serving under Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald in Canada’s first national government.

While Britain seemed to view the surveying of the last gap in the boundary with the United States as unfinished business—a sort of “parting gift” to the new dominion—the Canadian government clearly saw it as an opportunity to assert its status as an independent nation. In addition to agreeing to pay half the cost of the commission, Canada asked that it might be given leave to recommend its own man for the position of chief commissioner. When the Foreign Office in London was unable to convince either of its own preferred choices to take the appointment, Britain agreed to the Canadians’ candidate, and Charles Tupper, by then president of the Privy Council, could tell his son-in-law that he had the job.

In fact, the boundary commission was Cameron’s second posting to the banks of the Red River, but he could hardly have been remembering his previous visit with any great warmth. In 1869 he had been aide-de-camp to the man who was supposed to become Manitoba’s first lieutenant governor, William McDougall, when the latter made an ill-fated attempt to assume his vice-regal seat during the height of Louis Riel’s Red River Rebellion. Cameron himself was said to have been stopped at a Metis barricade and provided great amusement to the defenders by pacing back and forth, closely examining the situation through a monocle and demanding the removal of what they remembered him calling “that blawsted fence.” It would not be surprising to discover that a somewhat aggrandized version of Cameron’s “previous experience” in the Red River valley, brief and foolish as it might have been, had been one of Ottawa’s selling points to secure his appointment to the boundary commission.

With a thin, full beard making his long face seem even longer, Cameron looked more Oxford don than artillery officer. Although the monocle had been replaced by a pair of wire-rimmed pince-nez, the man had retained his stiff formality. While both commissions would allow very relaxed rules for the wearing of uniforms, Cameron would rarely be seen without a full suit, collar and tie.

“Comparing a Canadian-history writer with Pierre Berton is not something that should be done lightly; Berton's ability to make history accessible to the masses is legendary. However, with Arc of the Medicine Line, Tony Rees has proven himself worthy of such a comparison… Rees's lively writing style, as well as his inclusion of witty and prescient excerpts from both personal letters and official reports, make this an engaging read…”— Quill & Quire, Dec 14, 2007

“Like the careful surveyors he is writing about, Rees moves the reader from point to point in meticulous fashion. The detail may be thick at times… but Rees offers a vivid picture of the conditions under which the surveyors operated…” — Canadian Geographic, Apr 4, 2008