Report From Hendersonville

Sipping from his hot water (with a twist of lemon and a dash of honey), not letting anything stop him, not even the fact that his fever spanned so many days that his thermometer got bored with him, William Haywood Henderson faced his crowd of over 100 at the Tattered Cover Cherry Creek Tuesday night, and I didn't notice a single person leaving without a book.

After reading two passages from his critically acclaimed novel Augusta Locke, Henderson fielded such questions as, "Are you a landscape novelist, in the tradition of Cormac McCarthy?" Henderson took the second part first, and made sure that we, the hundred plus in the audience, knew who Cormac McCarthy is (not everyone did), and then went on to talk about Cormac's use of landscape, and then stopped and looked at us. "Yes," he said. "I am." At bottom, what interests him, he said, is the idea of a small figure in front of a gigantic background, such as one might find in, say, Wyoming.

Lots of laughter as Hendy delivered one quip after another. "Do you inject any of the sense of humor we're seeing tonight into your writing?" Henderson didn't miss a beat. "My books aren't very funny," and then went on to posit that his sense of humor comprised of "making stupid quips," and that that doesn't translate well to paper. Of course, this reader disagrees -- Augusta has many lighter moments, including some laughers. Maybe it was his fever talking.

Check out Henderson on May 13, reading and booksigning at Book Buffs, Ltd., Cameron Church, 1600 South Pearl Street, Denver, CO at 4:00 p.m. Also sponsored by Lighthouse Writers and the Colorado Center for the Book (a program of the Colorado Humanities).

See ya there.

--AD

Pritchett on the Brain

Just when you thought you'd read everything under the sun set on a Colorado ranch, someone writes about it in a way that makes it new again. Introduces you, for example, to a world where a stillborn calf converges subtly (as in, with great literary restraint) with memories of a murdered daughter, or examines an unlikely acquaintance between a teenaged girl and an ex-convict who's employed on her grandparents' ranch. I guess she won the Pen USA and Milkweed Editions prizes for good reason.

Just because she was in her twenties when she wrote the collection Hell's Bottom, Colorado, and just because she's got the most striking blue eyes you've ever seen, doesn't mean you should resent Laura Pritchett. My gift to myself for May is to read her novel, Sky Bridge, and do so with the knowledge that at least she was in her thirties when she wrote that one. Goodbye to retrospective embarrassment for my own scribblings in my twenties. We can't all be prodigies, can we? How boring would that be?

To learn from the woman herself, check out her course on Landscape (Interior and Exterior) on Saturday, May 6, from 1-4. Register: www.lighthousewriters.org/order.htm or by calling 303-297-1185.