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.