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FICTION
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Rodes Fishburne: A South Dakota Homecoming
“Veering from the sublime to the sublimely ridiculous” is how Amazon.com described Going to See the Elephant, Rodes Fishburne’s best-selling fiction debut. Main character Slater Brown moves to San Francisco to be the “best writer ever,” but to make a living he takes a job at the Morning Trumpet, a 140-year-old newspaper that has been in decline for 139 years. Adventures ensue, including bus rides that give Slater scoops that resurrect the Trumpet, romance with a world-class chess player, and run-ins with a dastardly mayor and a mad scientist whose experiments threaten the city.
Fishburne, a graduate of Pierre Riggs High School, has written for magazines and newspapers. Three of his plays have been produced in New York. He also spent five seasons as a fly-fishing guide in Alaska.
Track Preview: Writing the West
Is it accurate to state that this year’s fiction offerings all share one strong quality (in addition to all being darn good page turners)? At first glance, the fiction track appears to epitomize variety. The lineup presents a wide variety of authors, topics, genres, and settings. But beneath the diversity lies a commonality: a sense of place so strong that it’s almost as if each unique setting is another character.
Even when the landscape is similar, each writer puts his or her own twist on the setting to ferret out the nuances that will best contribute to a story’s need. In the opening pages of The Work of Wolves, Earl Walks Alone takes his mother’s car for a drive one Friday night after studying calculus: “The moment he left the circle of trees, he felt the wind strike the car, angling across the highway into Twisted Tree. Earl held the steering wheel against it, keeping the car straight. A great blob of white came rolling out of the sky and flattened against the windshield with a sucking sound. Earl jumped, then saw it was only a plastic grocery bag … a prairie jellyfish.”
Kent Meyers’ newly released novel, Twisted Tree, returns to a familiar landscape, but readers will encounter an entirely new story line. Young Haley Jo Zimmerman is gone; her story is told through those she left behind.
In the morning, Meyers will team up with two other masters at evoking a sense of place: Lori Armstrong and Wyoming bestselling author Craig Johnson. Together, the three will provide festival visitors with excellent opportunities to learn more about what goes into crafting a successful mystery and suspense novel. Earlier that morning, Armstrong and MaryJanice Davidson will hold an enlightening session on breaking genre constraints for female characters.
“Sagebrush, Skylines, and the Landscape” will be addressed by experts: fiction writers Kent Meyers, and Ron Carlson. Poet and novelist Melissa Kwasny will join them. Her latest collection, Reading Novalis in Montana, has been described as “the marriage of science and poetry in the uncompromising landscape of Big Sky Country.”
Pete Dexter’s latest novel, Spooner, is being released just before the festival. Spooner is born in Milledgeville, Georgia, in 1956, “across the street from and approximately in the crosshairs of a cluster of Confederate artillery pieces guarding the dog-spotted front lawn of the Greene Street Sons of the Confederacy Retirement Home.” Dexter will entertain his audience with selected readings.
Susan Power grew up in Chicago, but her writing in The Grass Dancer and Roofwalker transports readers to her ancestral home in North Dakota. From her mother, Power grew up hearing stories of her tribe, the Standing Rock Sioux, as well as ancestral tales from her father’s side – New Hampshire during the Civil War. Simon Van Booy’s collection of short stories, Love Begins in Winter: Five Stories, was published in May 2009. Publishers Weekly said, “Each of these stories has moments of sheer loveliness.”
This year’s fiction offerings are sure to provide many moments of sheer loveliness to festival-goers.