Say happy birthday to the Colorado Authors’ League, which is 75 years old this month. To celebrate – and glean insight from some of the state’s best-known writers – Style asked four authors from the 200-plus- member organization to riff on living and working here.
About the authors
Tom Noel, 60, teaches history at CU-Denver and is known as Dr. Colorado. For information visit coloradowebsites.com/dr-colorado.
Julie Anne Peters, 54, lives in Wheat Ridge. For more information about her work, visit JulieAnnePeters.com.
Nancy M. Peterson, 71, is a full-time writer. For information about her books, visit writerswest.com.
Chris Ransick, 44, is on the faculty of Arapahoe Community College. Visit chrisransick.com to learn more about him and his work.
History near home
Tom “Dr. Colorado” Noel:
Our late, great, state poet laureate, Tom Ferril, offered advice I have taken to heart and passed on to my students for the past 40 years:
Always begin right here where you are
And work out from here …
Then mount and ride away
To any dream deserving the sensible world.
All 35 books I have authored or co-authored and innumerable columns, reviews and articles have focused on Colorado people, places, plants and creatures. And I badger my CU-Denver students: Rather than write yet another presidential biography or history of Lewis and Clark, rewrite the Union Pacific story, or re-examine the Turner Thesis on the significance of the frontier in American history, why not tackle a virgin topic? Why not write about history-less people and places in Colorado?
Often it is the poorest people and ethnic neighborhoods that lack published histories. Yet they are the most colorful, the most fun to research, as I discovered in Denver’s Larimer Street: Main Street to Skid Row. Local history should let the locals speak for themselves, by using oral history.
Folklore is a key ingredient for local history. In my first book – on my Montclair neighborhood in northeast Denver – I found its history overwhelmed by the giant figure of the Baron Walter von Richthofen with his endless lovers, various wives, secret tunnels, and his bears and great Danes. His castle still dominates the neighborhood.
Folklore, properly identified as such, gives local history a larger dimension and often a literary, a mythical magic. And every neighborhood has its “castle” and its “baron” or at least its show home and founding father. Even Aurora and Centennial and Lone Tree have their magic, if you look hard enough.
Look for a great story in your neighborhood tavern, or the nearest bone yard, the old school or church, or the closest and cheapest ethnic cafe.
Some see Colorado as a small, provincial place, but you find people from all over the world here and can explore, in a Colorado context, practically everything, from America’s greatest ancient Indian ruins to the next space shot.
Roots grow deep
Julie Anne Peters:
We moved to Colorado when I was 5 years old, to this brand new suburban area called – wait for it – Westminster. You know how, supposedly, most people live within 5 miles of where they grew up? That’s a lie. I moved 20 miles away.
I’ve always loved the Western culture: cowboys, Indians, farming, ranching, rodeoing, sports. My childhood was steeped in iconic heroes of the Old West: the Rifleman, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, my friend Flicka, the Lone Ranger, Tonto, Matt Dillon, Miss Kitty, Sheriff Scotty. I love the geography, topography, history, weather, clash of past and present, economic and cultural parity and disparity. My Western roots play a role in the background and attitude of all my work for young readers. There’s something magical and mysterious in the panspermia blowing in over the Rockies.
Kent Haruf’s masterworks, “Plainsong” and “Eventide,” reminded me of the resonance of small-town life; how people are defined by their places; how they create and shape and contribute to community. The profound beauty of those two books empowered me to concentrate more on setting, to imagine a place integral to the nature and growth of a person. The result is my young-adult novel, “Far From Xanadu.” Even though in the end I decided to cross state lines and set my story in fictitious Coalton, Kan., that town is Bennett, Colo. I have pictures in my research files to prove it. Coalton is the very best of Colorado, and the sense of community I’ve always felt here.
Although I make a conscious effort to set my books in Anywhere USA, there are definite clues to my Colorado connection. Astute readers will find familiar street names (Wads-
worth, Colfax), neighborhoods (Westminster, Littleton), schools (Oberon, Fairview), shopping areas, entertainment meccas, flora and fauna. An unexpected snowstorm always blows in at the most inopportune time.
The contradictions of Colorado – political, economical, cultural – insinuate organically in my work. You’ll hear expressions from my characters you’d never hear in a L.A. ghetto. “No howdy. Dude. Wha?” My teen characters are as hip as any New York street punk, but homie, they’re listenin’ to Dixie Chicks on the iPod.
Embracing creativity
Nancy M. Peterson:
Growing up in western Nebraska on the North Platte River and the Oregon Trail, it was perhaps inevitable that I began to focus my writing on the Western frontier. Moving to Denver in 1975 only intensified my interest, because (now on the South Platte) I suddenly had the rich archive of Denver Public Library’s Western History Department at my fingertips. It is a treasure beyond value.
Not an academic, I’ve always been attracted to the personal side of history. I began searching out the intensely human stories that make Western history so fascinating. I’ve written of botanist Edwin James’ cold, hungry climb up what would become Pikes Peak, the first of so many to be thrilled at the view of river, plains and a chaos of mountains.
Of tense, wiry Ferdinand F. Hayden urging his mule up Colorado peaks, braving snow and lightning strikes to determine triangulations for the first map of Colorado. Of the smoke that drifted from the ruins of Cheyenne lodges after their final, futile battle at Summit Springs on the eastern plains.
Of Mollie Sanford’s reluctant, fear-filled transformation from wife in a gold camp to wife of a soldier off fighting Colorado’s Civil War.
Over the years I’ve found myself drawn more and more toward the native peoples, attending powwows and visiting the lands they used to own. I’ve tried to understand their situation as they were systematically driven from their homes.
These interests have merged to produce my newest book, “Walking in Two Worlds,” to be released by Caxton Press this fall. Subtitled “Mixed-
Blood Indian Women Seeking Their Path,” it will tell the stories of 11 women of various tribes who were born of Indian mothers and white fathers.
Snatched away to Eastern schools where they were stripped of their native culture and trained for the white world, they had to discover who they were and what they could do with their lives. What they accomplished with those lives, each in her own way, I found amazing and inspiring. The paths they chose differed – medicine, music, crafts, the stage, the classroom, the lecture hall, the written word – but all created a way to help their people find a place in a hard, new world.
Would I have been a writer had I lived elsewhere? I believe so. Would I be writing in this field? I doubt it. Colorado is a stimulating place to live; it embraces creative people.
Who needs the coasts?
Chris Ransick:
I’ve heard many writers – friends, colleagues and strangers – discuss the unique circumstance of living and writing in this state.
For some there’s a grinding feeling that the hotbeds of literary activity on both coasts are where real writers go to make it big – an odd reversal of the Gold Rush fever that brought immigrants to the Rocky Mountains 150 years ago.
But there is another reality, too. New York City, for all the awesome potential it holds out to writers, is also where writers often go to disappear.
I am a native New Yorker, so I don’t say this lightly, but as Hollywood is to the aspiring actor, New York City is to the aspiring writer.
You might hit it big. You might land the hot agent. You might find yourself in a high-
rise overlooking the Manhattan skyline, inking a contract for a lucrative six-figure advance. But then you might also find yourself slapping mayonnaise on endless kaiser rolls in a crowded deli and then stumbling home after hours to scribble out a novel that will end up in one circular file after the next.
Heck, I can do that here. And when I’m done, I can hike up Grays & Torreys peaks or spend a weekend bathing my toes in Medano Creek at the base of the Great Sand Dunes. On the way home, I might stop for lunch, get out my notebook, and come home with something like this:
On the Bank of the Nameless River
In the end, all rivers are nameless,
just as currents folding back and back
where water bends against the bank
are nameless, the water itself different
and indifferent in that crook
of river, though ripples repeat shape,
change ceaselessly. Chunks of sandstone
lie nameless. Cottonwoods rising on sand spits
splitting the water may have names
but ones I’ll never know. A red fox
hunting the river bottom this May morning
does not call her prey by name nor
name her pups, nourished on blood
milled in anonymous bones.
Spring’s first crickets scratch
from tall grass on the bank a descant to the river’s full-throated song
as wind throbs through willows
and sweeps down-valley, carrying tales
off the fractured black peak, and all of it
is nameless. What would I call this place?
What voice could join these harmonies
and last as long as water and wind?
From now on, I will go nameless,
without fear of vanishing,
listening for my feet upon earth.
– from “Lost Songs & Last Chances,” forthcoming from Ghost Road Press, August 2006
– Chris Ransick
We moved to Colorado when I was five years old, to this brand new suburban area called wait for it…Westminster. You know how, supposedly, most people live within five miles of where they grew up? That s a lie. I moved 20 miles away.
I’ve always loved the Western culture: cowboys, Indians, farming, ranching, rodeoing, sports. My childhood was steeped in iconic heroes of the Old West: The Rifleman, Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, my friend Flicka, The Lone Ranger, Tonto, Matt Dillon, Miss Kitty, Sheriff Scotty. I love the geography, topography, history, weather, clash of past and present, economic and cultural parity and disparity. My Western roots play a role in the background and attitude of all my work for young readers. There s something magical and mysterious in the panspermia blowing in over the Rockies.
Kent Haruf’s masterworks, Plainsong and Eventide, reminded me of the resonance of small-town life; how people are defined by their places; how they create and shape and contribute to community. The profound beauty of those two books empowered me to concentrate more on setting, to imagine a place integral to the nature and growth of a person. The result is my young adult novel, Far from Xanadu. Even though in the end I decided to cross state lines and set my story in fictitious Coalton, Kansas, that town is Bennett, Colorado. I have pictures in my research files to prove it. Coalton is the very best of Colorado, and the sense of community I ve always felt here.
Although I make a conscious effort to set my books in Anywhere USA, there are definite clues to my Colorado connection. Astute readers will find familiar street names (Wadsworth, Colfax), neighborhoods (Westminster, Littleton), schools (Oberon, Fairview), shopping areas, entertainment meccas, flora and fauna. An unexpected snowstorm always blows in at the most inopportune time.
The contradictions of Colorado – political, economical, cultural – insinuate organically in my work. You ll hear expressions from my characters you d never hear in an L.A. ghetto. ‘No howdy. dude. Wha? – My teen characters are as hip as any New York street punk, but homie, they’re listenin’ to Dixie Chicks on the iPod.
– Julie Anne Peters
Writing in the Highest State has been exhilarating. Notable authors like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson all fancied writing high, but they are dead. Other writers have lasted longer riding natural Colorado highs.
Colorado is the highest state with an average elevation of about 6,800 feet. The air is lighter, the sun brighter, and words should be too. Yet Colorado had not produced a single writer making the anthologies of American Literature. Missouri had Mark Twain, Nebraska Willa Cather and Mari Sandoz, Utah had Wallace Stegner, Wyoming has Annie Proux and New Mexico attracts a host of literary illuminati. Does the Colorado scenery and climate leave folks wordless as well as breathless?
The Highest State inspires my sometimes inspired Dr. Colorado columns for the Saturday Denver Post/Rocky Mountain News columns and appearances on Channel 9 s Colorado & Company.
Colorado comes natural, perhaps my mother and grandmother both did graduate work at the University of Colorado, as did I. As the sources, the setting, and the magic were already here, it just seemed natural to write about Colorado. I never even venture verbally into Wyoming, Utah, Nebraska, or Kansas, and only rarely into New Mexico.
Our late, great, state poet laureate – Tom Ferril – offered advice I have taken to heart and passed on to my students for the past 40 years:
Always begin right here where you are
And work out from here. . .
Then mount and ride away
To any dream deserving the sensible world.
All 35 books I have authored or co-authored and innumerable columns, reviews and articles have focused on Colorado people, places, plants and creatures. And I badger my CU-Denver students: Rather than write yet another presidential biography or history of Lewis and Clark, rewrite the Union Pacific story, or re-examine the Turner Thesis on the significance of the frontier in American, why not tackle a virgin topic? Why not write about history-less people and places in Colorado?
Often it is the poorest people and ethnic neighborhoods that lack published histories. Yet they are the most colorful, the most fun to research, as I discovered in Denver s Larimer Street: Main Street to Skid Row. Local history should let the natives, the locals, speak for themselves, by using oral history. In Denver s Larimer Street I tried to give a voice to the foreign-speaking immigrants who have settled there. I can still hear the broken English of Manuel Silva of La Case de Manuel, Denver s oldest Mexican restaurant. Deciding to avoid warfare between young newcomers and old timers and between Spanish and English speakers, he concluded: Juke box cause fights. No more juke box.
Folklore is a key ingredient for local history. In my first book – on my Montclair neighborhood in northeast Denver – I found its history overwhelmed by the giant figure of the Baron Walter von Richthofen with his endless lovers, various wives, secret tunnels, and his bears and great Danes. His castle still dominates the neighborhood.
Folklore, properly identified as such, gives local history a larger dimension and often a literary, a mythical magic. And every neighborhood, has its castle and its baron or at least its show home and founding father. Even Aurora and Centennial and Lone Tree have their magic, if you look hard enough.
Look for a great story in your neighborhood tavern, or the nearest bone yard, the old school or church, or the closest and cheapest ethnic café.
Saloons are particularly fascinating. They resemble little theaters filled with changing characters, dramatic vignettes, mysterious transactions and romantic possibilities. The plots are usually tragic, but there is comic relief. Denver: The City & the Saloon and Colorado: A Liquid History & Tavern Guide to the Highest State were fun to research and to write and to read – both are still in print.
Many of my other books, on banks, buildings, churches, cities, counties and philanthropists are out of print. Nearly all of my work focuses on Colorado and yet there are many more people, places and things that I hope to explore in words. Some see Colorado as a small, provincial place, but you find people from all over the world here and can explore, in a Colorado context, practically everything, from America s greatest ancient Indian ruins to the next space shot.
– Tom – Dr. Colorado – Noel
Place is an essential element in my writing. Being born in the West, I have absorbed the creamy look of yucca blossoms against vivid blue sky, the nature of plains rivers – as much sand as water – the penetrating What? What? What? of a scolding magpie. I try to share these things with my readers.
I believe place has significant influence in making us who we are.I think the breathable air, the wide spaces, the independence and reliability of the individual give us a different perspective from people on either coast.
Growing up in western Nebraska on the North Platte River and the Oregon Trail, it was perhaps inevitable that I began to focus my writing on the Western frontier. Moving to Denver in 1975 only intensified my interest, because (now on the South Platte) I suddenly had the rich archive of Denver Public Library s Western History Department at my fingertips. It is a treasure beyond value.
Not an academic, I ve always been attracted to the personal side of history. I began searching out the intensely human stories that make Western history so fascinating. I ve written of botanist Edwin James cold, hungry climb up what would become Pikes Peak, the first of so many to be thrilled at the view of river, plains and a chaos of mountains.
Of tense, wiry Ferdinand F. Hayden urging his mule up Colorado peaks, braving snow and lightning strikes to determine triangulations for the first map of Colorado. Of the smoke that drifted from the ruins of Cheyenne lodges after their final, futile battle at Summit Springs on the eastern plains.
Of Mollie Sanford s reluctant, fear-filled transformation from wife in a gold camp to wife of a soldier off fighting Colorado s Civil War. These stories appeared in my first book, People of the Moonshell, a history of the Platte River.
Going farther afield, I did a two-volume history of the Missouri River. I could join Edward Drinker Cope, clinging to a Montana cliff side as he painstakingly uncovered the first fossil of a triceratops. With a steamboat captain, I ve Agrass-hoppered@ my boat over sandbars to find that maddeningly illusive river channel. And I joined a young Hidatsa girl, guarding the corn crop in her youth and later giving birth in a tipi by the Missouri. I don t often tell stories of famous people. I try to tell of ordinary people who found themselves in extraordinary situations, and I search out women s stories whenever possible.
Over the years I ve found myself drawn more and more toward the native peoples, attending powwows and visiting the lands they used to own. I ve tried to understand their situation as they were systematically driven from their homes.
These interests have merged to produce my newest book, Walking in Two Worlds, to be released by Caxton Press this fall. Subtitled Mixed-Blood Indian Women Seeking Their Path, it will tell the stories of 11 women of various tribes who were born of Indian mothers and white fathers.
Snatched away to eastern schools where they were stripped of their native culture and trained for the white world, they had to discover who they were and what they could do with their lives. What they accomplished with those lives, each in her own way, I found amazing and inspiring. The paths they chose differed – medicine, music, crafts, the stage, the classroom, the lecture hall, the written word – but all created a way to help their people find a place in a hard, new world.
Would I have been a writer had I lived elsewhere? I believe so. Would I be writing in this field? I doubt it. Colorado is a stimulating place to live; it embraces creative people. There are classes and workshops and seminars and writers clubs that offer kindred souls who can commiserate or celebrate with you as the occasion demands. If there are more occasions for the former than the latter, that just make the celebrations more sweet. We can t help being writers. Being a writer in Colorado makes it almost bearable.
– Nancy M. Peterson
Information: To launch its new book, “Writing, Etc.” ($15.95, Ghost
Road Press), the Colorado Authors’ League is holding a one-day writing
seminar Saturday in Englewood, offering 12 sessions for writers of every
level. Among the features in the book are more than 250 proven tips
from authors about the craft. For information about the book and the
seminar, visit coloradoauthors.org.
