“My Year as a Clown,” by Robert Steven Williams

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My-Year-As-a-Clown cover 300 by Robert Steven WilliamsRobert Steven WilliamsYou’ve got a secure marriage, right? Even though her work takes her out of the country for long periods of time, you’ve got 20 years together, prepared for the long haul. That’s what Chuck Morgan, thought, too. Until he picked his wife up at the airport and she tells him she’s met someone else and is leaving, not subject to debate.

That’s the way Robert Steven Williams starts his novel, “My Year as a Clown, and if you’ve ever been blindsided by fate, you’ll appreciate his struggles and the incredible awkwardness that can come from being back in the dating pool after a long absence. The novel is well-deserving of its 2013 Silver Medal  for Popular Fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

Williams is also a gifted singer-songwriter who’s studied with Texas singer-songwriting legend Jimmy Dale Gilmore and the amazing Roseanne Cash. We’ve added the song he wrote that’s referenced in the book to our author interview below, recorded on May 9, 2013.

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Mike Mullin: Ashfall

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Mike Mullin is one of the 12 YA (Young Adult)-focused authors who will be at Klindt’s Booksellers in The Dalles this June 1 weekend. Here’s how his  site describes his breakthrough novel, “Ashfall:”

AshfallCover 300mike mullin 300Many visitors to Yellowstone National Park don’t realize that the boiling hot springs and spraying geysers are caused by an underlying supervolcano. It has erupted three times in the last 2.1 million years, and it will erupt again, changing the earth forever.

Fifteen-year-old Alex is home alone when Yellowstone erupts. His town collapses into a nightmare of darkness, ash, and violence, forcing him to flee. He begins a harrowing trek in search of his parents and sister, who were visiting relatives 140 miles away.

Along the way, Alex struggles through a landscape transformed by more than a foot of ash. The disaster brings out the best and worst in people desperate for food, clean water, and shelter. When an escaped convict injures Alex, he searches for a sheltered place where he can wait—to heal or to die. Instead, he finds Darla. Together, they fight to achieve a nearly impossible goal: surviving the supervolcano.

That’s a clear description, but it doesn’t begin to convey the riveting story that readers will find. This reviewer stayed up until past midnight to finish “Ashfall,” even though his alarm goes off at 3:45 a.m.   This is what Heinlein described as “The pure quill,” and I quote R.A.H. deliberately because this author’s work stacks up to Heinlein’s juveniles, and that is off-the-charts praise in my book.

I got the same thrill at reading this as I did when I opened the August 1975 issue of Analog and read  Orson Scott Card’s  original “Ender’s Game” for the first time. The first thing I did the next morning was to race to Klindt’s to buy the sequel, “Ashen Winter.”  Mullin is that good. 

Earlier this week, he was kind enough to give the interview you can hear below. Listen and enjoy the words of a major new talent in the field.

 

 

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Cover to Cover – “Wax” by Phil Duncan

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WAX Cover 1Phil DuncanHere’s the setup: Yancey Muncey is dead. Or, he was. Raised from the grave by the shadowy figure of Dr. Blankenship, Yancey is now back in high school, hanging out with his best friend, and working up the nerve to ask the girl of his dreams to the upcoming Halloween carnival.

But not everything is the same as it was before: Yancey’s eyes are yellow, his skin is blue, and he’s indestructible. As if that weren’t bad enough, Dr. Blankenship has made it his life’s mission to hunt Yancey down. Because the only reason Yancey is alive again is to help the good doctor destroy his rival.

An average boy with a new lease on an extraordinary life, Yancey must battle high-trained security and high school bullies in his quest to get back to normal. What’s the worst that can happen after all? He’s already dead.

We had the opportunity to talk with author Phil Duncan, who’s one of the 12 YA or Young Adult authors appearing this Saturday, June 1 at Klindt’s Booksellers in The Dalles. We found him as fascinating as his characters. Take a listen by clicking on the podcast bar below.

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Cover to Cover: “Captives” by Jill Williamson

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Jil lWilliamson 300 Captives by Jill WilliamsonJill Williamson is weird, which is probably why she writes science fiction and fantasy novels for teenagers. She grew up in Alaska with no electricity, an outhouse, and a lot of mosquitoes. Thankfully it was the land of the midnight sun, and she could stay up and read by the summer daylight that wouldn’t go away. But the winter months left little to do but daydream. Both hobbies set her up to be a writer.

Her debut novel, a medieval fantasy called By Darkness Hid, won an EPIC Award, a Christy Award, and was named a Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror novel of 2009 by VOYA magazine. Jill has since published twelve books.

Jill loves working with teenagers and encouraging them to respect their dreams. She speaks and gives workshops at libraries, schools, camps, and churches. She lives in Oregon with her husband, two children, and a whole lot of deer. Come visit Jill on her Facebook author page or on her website at www.jillwilliamson.com, where adventure comes to life.

The Safe Lands is a dystopian series by Jill Williamson in which earth’s population is divided between the infected and the uninfected; the infected live short, cushy lifestyles within walled cities of unending entertainment, while the uninfected live primitively off the land; when the virus mutates and becomes uncontrollable, the uninfected become the hunted; it is believed they hold the cure. The book is inspired by the first chapter of the book of Daniel.

Captives is the first book in the series. Jill Williamson will be in The Dalles at Klindt’s Booksellers as one of the dozen authors attending the third annual YA (Young Adult) writers series Saturday, June 1 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

We talked with the author Tuesday about the novel, the series and about a workshop that she’s teaching Friday about building a fantasy or science fiction society.

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Audio: Interview with author Kim Stafford, appearing in the Mid-Columbia today

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100 Tricks every boy should know coverPortland author and poet Kim Stafford will make two Kim Stafford mugappearances in the Mid-Columbia today. He’ll be at noon at the Hood River Campus of Columbia Gorge Community College (1730 College Way, Hood River) sponsored by Waucoma Bookstore in Hood River.Then at 5:30, he’ll be at Klindt’s Booksellers in The Dalles.

Stafford will be discussing his book “100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared.”

Stafford’s brother, Bret, lived and worked in Hood River in the 1980s, and significant passages in the book are set on Mt. Adams.

Listen to the interview with the button at the bottom of the page

About the Book

Told in one hundred episodes, the story of two brothers separated by suicide and the secret pain that shadows the family of poet William Stafford

How many tricks does it take to grow up and survive? From a beautiful childhood, the older brother disappears into depression, leaving the younger to endure the story. 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do explores memory to find a brother lost to suicide—the saint who teaches his family about depression, violence, and the ultimate quest for harmonious relationships.

Taking its title from a pamphlet Kim Stafford’s brother, Bret, ordered as a kid, 100 Tricks works its own magic in portraying two boys, close in age and inseparable in many ways, against the backdrop of an
American family in the 1950s. Bret was the good older son, the obedient public servant, Kim the itinerant wanderer. Their father, poet and pacifist William Stafford, occupies a large presence in the brothers’ lives as they find their ways through boyhood shenanigans and forge identities together into adulthood and then apart, when Bret takes his own life at age forty.

This deftly written, compassionate memoir offers a paradox about family tragedy. With suicide, Stafford writes, there is collateral damage in every direction, but there is also a chance to learn vital stories behind the shadows of silence, depression, and violent death, and ultimately to recover the lost best friend. “100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do” takes the reader through what Stafford calls “the chrysalis of
the invisible”—a tunnel of fears, silences, and tragedies—in order to find new life.

About the Author

Kim Stafford has taught since 1979 at Lewis and Clark College, where he is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute and codirector of the documentary studies program. He also serves as the
literary executor for the estate of William Stafford. He has worked as an oral historian, letterpress printer, editor, photographer, teacher, and visiting writer in communities and at colleges across the country,
and in Italy, Scotland, and Bhutan. Stafford has published a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft; Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford; and Having Everything Right: Essays of Place. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Oregon Governor’s Arts Award, and a Western States Book Award. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and children.

Kim Stafford large

 

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Audio: Interview with Vince Welch, author of The Last Voyageur – Amos Burg and the Rivers of the west

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05 12 13 Vince Welch, author of The Last Voyageur

The Last Voyageur
May 21st at 7pm

CCA in partnership with Waucoma Books present a book talk and slideshow with author Vince Welch on his new book, The Last Voyageur: Amos Burg and the Rivers of the West. Amos Burg, one of the first commercial river guides, the last known individual to run all the major western rivers before dams made such voyages difficult if not impossible; first to complete source-to-mouth canoe voyages on the Columbia and Snake Rivers; first to pilot an inflatable raft through Grand Canyon and down the Middle Fork and Main Salmon.

In The Last Voyageur: Amos Burg and the Rivers of the West author Vince Welch, himself a river guide, weaves a passionate and well-researched narrative using extensive material from Burg’s own rich archives. History buffs, paddlers, and adventure readers alike will delight in this remarkable regional history of the larger-than-life Burg, a quintessential man of the American West and one of the last “voyageurs” of North America’s great waterways.

Suggested Donation is $5 at the door.

For nearly five decades Amos Burg traveled in search of adventure and natural beauty. During the 1920s and ’30s he completed lengthy voyages on all the major western rivers – Columbia, Pig, Yukon, Canada’s Mackenzie, the Green and Colorado – source to mouth, often traveling alone. He also managed to make a 4-month, 3,800-mile run on the Yellowstone-Missouri-Mississippi as well as the Middle Fork and Main Salmon, and numerous other small rivers. He broke new ground by being the first individual to take his rubber raft Charlie through Grand Canyon and down the Middle Fork and Main Salmon. The Last Voyageur chronicles Burg’s epic river voyages as well as his journeys along the Inside Passage and through the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in the Dorjun and later the Endeavour. We follow not only the arc of his career as an outdoor writer, photographer, filmmaker, and lecturer for National Geographic magazine, but also his expanding sense of the natural environment as a place for spiritual and emotional rejuvenation and as a living repository of American western history. Burg once wrote, “How we treat our rivers tells us something about who we are?” Vince Welch has written for Oregon Coast, Wend, Rivers, Boatman’sQuarterly Review, Utne Reader, and The Hibernacle News. At present he is a senior correspondent and blogger (Rivermouth) for Mountain Gazette. A former professional river guide, and co-author of The Doing of the Thing: The Brief, Brilliant Career of Buzz Holmstrom, Welch continues to run rivers throughout the West with his family and other ancient mariners. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his family and a bunch of chickens.

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04 09 13 Crystal McVea, Waking Up in Heaven

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cover Waking Up in Heaven Crystal McVea author Waking Up in Heaven 300Excuse me…My name is Crystal McVea, and in 2009 I died and went to heaven.” McVea’s miraculous memoir Waking Up In Heaven (Howard/Simon & Schuster,) detailing her stay in heaven for 9 minutes isn’t the most powerful part of her story—it’s just the beginning.

From skeptic to soulful believer, McVea details her journey of abuse and bad choices being wiped away the instant she woke up in heaven.

With interest in personal stories on heaven at its peak, McVea’s book on heaven stands out because she wasn’t a religious zealot. In fact, she represents the normal, average doubting American woman who had a startling experience that changed who she was to the core, along the way inspiring all those around her.

Heralded by New York Times best-selling author Laura Schroff as “having the power to change lives,” the book almost didn’t happen. McVea resisted telling her story for fear “people would think I was flat-out crazy” and shares, “I struggled, because I’m the least likely person to be telling anyone about God.”

“Put simply, I’m not ever going to be on any short list for sainthood. Early in my life I was a sinner, and I’m pretty sure I broke every one of the Ten Commandments,” writes McVea. “That’s right, not just some—all ten. Even the big one—Thou shalt not kill. When I was younger I committed a sin I believed to be so grievous and so unforgivable, I was sure God could never love me, if He even existed at all.”

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