Happenings, Week of September 10

This week of happenin' Happenings!  Be there or be square.  And as always, let us know what's happening in your world.


Week of September 10


MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 10

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TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11

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WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12

Michelle Alexander with Liliana Segura, 7 p.m., Lannan Foundation, Lensic Performing Arts Center, Santa Fe, NM


THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 13

David Abrams, Fobbit, 7 p.m., Barnes & Noble, Billings, MT

Cheryl Strayed, or Dear Sugar, Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things, Toronto, Canada

Lance Weller, Wilderness, 7 p.m., Tacoma Public Library, Tacoma, WA

Lidia Yuknavitch, Dora: A Head Case, with Chelsea Cain, Kill You Twice, 7:00 p.m., Broadway Books, Portland, OR


FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 14

Casper College/ARTCORE Equality State Book Festival and Literary Conference, featuring Pat Frolander, Zak Pullen, Cat Urbigkit, Kendra Spanjer, Karla Oceanak, Alyson Hagy, David Romtvedt, Linda Hasselstrom, Rebecca O’Connor, Renee d’Aoust, Brian Turner, Matt Daly, Claudia Mauro, W. Dale Nelson, and Luis Carlos Montalvan, Casper College, Casper, WY

Celebration of Writers at Valhalla, 7 p.m., from Tahoe Writers Works, with Stefanie Freele, Steve Robinson, Tim Hauserman, and Suzanne Roberts, Valhalla Grand Hall at the Tallac Historic Site, South Lake Tahoe, CA (tickets $10)

Ivan Doig, The Bartender’s Tale, 7:30 p.m., Powell’s City of Books, Portland, OR

Alyson Hagy, Boleto, Equality State Book Festival, Casper, WY

Lance Weller, Wilderness, 7 p.m., Elliott Bay, Seattle, WA


SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 15

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Book Launch

A Growing Season, by Sue Boggio and Mare Pearl

Hailed by Booklist as "Two talented authors who vividly bring to life the beauty of New Mexico and its people", Sue Boggio and Mare Pearl return to Esperanza, New Mexico, where a devastating drought threatens the farming community's survival. Vultures circle in the form of developers who see failing farms as ripe pickings for a bedroom community for Albuquerque. Court battles pit the endangered silvery minnow against the farmers as the once mighty Rio Grande shrinks from its banks even as demand for its precious water increases.

Abby Silva and her adopted son Santiago must heal from the violence of the past to claim their futures. CeCe and Miguel Vigil care for CeCe's octogenarian Jewish parents, whose long-distance disapproval of their marriage is now played out under their own roof, threatening their once solid union. Their daughter Rachel finally confronts the Jewish half of her ethnicity through her grandparents, Holocaust survivor Zeyde Mort, and irrepressible Brooklyn Bubbe Rose.

In A Growing Season, Esperanza is an American community at the crossroads. A place where people are struggling to preserve a traditional way of life and bring it into the future despite overwhelming odds. A place where cultures must cross divides if all are to thrive. Where love is risked, secrets are revealed, past wounds healed, compromises become victories and somehow, standing together despite their differences, good, brave people prevail.

 1963. President Kennedy was assasinated. All the adults were distracted and sad. The TV sets in Iowa began to show a war brewing in Southeast Asia. Sue's parents sold the house she had come to consciousness in, a lovely little green cottage with a grove of pine trees perfect for forts and secret gardens. They moved a mile west into a new subdivision where all the trees were so puny they had ropes attached to stakes to hold them up in the wind.

      
It was lonely in the new neighborhood. Sue was ten and her little sister was only six and therefore boring. She walked two blocks to the new grade school she would be attending. Along the way, any kids she saw stared at her and she stared right back. They were all younger and therefore boring. She thought about the Beatles. They were the only interesting thing in her life. When she had seen them on Ed Sullivan she felt something she had never felt before. It was joy and sadness mixed together and it became hard to breathe. Afterward, on the commercial break, she found she had squeezed her fists so tightly her fingernails had made little cuts in her palms.

By the school there was a house with a girl in the yard who looked about her age. She had wavy long dark hair and she held the collar of a mean looking dog. They looked at each other and knew each other at first sight.

Mare was short and kind of round and Sue was tall and skinny. Mare was Lennon and Sue was McCartney. Jewish and WASP. Brash and funny, reserved and serious. Mare taught Sue how to giggle and Sue taught Mare how to think deep thoughts. They played Beatle music non-stop and spent every minute they could together. They started their sentences with "What if" and then let their imaginations run wild with scenarios in which they would meet John Lennon and Paul McCartney and impress them with their sarcastic wit and maturity. These 'what ifs" became stories, with dialogue, plots with twists and surprise endings. They harmonized to Beatle songs and Mare learned guitar.

To read the rest of their entertaining biographies, go to their website.

Buy A Growing Season at IndieBound or at Amazon


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Sue Boggio and Mare Pearl, A Growing Season, 3 p.m., Bookworks, Albuquerque, NM.

Casper College/ARTCORE Equality State Book Festival and Literary Conference, Casper College, Casper, WY

Alyson Hagy, Boleto, Equality State Book Festival, Casper, WY

Ruben Martinez, Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West, 5 p.m., Skylight Books, Los Angeles, CA

Claire Vaye Watkins, Battleborn, 7 p.m., Alumni Bookfair & Festival, OSU Bookstore / Barnes and Noble, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio


SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 16

Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her, 7 p.m., Baghdad Theater, Portland, OR