BOOKPATHS

Colorado

David Mason talks about, and reads from, his book-length poem, Ludlow, “the story of a violent strike in 1913 by Colorado miners, most of them immigrants.”

I am a poet who grew up in Washington State, but I had family roots here in southern Colorado. And when I came back to Colorado in the late 1990s, I decided it was very important for me to try to write about Colorado. – David Mason, The News Hour Website

Denver, Colorado, U.S.

To celebrate Denver’s 150th anniversary, the Rocky Mountain News has “run a special series titled "A Dozen on Denver:  Stories to celebrate the city at 150.” Read them online.

For the series, we commissioned 11 Colorado authors to write original fiction. We asked the authors to choose a different decade of Denver's history, to mention Larimer Street at least once in their stories and to keep it all to 2,500 words. – from “A Dozen on Denver,” Rocky Mountain News

The Colorado Rockies, Colorado, U.S.

Beyond the Aspen Grove, by Ann H. Zwinger (Boulder, CO:  Johnson Books, 2002; first published in 1970)

Writing from her forty acres in the Colorado Rockies’ Montane Zone, Ann Zwinger invites readers into the landscape and life that surrounds her – lake, streams, meadows, and forests.  Zwinger’s line drawings complement her words, helping us to “see” the place she calls home and to "feel" its changing seasons.

And so Herman and I signed the final papers and assumed, in our innocence, that we had bought and therefore owned these forty up-and-down acres.  It has since turned out to be precisely the other way around.  It is we who belong to the land.  Beginning to know these mountain acres has been to discover a puzzle with a million pieces already set out on a table.  Occasionally a few pieces fit together and we gain another awareness of the land’s total pattern of existence, of its intricate interdependencies, enhanced by knowing that the puzzle will never be completed.  There will always be something new to discover:  a minute moss never found before, a rabbit eating birdseed with the birds on a hungry November day, a bittern that stays only long enough to be remembered. – from Beyond the Aspen Grove, by Ann H. Zwinger

Publisher’s Website

Tattered Cover Book Store, Denver, Colorado, U.S.

The Tattered Cover Book Store, a book lover’s dream in Denver, welcomes the Democratic convention and the many “guest speakers visiting The Big Tent [who] have graciously agreed to sign books at the Tattered Cover.”

Bookpath: High Line Canal, Denver area, Colorado

The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland, by Robert Michael Pyle (Out of print, but available; hardback published by Houghton Mifflin in 1993; paperback published by The Lyons Press, New York)

At age six, Robert Michael Pyle discovered the High Line Canal near his home in Aurora, Colorado. In The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland, Pyle shares how the canal touched and influenced his life as “sanctuary, playground, and sulking walk,” as an “imaginary wilderness, escape hatch, birthplace as a naturalist,” lover’s lane, research site, and holy ground of solace.” Pyle’s memoir is both place-specific as he guides readers into the life and history of the High Line Canal and broader in its desire to “awaken interest in places like the High Line in every community.”

“My own point of intimate contact with the land was a ditch. Growing up on the wrong side of Denver to reach the mountains easily or often, I resorted to the tattered edges of the Great Plains on the back side of town. There I encountered a century-old irrigation channel known as the High Line Canal. Without a doubt, most of the elements of my life flowed from that canal.” -- from The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland, by Robert Michael Pyle

Related Website

Denver Water – High Line Canal

Steamboat Springs, Colorado

The American Booksellers Association profiles Off the Beaten Path Bookstore.

Boulder, Colorado

The American Booksellers Association highlights Troubadour Books of Boulder, Colorado, this week.

“This week, Troubadour Books of Boulder, Colorado, is celebrating its first year in business and the start of its second. The 700-square-foot general bookstore, owned by Deb Evans, specializes in books and magazines on the performing arts, creative writing, and education and career development.” – from ABA Website

Troubadour Books Website