Missoula Bookfest roundup
The annual Montana Festival of the Book is always a highlight of the year for me, and this year was no exception. It was particularly exciting for me to be at the bookfest with a new book on the shelves.
But I had a busy weekend, participating in four different panels or readings. The unquestioned highlight was the surprise among them: I substituted for Mark Sherouse in a Conversation with Guy Vanderhaeghe. Guy (whose last name is pronounced "van-der-haig") is the author of "The Last Crossing," selected as this year's One Book Montana. He's also a brilliant and highly articulate conversationalist. Many bookfest programs are recorded for future public-radio broadcast, and I hope our audio equipment worked well enough to pull that off, because even I would love to hear him speak again about why Potts is not one of the novel's multiple narrators, or about the significance of the title.
My conversation with Richard Wheeler drew a large and appreciative crowd. Richard even earned a spontaneous ovation, for his comments about the futility of the divide between "literary" and "commercial" fiction. I was delighted to be part of a reading with Kim Todd and Jeff Hull, and Kim and I were on an entertaining panel about biography that also included Martin Kidston, Paul Wylie, and Christy Leskovar.
One of the interesting things about publishing a book in a relatively small community such as the state of Montana is that you get to hang out with a lot of the same people at a lot of different events. I'd met Wylie at the delightfully laid-back Meagher County Book Festival this summer (and I loved the slogan printed every week in the newspaper: "The only county in Montana with a castle"). And I'll be appearing with Leskovar at the High Plains Bookfest in October, where she is also up for an award.
I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com
But I had a busy weekend, participating in four different panels or readings. The unquestioned highlight was the surprise among them: I substituted for Mark Sherouse in a Conversation with Guy Vanderhaeghe. Guy (whose last name is pronounced "van-der-haig") is the author of "The Last Crossing," selected as this year's One Book Montana. He's also a brilliant and highly articulate conversationalist. Many bookfest programs are recorded for future public-radio broadcast, and I hope our audio equipment worked well enough to pull that off, because even I would love to hear him speak again about why Potts is not one of the novel's multiple narrators, or about the significance of the title.
My conversation with Richard Wheeler drew a large and appreciative crowd. Richard even earned a spontaneous ovation, for his comments about the futility of the divide between "literary" and "commercial" fiction. I was delighted to be part of a reading with Kim Todd and Jeff Hull, and Kim and I were on an entertaining panel about biography that also included Martin Kidston, Paul Wylie, and Christy Leskovar.
One of the interesting things about publishing a book in a relatively small community such as the state of Montana is that you get to hang out with a lot of the same people at a lot of different events. I'd met Wylie at the delightfully laid-back Meagher County Book Festival this summer (and I loved the slogan printed every week in the newspaper: "The only county in Montana with a castle"). And I'll be appearing with Leskovar at the High Plains Bookfest in October, where she is also up for an award.
I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com
