Send Your Voice Down The Road On A Books In Motion Recording

Books in Motion, the Spokane based company that specializes in recording books on tape, is looking for readers.

Owner Garry Challender reports that he needs up to five new readers of both sexes, but he’s especially looking for women to read from two new mystery series. The reader, ideally, should be mature, and possess a mellow but tough voice. Think Kathleen Turner, he says.

The last time Books in Motion advertised for readers, some 115 applicants responded. “We got a lot of good people,” Challender says.

He’d like some more, those with dramatic experience preferred. If you’re interested, call 922-1646 during regular business hours on weekdays.

Reading their writing

No, folks, Auntie’s Bookstore is not the only entity to hold regular readings in Spokane.

The creative writing department of Eastern Washington University does its part, too. The department, famous for its MFA program, is holding a fall reading series that features the following schedule:

Nov. 3 - Poet Mark Levine will read from his collection “Debt,” winner of the 1993 National Poetry Series Award.

Nov. 10 - Novelist Ursula Hegi, a faculty member in EWU’s creative writing program, will read from her newest book, “Salt Dancers.”

Nov. 17 - Lesa Luders, a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Eastern, will read from his first novel, “Lady God.”

All readings will begin at 7 p.m. in the lobby of the Davenport Hotel, 807 W. Sprague. Each event is free and open to the public.

For further information, call 359-7064.

In and out of the saddle

In “Talk about Tough: The Life and Times of a True American Cowboy” (ParBest & Dickoens, 196 pages, $12.95 paperback), author Frank L. Folkens writes about what he seems to know best: his life.

And for us city-slickers, it’s a life that sounds like something out of a Western novel. It includes being born in North Dakota (in 1917), being raised there and in Montana, doing farm work, discovering what it’s like to endure cold weather in a sod house, to punch cows, ride broncs and outlive two wives.

And then there’s always the prospect of going hungry.

“Unless you been hungry sometime, you don’t really know about it,” Folkens writes. “I’m talkin’ about two or three days of hungry. You learn how to do a whole lot a things. You find out, too, that there ain’t a whole lot you won’t do to get something to eat.”

Published in Sandpoint, “Talk About Tough” is a memoir that doubles as personal history of the West. It’s written in small chapters, each one of which conveys a message, such as some dudes don’t know squat and life can be a hard deal.

The major message, in Folkens’ view, is just as simple. “Life is what you make it,” he writes.

For order information, call (208) 265-5245.

Up and down the coast

Personal memoirs being what they are, namely a popular sell to today’s reading public, publishers of all size and stature are printing them.

Sasquatch Press, the premier small press based in Seattle, has put out as its most recent memoir, “West Coast Journeys, 1865-1879: The Travelogue of a Remarkable Woman” (Sasquatch, 166 pages, $14.95 paperback).

The book is the travel diary of Caroline C. Leighton, who details her wanderings up and down the West Coast, from San Francisco to Vancouver, British Columbia, and most points in between.

Leighton, whose book originally was published in 1884, came to the West as the wife of a customs collector in Washington and Oregon. They traveled by ship from New York, were shipwrecked off the Nicaraguan coast, traveled by train across Panama and finally made their way north to Port Angeles.

From there they traveled to such remote spots as Fort Colville and other points east, including Umatilla, which Leighton described as, “a cheerless little settlement at the junction of the Umatilla River with the Columbia, in the midst of a bleak, dreary waste of sand and sage-brush, without a sign of a tree in any direction, a perfect whirlwind blowing all the time. What could induce people to live there, I could not imagine.”

For ordering information, call Sasquatch Books at (206) 467-4300.

Seattle stories

Sharon Creeden, a Seattle attorney and professional storyteller, has been awarded the 1995 Aesop Prize for her first book, “Fair Is Fair: World Folktales of Justice” (August House Publishers).

The Aesop Prize is sponsored by the Children’s Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society.

Mixed media

William Kittredge, the author and professor of creative writing at the University of Montana, will discuss the art of Pullman artist Robert Helm at a 7:30 p.m. program Monday at the Washington State Univeristy Museum of Art. The event, at which WSU Museum curator Bruce Guenther will also speak, will introduce a special Helm exhibit, “Robert Helm, 1981-1993.” It is free and open to the public.

The reader board

Swami Sivananda Radha and Linda Anne Seville will present the book “Realities of the Dreaming Mind” as part of a dream workshop to be held 7:30 p.m. Friday at Auntie’s Bookstore, Main and Washington.

Mark Levine will read from his poetry collection “Debt” at 7 p.m. Friday at the Davenport Hotel, 807 W. Sprague.

, DataTimes