Writers blaze trail into Valley
When defunct gold mines gleam with potential and thousand-year-old skulls whisper history, a Western novel is in the making.
Two hundred Western-genre novelists and non-fiction writers converged on Spokane Valley this week for Blazing Trails, a conference hosted by Western Writers of America.
On Tuesday, attendees listened to presentations, handed out awards for a local youth writing contest and prepared to sign autographs at an evening event.
“Every year we go to a different city west of the Mississippi,” said Carol Crigger, a Valley resident and conference organizer.
The five-day event, held at Mirabeau Park Hotel, attracted big-name authors such as Montana’s Kat Martin, Loren Estleman and the prolific Elmer Kelton. It also brought in editors, publishers and other experts, who discussed topics ranging from researching history to copyrighting written works.
The association’s Spur Awards – of which Estleman has won several – are bestowed on writers with distinguished works portraying the American West.
“It’s a pretty big deal. For Western writers it’s like winning an Emmy,” explained Crigger, who has published seven books, including a Western titled “The Gunsmith: In the Service of the Queen.”
Although Western works focus on an era long gone, the books are far from passé, said WWA President Rita Cleary of Long Island, N.Y.
Baby boomers who grew up watching “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza” are starting to return to their roots when they hit bookstores, Cleary said.
Nonetheless, the former educator is disappointed that an upcoming generation of middle- and high-school-age boys is being largely overlooked by the publishing industry. Girls are reading, but boys aren’t, she said.
Mary Cronk Farrell, a South Hill resident and mother of three, wrote “Fire in the Hole!” – a novel that pulls kids into Coeur d’Alene’s 19th Century mining era by interweaving train hijackings, explosions and jail escapes with history.
“I wrote a book for boys because I have two sons,” Farrell said. “You’ve got to have a good book to get them off the computer.”
Artistic inspirations were as diverse as the authors, who ranged from middle-age men in cowboy hats to young moms.
As former anthropologists, Kathleen O’Neal Gear and Michael Gear, a husband and wife writing duo from Wyoming, initially wanted to raise awareness of the value of Native American artifacts.
Their knowledge, research skills and love of history has translated into over 100 published books. Their recent effort, “People of the River,” is a historical fiction based on a skeleton that was discovered in 1996 in central Washington. The bones were estimated to be some 9,000 years old, and the archeological find was dubbed Kennewick Man.
Author Sherry Monahan of North Carolina combined an interest in cooking, history and writing in “Taste of Tombstone,” which includes a section consisting of recipes that travel back over a century and prove that while there was gunfighting in the streets, there was tasty food on the table.
“They where eating French food in Tombstone in the 1880s,” she said. “They had ice cream parlors.”