University of Nebraska Press

Spreading the Word: Advice for the Newly Published Author

By Peggy Shumaker

Congratulations!  Your book’s been accepted for publication! First, you dance! Then you make plans to give your new book its best chance in the world.

You’ve got nearly a year while the book’s in production, just barely enough time to do the following:

• Contact any reporters or reviewers you know—print, broadcast, or online. Send them advance publicity and reviews. Add them to the press’s standard review list.
• From your acknowledgments page, make a list of the magazines that have published your work. Do they also publish reviews? If so, compile a list of those editors and their addresses. Add these to the press’s review list.
• Prepare your personal address list for advance fliers. These can be sent by snail mail, e-mail, or both.
• If you can afford to, set up readings in different parts of the country. Send a copy of your book to the person who organizes the readings at your venue of choice. Once you get a yes, try to set up two more within driving distance of the first. 
• Know this—universities, community colleges, and schools often pay authors for readings. Some libraries do. Bookstores don’t. Read at bookstores anyway. Read anywhere someone will set up chairs and do publicity. Offer to visit classes, discussion groups, and/or book clubs. 
• If you can’t travel to meet with a class that’s reading your book, offer to talk with the group by audio conference.
• Offer your services at writing conferences and festivals. If you’ve attended some in the past, contact the organizers and let them know about your new book. Try to find a link between your book and their audience or community. Send a sample of your book to organizers who seem interested.
• Say "yes" to interviews on the radio or television, in print, or online.
• Ask bloggers you know to do a blurb on your book. 
• Prepare a one-sentence description and three-sentence synopsis as reference points when you talk about your book.
• Prepare study questions and post them to the Web site for your book. These help teachers who might host you, discussion leaders, and interviewers who might not read your book. Let these questions lead to things you’d like to say about the book.

Once your book comes out:

• Announce your book’s release on listservs and on your own Web page. Link to your press’s Web page to make buying your book a breeze.
• Place your book in local bookstores. Independents and university bookstores will likely buy directly from you or from your press. Chain stores will require you to go through a distributor. Find out who the distributor is. Make an appointment with your local rep. Buy her coffee. Let her know where your book fits into her list.
• Keep a carton of books in the trunk of your car. Keep an extra one in your book bag. Don’t be shy.
• Attend the Associated Writing Programs (AWP) conference. Spend time in the booth talking about your new book, handing out postcards of the cover, and signing purchased copies.
• If you’re lucky enough to get invited to a regional or national booksellers’ association conference, prepare a ten-minute presentation that will help booksellers place your book in the hands of customers. Be prepared to sign books as fast as you can, then mingle. Walk the book show floor and talk about your book.
• Be aware of calls for papers at conferences around the globe. If you can link your book to their programs, submit a proposal. If your proposal is accepted, attend the conference, and take along postcards of your cover and a few copies of your book.
• Donate copies of your book to libraries and nonprofit literacy centers.
• Donate copies of your books to students who cannot afford them.

Throughout this process, you should stay in close touch with the people at your press. They will help you as much as they can. Rely on their expertise. Ask questions. Get suggestions.

Take great pleasure in spreading the word about your words.

*****

Peggy Shumaker is professor emerita of English at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the author of Just Breathe Normally (University of Nebraska Press, 2007). She teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. Visit her Web site at www.peggyshumaker.com.

Authors Reflect on the Challenges of Writing About Others

Authors Sonya Huber and Mimi Schwartz both penned fascinating creative nonfiction works newly published by the University of Nebraska Press. Huber's is a memoir and recreated family history that tells a layered story of an overlooked history of socialism in Germany before and after Nazism entitled Opa Nobody. Schwartz's memoir, Good Neighbors, Bad Times, focuses on recovering the Nazi-era history of her father's German village where Jews’ and Christians’ claims of congeniality were often proved true. Both women faced a number of challenges in writing non-fiction accounts of the lives of others. How does a creative writer do justice to her subjects as well as her craft? How does she practice artistic freedom and expression within the confines of a story largely about people other than herself? In their guest blog postings, Huber and Schwartz address these questions and speak to the uniqueness and importance of the creative nonfiction genre.

*****

Accountability and Joy

By Sonya Huber

I felt compelled to write Opa Nobody, but my fear of the outcome was almost as big as my desire to write. Throughout the research process, I worried that I was bothering people, dredging up too many buried feelings with my questions. I worried that I was inevitably getting it wrong, that I was missing sources and doing other sources a disservice by misunderstanding them. I worried that the final outcome for all of this work would be hurt feelings for anyone and everyone mentioned in the book. In my writing classes, my students and I regularly discuss ethics and the predictable and surprising fallout that can result from a work of family-based memoir. I worried about these consequences, and I knew as I wrote that my internal “writer” would be unable to reach the ideals of responsibility, transparency, and accuracy so cherished by my internal “editor.” Every day when I sat down to write, the “writer” in me took over—this reckless person who elbowed into the story, flung around metaphor, and pushed toward the points of maximum conflict and difficulty. Then the “editor” came back and worried over the pages, always desperately behind, looking for the holes and the blind spots.

My relatives in Germany have now received their copies of the book, as have friends and family in the United States. A new “blind spot” has been revealed: I realized that I never dared to dream about positive reactions. I held my breath as those closest to me read their copies, and I flinched when I opened my e-mails. I never anticipated the wonderful messages of praise; I did not adequately imagine the generosity of my family. These people who had been so forthcoming with their stories and their memories have now been as equally giving with their support. I have realized in the weeks since publication that a public focus on the sins of memoir and family history—and my research interest in critical response to controversial works of memoir—had obscured for me the productive beauty of the genre and the reasons why I am committed to it. I did not imagine that my relationships with my subject matter—my German family—could continue to shift and develop, even after publication. I thought I had said everything possible about my relationship with my imagined Opa, but I find that as family members send me their reactions, I feel a web of connections drawing through and beyond the text as if an electrical circuit has been established. I thought that publication equaled the end of an exploration, a sign that the last chance to fix my mistakes had passed. Instead, new conversations have begun.

*****

The Ups and Downs of Telling Other People’s Stories

By Mimi Schwartz

If it’s nonfiction, why change the name of your father’s village—and also of the villagers? It’s a question people ask about my new book, Good Neighbors, Bad Times: Echoes of My Father’s German Village. My answer is: Privacy. When people are neither famous nor infamous, and they prefer to have pseudonyms, why not?  Most readers of memoir, I’ve found, don’t care about names; it’s the stories that matter—and the obligation to get them as true as possible on the page. Readers also want you to let them know what you are doing and why. That’s why I wrote this in my Author’s Note in the front of Good Neighbors, Bad Times:

The people I met, the stories they told, the facts of village life and history, are true as I learned them. Nothing is made up—except for people’s names; the name of the village, which I call Benheim; two other place names; plus some identifying details that I changed to protect the privacy of the non-famous.

Of course, inventing pseudonyms doesn’t work for family members. My father, or rather his voice in my memory, is central to my book. All through my childhood I heard him say, In Benheim we all got along before Hitler. In Benheim we respected each other. And echoes of those stories, forty years later, propelled my writing along.  My father died in 1973, before I started Good Neighbors, Bad Times, but I think he’d be pleased with what I captured of his old world. I even imagine him saying, “You got it right!” They are the magic words a creative nonfiction writer hopes for, signaling that real people, whether their real names are used or not, believe that their lives feel true on the page.

More than accuracy is involved. A writer must capture what I call the “emotional truths” of her characters: the spirit of who they are, what they said, worried about, and thought. Yes, dates, numbers, and other facts must be correct: I fled Hitler in 1937, not 1938. I had three brothers and two died. My mother was a seamstress, not a baker. But correct facts alone won’t reveal how fleeing in 1937 left scars today and what the emptiness of losing two brothers was like. Even small humiliations, ones like your bread not rising and turning golden like your sister-in-laws’ breads, need to produce, “You got it right!”

To make that happen requires the craft of creative nonfiction: description, dialogue, and dramatic narrative. It requires imagination to fill in what isn’t in archives, transcripts, and pages of notes. It requires a willingness to bear a big responsibility: to be honest and fair to your real-world characters. I felt that responsibility in my first book, Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed, which was about my life in a long marriage. But I felt it even more in Good Neighbors, Bad Times, writing about subjects who didn’t know me and so generously let me into their lives. I wanted to be worthy of that trust.

I rely on two guidelines to encourage my honesty and fairness. One I started using when writing about my husband, and it goes like this: If I call him a moron, he gets to call me a moron. In other words, I must give him voice; I must empower him to tell his side of the story—and it seems to have worked. Six years after publication, we are still together!

The second guideline comes from memoirist Kim Barnes who wrote the best-selling memoir, In the Wilderness. She was very nervous that her father, in particular, would be angry at her version of her rebellion against the Pentecostal religion of her parents, but he wasn’t. He only wanted her to change a few minor facts, and much relieved, she realized:

One thing that we always assume, wrongly, is that if we write about people honestly they will resent it and become angry. If you come at it for the right reasons and you treat people as you would your fictional characters—you know, you don’t allow them to be static—if you treat them with complexity and compassion, sometimes they will feel as though they’ve been honored, not because they’re presented in some ideal way but because they’re presented with understanding.
(from an interview in Fourth Genre, Volume 2, issue 2)

Two of my characters have read my newly published Good Neighbors, Bad Times and both have liked it, but I’ll be uneasy until all responses are in. In the meantime, I keep rereading an e-mail I just received from one of three sisters I wrote about. They all survived in the village as half-Jewish little girls who weren’t deported:

For three days I did nearly nothing else but reading [your book] and now I am almost speechless, that means words especially English are not enough to express how impressed I am. Your voice in the book is so near to me.

She had been trying to write about her experience, she goes on, but had been blocked. Reading my book gave her permission to try again: this time talking about the bad and the good: “I have a photo, showing me as a child leaning at the wall of our house . . . with a fissure on it. . . . And I would tell how life brings the cement to fill it.”

Her words affirm for me the power of this genre called creative nonfiction. More than its cousins, fiction and journalism, it is in this genre (when “You get it right!”) that one voice encourages others to speak.

*****

For more information on Opa Nobody, visit http://nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Opa-Nobody,673370.aspx.

For more information on Good Neighbors, Bad Times, visit http://nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Good-Neighbors-Bad-Times,673371.aspx.

Pulp Praise: Continued Acclaim for Pulp Writer

Pulp Writer: Twenty Years in the American Grub Street
by Paul S. Powers, edited by Laurie Powers

“[Powers] penned this intriguing biography 40 years ago, but it remained unpublished until his granddaughter unearthed it in a closet and brought it to light, with her own biographical commentaries and research on the pulp fiction phenomenon. This is an extraordinary story.”—Margaret Guerrero, Southwest Books of the Year

To read earlier praise for Pulp Writer, please visit http://nebraskapress.typepad.com/university_of_nebraska_pr/2007/04/praise_for_pulp.html.

Chevato added to the American Indian Lives Series; a dominant theme is 19th- and 20th-century Apache life on the U.S.-Mexico border

If you’re a scholar or devoted reader of Native American or Texas and southwestern U.S. history, you don’t want to forego the chance to read Chevato. And don’t let the subtitle—The Story of the Apache Warrior Who Captured Herman Lehmann—bias your expectations. UNP’s November addition to the American Indian Lives Series combines enthohistory with extensive traditional historical research and narrative to tell not only the story of Chevato’s life but also the much broader and complicated story of Native American resistance and survival in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico, Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.

The life of the Apache warrior and shaman Chevato is at the center of the monograph in the form of oral histories told to William Chebahtah, Chevato’s grandson, by Thomas David Chebahtah, Chevato’s son. These oral histories are printed at the beginning of each chapter. Historian Nancy McGown Minor’s historical narrative follows. Based on extensive secondary and archival research, Minor’s narrative provides the detailed historical context needed for readers to fully understand and appreciate the content and veracity of the oral histories recounting Chevato’s life.

Although Chevato’s life is the genesis for Chebahtah and Minor’s historical narrative, his life story is far from the only history these author’s tell. Chevato’s life in fact became the catalyst for telling the story of Native American cultures—particularly, the Lipan and Mescalero Apaches and Comanche—under stress and attack by the forces of Mexican and American expansion into the Southern Plains and Southwest. By drawing on Chebahtah’s oral histories, published ethnohistorical accounts, and other primary and secondary sources, the authors show how the various tribes fought one another, Mexicans, and Texans to ensure their continued survival. Of particular value are the revelations these authors make about Native American practices of capturing and adopting enemies or the children of enemies (such as Herman Lehmann) to replenish tribes’ combat losses. Not all individuals taken captive were adopted, however. Many were killed out of vengeance by the families of warriors killed in combat, while others were captured for the purpose of being traded as soon as possible to other tribes or to people in Mexico.

Chevato also offers scholars and general readers significant insight into importance of community (versus individual) identity among Native American tribes and how those ties borne of communal identity made it possible for individuals and their relatives (as understood and recognized by Native Americans) to move between tribes. This is particularly important in understanding how Chevato, a Lipan Apache, became a recognized and influential member of the Mescalero Apaches in New Mexico and later of the Comanche people in Oklahoma, where through his relationship with Quanah Parker (the powerful Comanche son of another white captive, Cynthia Ann Parker), he introduced the peyote ritual and became a founding member of the Native American Church.

In spite of these strengths, the monograph has its weaknesses as well. The story/stories recounted in the oral histories included at the beginning of each chapter and what’s included in the historical narratives that follow don’t always coincide; perhaps as a result, the chronology of events recounted in the historical narrative is occasionally confusing or unclear (particularly the correlations between events recounted in one chapter and the next). Also, the content of the oral histories at the monograph’s end more often are Chebahtah’s reflections on his memories of Chevato than about Chevato. Most surprisingly, several footnotes were omitted from the text when it was printed.

Readers interested in learning more about Native Americans in Texas and the Southwest in the decades prior to Chevato’s birth in 1852 and how those events helped set the proverbial stage for the events in his life should read F. Todd Smith’s From Dominance to Disappearance: The Indians of Texas and the Near Southwest, 1786-1859 (UNP, 2005). Other scholarly monographs that are likely to be interest include David LaVere’s Contrary Neighbors: Southern Plains and Removed Indians in Indian Territory (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000) and The Texas Indians (Texas A&M University Press, 2004).

Ancestral Adventures

An Interview with Joanne Wilke, Author of Eight Women, Two Model Ts, and the American West

In 1924 eight young women drove across the American West in two Model T Fords. A group of farm girls who met while attending Iowa’s Teacher’s College, they shared a sense of adventure and a “yen to see some things.” In nine weeks they traveled more than nine thousand unpaved miles on an extended car-camping trip through six national parks, “without a man or a gun along.” Joanne Wilke’s grandmother and great-aunt were among the fearless females who embarked on this rousing expedition. Now Wilke is the author of a new book detailing their unique journey, Eight Women, Two Model Ts, and the American West (University of Nebraska Press). We chatted with her about the book, the challenges she faced in her research, and what she gained from the experience of chronicling a piece of her family’s history.

Q: What inspired you to write this book?

JW: I wrote Eight Women, Two Model Ts, and the American West because I was intrigued by the trip in 1924 and by the women’s stories. I thought it was a unique bit of history that could easily be lost. Additionally, two of the women, Marie and Laura, had a big impact on me personally—not only their strength and intelligence, but their zest and humor. I wanted to do them justice. Although the backbone of the book is the Model T trip, the family stories, essays, and memoirs are the heart.

Q: Do you have any tips or suggestions for writing a book based on a family history? How did you go about doing your research? What were the biggest challenges and how did you tackle them?

JW: My biggest challenge in research was the aging minds of my subjects. I was able to interview four of the women, but they were so old that their memories came in snippets. They couldn’t remember what happened where or what route they took, and sometimes they confused this trip with other trips. But as the travelers passed away, their heirs sent me diaries and letters that they found. These were indispensable. In the future, I would certainly ask interview subjects directly if they had journals, letters, or pictures saved. My main advice in researching family history is to maintain optimistic patience, thoroughness, and good record-keeping, but also to maintain correspondence with other family members. Don’t be afraid to contact people, even total strangers, and be willing to let the story take on a life of its own. I would also advise some research into what constitutes nonfiction (as opposed to fiction, or even creative nonfiction), just to be clear in your mind as you work.

Q: In researching and writing Eight Women, Two Model Ts, and the American West, what did you learn about your grandmother and great-aunt that you did not know before setting out on this journey?

JW: In the process of writing Eight Women, my youthful, somewhat mythic, impressions of Marie and Laura coalesced into a fuller picture of them as human beings. I also found my connection to them was deeper than I realized.

Q: Your grandmother, great-aunt, and their cohorts set out on a long, difficult journey "without a man or a gun along" at a time when this was not at all common. How has their conviction and sense of independence inspired you in your personal and professional life? 

JW: When I was a child, I listened as my grandmother’s and great-aunt’s conversations strayed into various youthful adventures, including this trip. To me it just seemed normal. I thought all grandmothers had such stories. But I was so young and the stories came in such a natural way that it is hard to determine the impact—to separate nature from nurture. I believe that my own curiosity, sense of adventure, ability to think for myself, and a certain willful confidence expanded in their presence. Perhaps that was their true gift to me.

Joanne Wilke’s work has appeared in the Crazy Woman Creek: Women Rewrite the American West and Leaning into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West anthologies. She has also written pieces for the Montana Quarterly, the Pacific Review, and the Christian Science Monitor.

To read a recent article on Joanne Wilke and Eight Women, Two Model Ts, and the American West in the Billings Gazette at http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2007/10/14/features/magazine/18-wilkie.txt.

For more information on the book, please visit http://nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Eight-Women-Two-Model-Ts-and-the-American-West,673240.aspx.

Nebraska to publish Knopp’s newest collection, Interior Places

The spring 2008 forecast for new essays, memoirs and other works of creative nonfiction by Cornhusker State authors looks to be unparalleled, especially for readers with an affinity and a passion for writing about the Midwest as a place and space to be savored and celebrated. Not only does Not Just Any Land (UNP, 2004) author John Price have a new book due out, but so too does Nebraska’s preeminent essayist Lisa Knopp. Her latest collection, Interior Places, will be published in March by the University of Nebraska Press / Bison Books.

If you’ve read any of Knopp’s previous books—The Nature of Home (UNP, 2002), Flight of Dreams: A Life in the Midwestern Landscape (University of Iowa Press, 1998), and Field of Vision (University of Iowa Press, 1996)—you know how intelligent, intense, and incisive her literary gaze is; how passionate her prose; and how inspiring her love for and attention to the Iowa and Nebraska of her childhood and later adult life. Interior Places returns to and expands on the themes that have informed her already deep and impassioned discovery and recovery of life on the Great Plains—what it means, for example, to live in the interior of the country, the heartland, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and also what it means to be middle aged, both daughter and parent, and still discovering a deeper appreciation for what’s here now.

If you’ve never read any of Knopp’s wide-ranging essays, including memoir and nature and travel writing, you don’t want to miss this opportunity. You’ll never forgive yourself. The journey you’ll experience in reading Interior Places will be as much a journey of physical and historical discovery—a discovery of the heartland that is and why—as it will be a discovery of Knopp’s (and our, her readers’) previously unknown personal connections to the people, places and events that are and give meaning to the Midwest.

Essays in Interior Places also carry on Knopp’s much respected reflections on the resilience of nature and how land and history have unpredictably combined in wondrous ways to create the place she so fervently and eloquently called home in her previous collection, The Nature of Home. The environmental historian William Cronon once wrote that “The romantic legacy [of wilderness] means that wilderness is more a state of mind than a fact of nature, and the state of mind that today most defines wilderness is wonder.” Knopp might not be writing about wilderness per se—one essay in Interior Places, for example, explores the origin, history and impact of corn on the land—but her essays nonetheless reveal her heartfelt wonder at the richness of nature and the depth of life in America’s interior places and show us—her lucky readers—what it means to be from here, the heartland. I can’t wait to return to the journey.

Regier's Obsession · Book of the Sphinx

by Willis Goth Regier

Book of the Sphinx is the product of an obsession.  The more I learned about Sphinxes, the more I wanted to know, and there was always more.  Imagine a curious cat the size of the Sphinx of Giza.

My curiosity began with that enormous Sphinx, known through the centuries as Horemakhet.  I wondered what it had to do with Phix, the man-eating Sphinx of Thebes, the one that posed deadly riddles.  These are the two most famous Sphinxes, and there are many more, a vast number.  I set out to find all I could, sort them, study them, and think about their types, tales, and purposes. 

Sphinxes stalk through murder mysteries, romance novels, riddle books, comic books, song lyrics, war propaganda, psychoanalysis, money, the Masons, tobacco companies, and almost anything that has to do with sex.  Why do so many sexy Sphinxes end up dead, especially when they are female?  When a woman is called “a Sphinx” should she feel praised or endangered?  What sex is the Sphinx of Giza?

Oedipus defeated the Sphinx of Thebes, or just thought he did.  Some considered Oedipus a genius, others saw him as a foolish know-it-all.  Since I wanted to know all about Sphinxes, I stepped into his sandals.  They pinched.

Illustrating the book was a project unto itself:  more than a hundred illustrations show Sphinxes old and new, including the recurring burial of Horemakhet by the Sahara.  Book of the Sphinx was designed by the great Richard Eckersley, who added his own incomparable magic. 

Deeply serious, Sphinxes provoke comedy.  I made room for that, too.  One review called the book “a romp.”  I’d be delighted if that’s how readers experience it.
_____________________________________________________

Willis Goth Regier's Book of the Sphinx is now available in paperback from Bison Books.

Live in Omaha: Kooser to speak about Nebraska wonders

Nebraska poet and two-time U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser will speak next Sunday, Oct. 14, at 1:00 p.m. at Sokol South Omaha (21st and U Streets). Kooser won’t be reading poetry, though. He’ll be reading from and discussing his memoir Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps (UNP, 2002).

According to Newsday writer Dan Cryer, Local Wonders includes “eloquent meditations on country pleasures, the rhythms of the seasons and the lingering presence of Czech folk culture in rural Nebraska." In the book, Kooser’s first collection of prose, he describes with exquisite detail and humor the rolling hills of southeastern Nebraska—an area also known as the Bohemian Alps—that he calls home.

The event is sponsored by and benefits the Omaha Czech Cultural Club. Admission is $4 for adults and free for children 12 and younger.

Local Wonders won the Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction in 2003 and was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection in 2002. The book also won the Gold Award for Autobiography in ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards.

If you want to learn more about Kooser or would like to read a sampling of his poetry, check out his website www.tedkooser.com/. Other books of his published by UNP include The Poetry Home Repair Manual, The Blizzard Voices, and Writing Brave and Free.

Not Just Any Price: Now in paperback—Price's Not Just Any Land

Essayist John Price’s eagerly read literary memoir and study of Midwestern nature writers the likes of William Least Heat-Moon and Mary Swander has finally hit bookshelves in paperback. The essence of Not Just Any Land is John’s rediscovery of his Midwestern roots and affinity for the American grasslands where he had grown up but had longed to escape from. Fortunately, Fate intervened. His love of literature—he studied literature and creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa—introduced him to regional writers who, like John, struggled with their own identities as Midwesterners and yet chose to write about, rather than abandon, a place disparaged by people as varied as nineteenth-century immigrants and twentieth-century coastal urbanites who had neither knowledge of nor interest in experiencing and intimately knowing a place popular culture condemned as a wasteland—dare I say it, the Great American Desert! The authors Price read, met, interviewed and then wrote about confronted and overcame this and other persistent and ill-founded myths and arrived at their own conclusions and sense of commitment to place. Through them and his own explorations of the grasslands, Price discovered his own intellectual roadmap to home. Now that Not Just Any Land: A Personal and Literary Journey into the American Grasslands (UNP, 2004) is in paperback, hopefully it will reach the larger audience Price’s story rightly deserves and in the process help others also find their ways home.

If you’ve never read anything by Price before, check out Orion magazine, where he often publishes creative nonfiction essays, or read his essay “Nuts” in The Big Empty, a compilation of writing by and about Nebraskans and Nebraska. The book, edited by Ladette Randolph and Nina Shevchuk-Murray, was published by UNP in May 2007. Also be on the lookout early next year for John’s latest book, a memoir that includes previously published humorous selections from Orion and elsewhere, as well as new selections, in which he continues to explore the unexpected and enriching intersections between nature and personal life. The book, tentatively titled Man Killed by Pheasants (and Other Kinships), is expected to be published in April 2008 by Da Capo, a member of the Perseus Books Group.

On a final note, any readers interested in America’s grasslands, most specifically the national reserves (akin to national forests) that preserve and also are called grasslands, you might want to check out Francis Moul’s and Georg Joutras’s The National Grasslands: A Guide to America's Undiscovered Treasure. The book was published by UNP in October 2006.

Linking Lincoln Return to Thursdays

There is really no rhyme or reason to the list of links below.  It's just that I was recently told about the National Museum of the American Indian's fourth year and new website for the Vine Deloria, Jr. Native Writers Series.  UNP author Frances Washburn, who wrote one of my favorite novels—Elsie's Business—is part of this year's series.

I have my favorite Native authors, like Sherman Alexie and Susan Power, but I was curious to know what bloggers have written on Native writers or on books by Native writers.  So I searched in the usual way and unusual way and found some blogs that spoke about Native American literature and writers. 

Prairiemary posted on Sid Larson’s book on Native writers.  There are a few reviews of Native books on Robin's Readings from this summer.  Multicultural Book Reviews, a blog created by a Texas Woman's University class, reviewed a folktale on their blog.

Finally, UNP author Eric Gansworth (Mending Skins) has a NativeWiki page and UNP author Stephen Graham Jones (Bleed into Me) has a blog called Demon Theory.

It's not Friday, but enjoy your weekend.  Gee, it's so close to Friday.  Why couldn't it be Friday?  I could use a Friday. . . it's not this job(!!!), it's school.  Yeah, that's it!  I need a break from school, not work. 

Take care.