Janet Skeslien Charles, author of 'Moonlight In Odessa'

While attending The University of Montana in Missoula, Janet Skeslien Charles worked part-time as a translator for American men corresponding with Russian women. The men wanted wives. The women wanted the safety and security of life in the United States. After graduation, Charles went to Odessa, Ukraine, as a Soros Fellow. There she saw the international dating scene from the other side, which became the focus of her novel Moonlight in Odessa.

In Odessa, Ukraine, Daria, a whip-smart engineer, spends her days underemployed as a secretary--a job she was lucky to get in this rotten economy. She spends her evenings moonlighting as an interpreter at an agency that matches lonely American men with beautiful-but-broke Ukrainian women. She spends her nights wondering if there is more. When an American client offers marriage and a one-way ticket out of poverty, Daria jumps at the chance. She soon learns there's a reason that her husband couldn't find a wife in America, and that the grass isn't always greener on the other side of the world. The perfect book for anyone who's ever been stuck in a dead-end job or relationship, Moonlight in Odessa is an exploration of language, culture, and the difficult choices we make in the pursuit of love and stability.

Here's what Publisher's Weekly had to say about Moonlight in Odessa:
“This darkly humorous debut explores the world of eastern European mail-order brides and the men who finance them. Daria, a savvy, warmhearted but standoffish secretary in Odessa, Ukraine, fears that her boss will fire her after she refuses his sexual advances. So to keep him busy (and to keep her job), she sets him up with her shallow friend, Olga, who promptly turns on Daria. Fearing imminent unemployment, Daria takes a second job at Soviet Unions, an Internet dating service that connects Western men with available Ukrainian women. As Daria, who is fluent in English, bridges the language gap between the women and foreign men, she wonders if she will ever find true love. The endearing and forthright Daria is the perfect guide through the trickery and sincerity of chaotic courtships and short-order love. Meanwhile, her own romantic life swirls between a sweet suitor in California, a Ukrainian gangster and her manic boss. The teetering dance between humor and heartbreak burns through this tale that takes place at the intersection of love and money, East and West, male and female.”

Join TWQ producer Chérie Newman and Janet Skeslien Charles for a conversation about Moonlight in Odessa, Thursday evening, June 30, at 6:30 (YPRadio.org) or 7:30 MTPR.org).

You can also listen by subscribing to The Write Question podcast.

Or listen online anytime from the MTPR Web site.

Monday Poems: "Miracle" - by Paulann Petersen

The wonder isn't that lightning
strikes where it does, but that it doesn't
strike everywhere. Specifically me.
It isn't the frequency of car crashes,
but their infrequency. Traffic flicks along
in its speed and perplexity, each move,
each surge a potential disaster.

The heart beats out its strange
litany of the enormously possible,
never excluding disease and stricture.
Why does my blood run so easy and warm?
This is the wonder: me approaching
the traffic light just turned yellow,
my foot pressing my trust down
into the brake, the car in agreement
coming steady steady to a stop.

* * * * * * * *

Paulann Petersen is Oregon's sixth and current Poet Laureate. She lives on Portland, Oregon, where she is “gratefully immersed” (as she puts it) in that city’s “splendid community of readers and writers.” Paulann is the author of four poetry collections, one of which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and several other major awards. "Miracle" was published in A Bride of Narrow Escape (Cloudbank Books, 2005). Learn more about her at http://paulann.net.

Rick Bass, author of Nashville Chrome

Late in 1959, the Brown siblings--Maxine, Bonnie, and Jim Ed--were enjoying unprecedented international success, rivaled only by their longtime friend Elvis Presley. They had a bona fide megahit on their hands, which topped both the country and pop charts and gave rise to the polished sound of the multibillion dollar country music industry we know today. Mesmerized by the Browns' haunting harmonies, the Beatles even tried to learn their secret. Their unique harmony, however, was only achievable through shared blood, and the trio's perfect pitch was honed by a childhood spent listening for the elusive pulse and tone of an impeccably tempered blade at their parent's Arkansas sawmill.

But the Browns' celebrity couldn't survive the world changing around them, and the bonds of family began to fray along with the fame. Heartbreakingly, the novel jumps between the Browns' promising past and the present, which finds Maxine--once supremely confident and ravenous in her pursuit of applause--ailing and alone. As her world increasingly narrows, her hunger for just one more chance to secure her legacy only grows, as does her need for human connection.

Lyrical and nuanced, Nashville Chrome hits all the right grace notes with its vivid evocation of an era in American music, while at its heart it is a wrenching meditation on the complexities of fame and of one family--forgotten yet utterly unforgettable when reclaimed by Bass--who experienced them firsthand

This week on The Write Question, producer Chérie Newman talks with Rick Bass about the challenges of writing fiction about real, living people. You'll also hear Bass read from Nashville Chrome and find out a little about his future projects.

Tune in to Yellowstone Public Radio Thursday (June 23) at 6:30 p.m. or to Montana Public Radio at 7:30 p.m. You can also listen online (and get more information about Rick Bass) or sign up for The Write Question podcast.

RICK BASS READS an excerpt from Nashville Chrome in which he describes the Browns, as children, listening to for the tempered harmony of the blades in their father's saw mill.

Monday Poems: "Desire" - by Keetje Kuipers

I can't tell the difference anymore
between what I want and why I want it:
the white, clapboard house in the country
or the husband and children
who wait on its porch; a man with a truck
or our frank heterosexuality. Hunger
hasn't gotten a very good name around here.
And when I do get what I want—
constellations unfurled in one loose rag,
Orion's little, three-hole-punch belt
accompanying each of my first kisses—
it never seems to be enough.
What is it the experts say about desire?
It is not an appetite: it is essentially insatiable.
I want to be a woman held by a man
who stands on the long, metal back of a suspension bridge
lit by a barrel-chested moon. Romance
doesn't begin to describe the kind of tenderness
that  can take a brave man—one who has fired a gun,
who knows the frets and grooves
of persistent calluses, who wears a scar that winks
like a pale, forgotten star on his cheek—
and make it impossible for him to touch me.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Keeje Kuipers is a native of the Northwest. She earned her BA at Swarthmore College and her MFA at the University of Oregon. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Oregon Literary Arts, and Soapstone, as well as awards from Atlanta Review and Nimrod. In 2007, she was the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, which provided her with seven months of solitude in Oregon's Rogue River Valley where she composed work that has been published in Prairie Schooner, West Branch, The Southeast Review, and Willow Springs, among others. Kuipers teaches writing at the University of Montana and is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She divides her time between San Francisco and Missoula where she lives with her dog, Bishop. "Desire" was published in Kuipers' collection, Beautiful in the Mouth.

Review of Kathleen Dean Moore's 'Wild Comfort'

Review by Chérie Newman - From the March 21, 2011 issue of High Country News

Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature
Kathleen Dean Moore
256 pages,
softcover: $15.95.
Trumpeter Books, 2010.

Writer, editor and activist Kathleen Dean Moore was settling in to write her next book when a series of personal tragedies changed everything. After several people close to her died within a few months, Moore abandoned her plans to create a book about happiness. Instead, she used her keen observations of the natural world to write her way to the knowledge that "sorrow is part of the Earth's great cycles." Her new book became a collection of profound essays titled, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature.
Wild Comfort often drifts into vivid poetry. Moore describes the sun "slumped on the water like an egg yolk, peppered by frigate birds" and shares her experience of a night when you'd need  "a stone chisel to flake the darkness out of this sky." Poetry is a way to express grief, she notes: Sometimes, she says, "when death comes, only poetry is enough."

Although dark images appear frequently in these essays, threads of insight and joy are stitched in as well. Moore returns briefly to her original intention in "The Happy Basket," a sort of gratitude-journal-in-wicker experiment where she collects notes about what she's doing when she feels happy: "Fresh crab ... Frank and I held hands in bed last night ... A patch of sun and a glass of wine after work." Near the end of the book, an optimistic essay about the abundant life rising from the ashes of the Mount St. Helens eruption reminds us that nature will use the tiniest crack in a rock or patch of scorched ground as a place to start over. Moore posits that "destruction, creation, catastrophe, renewal, sorrow, and joy are merely human ways of seeing" natural events. Ultimately, she says, only change is real. While this is certainly not a new idea, her descriptions of insects under rocks, of snowflakes and fog, of water and tree branches show us fresh ways to value often-unwelcome changes.

Moore does not pretend to have a comprehensive definition of sorrow, or a cure for its pain. What she does have, however, is the skill to weave snippets from the cycles of nature into essays that offer beauty, reassurance and comfort.

Cedar Brant

Cedar Brant was born in a barn in northwest Montana. She spent her youth fascinated by wolves. This intrigue propelled her into biology, and a love affair with the land and culture of the rural west. For the past ten years, she has worked from Yellowstone to the empty valleys of Nevada, Oregon and Montana as a botanist and field biologist. She spends her summers living in a trailer in various rolling grasslands, counting and keying out plants, and honing her four-wheeling skills.
     
Her poetry and essays have appeared in Camas, and Poems Across the Big Sky. In 2007, she and several other Montana writers formed the traveling poetry troupe Bentgrass, which tours the state performing poetry and music, and hosting writing workshops. In 2008, they received a grant from Humanities Montana for their “On East” tour to the small ranching towns of eastern Montana where, among other honors, they were invited to tour a longhorn cattle operation, stay the night at the mayor's house, and attend northeastern Montana's “Schmeckfest,” a Mennonite sausage eating party. Bentgrass Poetry Troupe has self-published two volumes of poetry, Windfall Season (2007) and Night Corn (2010). Cedar Brant unpacks her bags in Missoula.

Hear Brant talk about her unusual childhood and her experiences with Bentgrass, and read a few poems during The Write Question, Thursday evening, June 16, at 6:30 (YPRadio.org) or 7:30 (MTPR.org).

Or click here to listen online.

Monday Poems: "Mud" - by Amy Hale Auker

Give me mud,
heavy black fragrant,
goldfish harbor
at the bottom of a trough.

Give me cows,
bawling cumbersome social,
daughters and sons and families of cows.

Give me light,
flickering non-electric intimate,
lantern light creating a small circle of us.

Give me solitude
days of books and truth and pages
when the story is the thing.

Give me simple
and wet
and real
an abundance of time.

Keep your diamonds,
your malls,
your exhaust fumes,
your schedules,
your rush,
your busy-ness,
your prescriptions,
your clean.

Give me mud,
heavy black fragrant,
goldfish harbor
at the bottom of a trough.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *

Amy Hale Auker writes and rides on a ranch in Arizona. She writes "about the real world where things grow up out of the ground, where the miracle of life happens over and over and over again, where people can and do survive without malls or Arby's."

Her collection, Rightful Place, is available at www.amyhaleauker.com.

Yellowstone National Park with Marc Hendrix, KC Glastetter, and Jeremie Hollman

'Tis the season for traveling to our national parks, especially Yellowstone, a world-famous destination. Before you drive off for a summer visit to our nation's first national park, tune in to The Write Question to find out about more about Yellowstone's geology, plants, and animals.

This week's program features Marc S. Hendrix, author of Geology Underfoot in Yellowstone Country, and KC Glastetter and Jeremie Hollman, co-authors of Yellowstone National Park: An ABC Adventure, a book for young readers.

No matter what you're interested in seeing - bison, petrified trees, geysers, the Fishing Bridge, a grizzly bear or wolf, or the remnants of an ancient ocean - you'll find it all in this pair of books.

LISTEN TO THE PROGRAM:
June 9 at 6:30 p.m. (YPRadio.org) or 7:30 p.m. (MTPR.org). Or right now using the embedded player below.

Marc Hendrix

Marc S. Hendrix is a geology professor at The University of Montana in Missoula. He received a bachelor's dgree in geology from Wittenberg University in Springfild, Ohio, in 1985, and a master's dregree in geology and geophysics from the University of Wisconsin in 1987. In 1992, he graduated with a PhD in applied earth sciences from Stanfrd University, where he conducted research on the geologic record of mountain building and ancient climate in central Asia, particularly in western China dn Mongolia. In 1994, Hendrix joined the faculty at UM, where he has developed a field-based research program focused on the geology of the northern Rocky Mountains, including the Yellowstone region.

KC Glastetter

KC Glastetter has been an elementary school teacher for over twenty years and a photographer for five. She currentlyl teaches third grade in Kalispell, Montana. KC and her family spend countless hours each year riding their tandem bicycle, hiking, cross-country skiing and snowshoeing throughout the magnificent northwest. KC feels fortunate just to be outside in such incredible surrounding, and if she's lucky enough to capture a photograph, she is even richer for the experience.

Jeremie Hollman

Jeremie Hollman is an avid fly fisherman and has tremendous love for wildlife. He embraces every opportunity given to him to be outdoors. Whether, hiking, fishing or just exploring, he always has his camera by his side and a photo to take home to tell a story of his adventures.  Jeremie has a bachelor'd degree in art from Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado.  His writing and photographs have appeared in many state, regional and national publications, as well as newspapers and calendars.

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The Write Question is produced by Chérie Newman.

Read an interview with TWQ producer Chérie Newman on the Humanities Montana Web site.

Executive producer, Michael Marsolek. Special thanks to Lisa Simon, David Moore, Barbara Theroux, and Kim Anderson.

This program is supported in part by Humanities Montana, enriching intellectual, cultural, and civic life for all Montanans. And by the Montana Cultural Trust.

The music in this program was written and performed by Aaron Minnick, and John Floridis.

Monday Poems: "Stones" - by Marie Smith

If stones were silver
like my grandmother's spoons
that came boxed
and wrapped in black
two weeks after she died,

I'd cherish them, too,
dip oatmeal, fresh sliced peaches
floating in thick cream,
stir fragrance
of wild, raspberry tea

and sift cinnamon
onto egg custard--spice
that will float, crisp
when three hundred and fifty
degrees has done its job.

And I'd shine them each Friday
like she did the spoons
and lay them, glowing,
side by side on crocheted mats
I'd hook like hers--

If stones were silver.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *

Marie Smith (1927 - 2010) was raised in the West Australian bush and on the shores of the Indian Ocean. She moved to Idaho in 1952 to marry rancher/cowboy artist, Cecil Smith (1910 - 1984) and was inducted into the Cowboy Poets of Idaho Hall of Fame in 1996. She lived in Somers, Montana, during her final years. Smith's poems have been published in three volumes of poetry, and in numerous collections. "Stones" was published, most recently, in Poems Across The Big Sky: An Anthology of Montana Poets.

Germaine White, Bull Trout's Gift

“We were wealthy from the water,” Mitch Smallsalmon says, and like all the tribal elders, he speaks to our understanding of the natural world and the consequences of change. In Bull Trout's Gift: A Salish Story About The Value of Reciprocity, the wisdom of the elders is passed on to the young as the story of the Jocko River, the home of the bull trout, unfolds for a group of schoolchildren on a field trip.

 

The Jocko River flows through the Flathead Indian Reservation in northwestern Montana. For thousands of years the Salish and Pend d’Oreille Indians lived along its banks, finding food and medicine in its plants and fish, and in the game hunted on its floodplain. Readers of this story will learn, along with the students of Ms. Howlett’s class, about the history and culture of the river and its meaning in Native life, tradition, and religion. They will also discover the scientific background and social importance behind the Tribes’ efforts to restore the bull trout to its home waters.

 

Beautifully illustrated and narrated in the tradition of the Salish and Kootenai Tribes, this account of conservation as the legacy of one generation to the next is about being good to the land that has been good to us. Bull Trout’s Gift is steeped in the culture, history, and science that our children must know if they hope to transform past wisdom into future good.

During tonight's program, Germaine White will talk about Bull Trout's Gift, and the field journal, and the interactive DVD that make up the Bull Trout Education Project's set of materials designed for grade school students. White is the Information and Education Specialist for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Natural Resources Department.

Hear the program at 6:30 p.m. (YPRadio.org) or 7:30 p.m. (MTPR.org). Or, click through to the Montana Public Radio Web site to listen online or sign up for The Write Question podcast.