Children's Book Review: 'Cowpoke Clyde and Dirty Dawg' by Lori Mortensen

Cowpoke Clyde and Dirty Dawg
by Lori Mortensen
illustrated by Michael Allen Austin
Clarion Books, 2013

Cowpoke Clyde is ready to relax after a long day on the ranch, when he notices that "ol' Dawg, his faithful, snorin' friend, [is] caked with mud from end to end." He fills his buckets to give Dawg a bath, but Dawg sets off on the run, creating mayhem as Clyde chases him across the ranch, splashing other animals along the way.

Michael Allen Austin's large, colorful illustrations perfectly capture the spirit of this story, portraying Clyde as a lanky, sharp-boned cowboy, and the animals as larger-than-life to emphasize the chaos that is created in the course of the chase.

Mortensen uses the time-honored folktale tradition of repetition and accumulation to convey the parade of animals that are "gettin' soaked instead of Dawg." The language is pleasingly rhythmic and peppered with the appropriate Western terms and details. And rhymes drop off with the final word in large print on the following page to encourage children to join in the telling of the story.

The first-grade students that I read this story to leaned forward in their seats as I read, and laughed aloud when the Dawg jumped into the tub with Clyde after he'd given up the chase. They loved the details in the illustrations (such as the cat, who on one page is chewing on a bone) and found the whole book to be funny and fun. This book is nearly perfect in style and execution: a rip-roaring read for children and adults alike.
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Lori Mortensen is the award-winning author of more than two dozen books for children, including fiction and nonfiction picture books, easy readers, first graphic novels, and middle grade nonfiction. She lives with her husband and three children in California and reckons that - unlike Clyde - she'll never complete her chores. You can visit Lori online at www.lorimortensen.com.

Michael Allen Austin is the creative director of a medical media company and the award-winning illustrator of ten books for children. He lives in Atlanta with his wife Kim, and their sheepdog, Riley, who - unlike Dawg - likes to roll in clean laundry. Michael's website is www.michaelallenaustin.com.
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Renée Vaillancourt McGrath has worked at Montana Public Radio as a program host since 2002. Her background is in librarianship and she currently works as a freelance editor, blogger, and website developer. Check out more of her book reviews at reneesreads.com.

Monday Poems: "The Hoot of The Owl" -- by Minerva Allen

The morning sun is bright and warm.
Children are playing; no worry of alarm. Listen!

The hoot of the owl three times.

The scout returns. The enemy is close by.
With speed of an eagle, the tribe is leaving.
Only the rings of the lodges are left on the ground.
Noise of lodge poles formed into travois; the whispering
of children. Each has his own chore.

Birds have stopped sining; dogs are all quiet.
Horses' ears are wiggling and they nicker to each other.

The tribe steals away in silence.

The evening sun is setting. Food is cooking
in the lodges. All is quiet
                    until the hoot
                    of the owl
                    three times.

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Minerva Allen lives in northern Montana on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Lodge Pole with her family in the foothills of the Little Rockies, know as the Island Mountains to the Nakoda. She owns a ranch with cattle and many horses that roam the ridges in Big Warm. She coordinates the Lodge Pole Senior Programs and teaches the Nakoda Language.

"Hoot of The Owl" was published in her collection titled Nakoda Sky People (2012 Many Voice Press).

An Interview with Joe Wilkins

During this week's program, Chérie Newman talks with author and poet Joe Wilkins about his memoir The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing Up in the Big Dry. He also reads from the book and reads two poems from his new collection, Notes From The Journey Westward.

Publisher's Description:

The Mountain and the Fathers explores the life of boys and men in the unforgiving, harsh world north of the Bull Mountains of eastern Montana in a drought afflicted area called the Big Dry, a land that chews up old and young alike. Joe Wilkins was born into this world, raised by a young mother and elderly grandfather following the untimely death of his father. That early loss stretches out across the Big Dry, and Wilkins uses his own story and those of the young boys and men growing up around him to examine the violence, confusion, and rural poverty found in this distinctly American landscape. Ultimately, these lives put forth a new examination of myth and manhood in the American west and cast a journalistic eye on how young men seek to transcend their surroundings in the search for a better life. Rather than dwell on grief or ruin, Wilkins’ memoir posits that it is our stories that sustain us, and The Mountain and The Fathers, much like the work of Norman MacClean or Jim Harrison, heralds the arrival of an instant literary classic.

The Mountain and the Fathers was a Montana Book Award Honor Book and was a finalist for the 2013 Orion Book Award.

Joe Wilkins' essay "Out West: Growing Up Hard," published by Orion magazine.

Find out more about Joe Wilkins, and listen to the program, on the radio or online.

• Thursday, May 9, at 7:30 p.m. on Montana Public Radio
• Thursday, May 9 at 6:30 p.m. on Yellowstone Public Radio
• Sunday, May 12 at 3 p.m. on KSJD 
• Sunday, May 12 at 6 p.m. on Spokane Public Radio
• Via the MTPR podcast

Children's Book Review: 'My Mom is the Best Circus' by Luciana Navarro Powell

My Mom is the Best Circus
by Luciana Navarro Powell
Robin Corey Books, 2013

Just in time for Mother's Day, Random House Children's Books has released a new board book which celebrates mothers by author/illustrator Luciana Navarro Powell.

In bright, colorful images, the mother in this story is portrayed as the ultimate super-mom, gliding through domestic tasks and keeping her children entertained before heading off to work in her business suit.

The focus of the story is squarely on the home, however, with mom's time at work passing in the flip of a page. The evening is spent cooking and clowning around with the kids before bath and bedtime.

The circus theme is clever, portraying mom as a ringmaster, juggler, acrobat and magician. But the finale is slightly disappointing, with mom's best stunt being "the sandman show."

Since no other adult is portrayed in the book, My Mom is the Best Circus might be an appealing choice for single mothers with young children. The board book format will hold up well to baby and toddler play. And every mother deserves a little applause on Mother's Day.
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Luciana Navarro Powell is originally from Brazil and moved to the US in 2002. She has been a professional illustrator for about 14 years. She has worked with all kinds of media but eventually settled on the digital brush, since she loves the freedom it allows her and all the possibilities of experimentation.
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Renée Vaillancourt McGrath has worked at Montana Public Radio as a program host since 2002. Her background is in librarianship and she currently works as a freelance editor, blogger, and website developer. Check out more of her book reviews at reneesreads.com.

Monday Poems: "As If darkness Can Mend It All" -- by Maya Jewell Zeller

I thought here I could summon you,
here where the first balsamroot
presents each sage-colored leaf
like an upside-down heart, apex
aimed at the sky.
I thought here I could call you forth,
here where the hills erupt
into a thousand white
and yellow eyes.
I thought here you'd listen
for the trickle of a new spring
spitting from the rocks.
I thought you'd want
to be mist.
But you've gone and found
a new cave.
The truth is you're tired
of all this damn
sunshine, this river
showing off its cheap jewelry,
robinsong, wingflick, white-
tailed deer with their quick tendons,
the new budding spruce,
even fresh bear scat
reminding you
how young you were.

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Maya Jewell Zeller grew up in the northwest, mostly near coastal environments. She now lives in Spokane, where she teaches English at Gonzaga University and co-directs a literary reading series. Her poems appear in a number of literary journals, and her reviews and interviews can be found online. "As If darkness can Mend It All" was published in her collection, Rust Fish (2011, Lost Horse Press).

Bruce Holbert: "I Killed My Friend"

Mike Kemp/In Pictures — Corbis

In North Dakota, a gun owner displays

hunting paraphernalia in a bedroom.

THE summer before my sophomore year in high school, I moved into my father’s house. My father had remarried and the only unoccupied bedroom in his house was the gun room. Against one wall was a gun case he had built in high school, and beside it were two empty refrigerators stocked with rifles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. My bed’s headboard resided against the other wall and, above it, a resigned-looking, marble-eyed, five-point mule deer’s head with a fedora on its antler rack.

The room had no windows, so the smell of gun oil filled my senses at least eight hours each day. It clung to my clothes like smoke, and like a smoker’s cigarettes, it became my smell. No one in my high school noticed. We all smelled like something: motorheads of motor oil, farm kids of wheat chaff and cow dung, athletes like footballs and grass, dopers like the other kind of grass.

It did not appear to anyone — including me — that residing within my family’s weapons cache might affect my life. Together, my three brothers own at least a dozen weapons and have yet to harm anyone with them. Despite their guns (or, arguably, because of them), they are quite peaceable. As for me, I have three guns, one inherited and two gifts, and I’m hardly a zealot. In fact I never had much interest in guns. Yet it is I who killed a man. 

It was the second week in August, a Friday the 13th, in fact, in 1982. I was with a group of college roommates who were getting ready to go to the Omak Stampede and Suicide Race. Three of us piled into a red Vega parked outside a friend’s house in Okanogan, Wash., me in the back seat. The driver, who worked with the county sheriff’s department, offered me his service revolver to examine. I turned the weapon onto its side, pointed it toward the door. The barrel, however, slipped when I shifted my grip to pull the hammer back, to make certain the chamber was empty, and turned the gun toward the driver’s seat. When I let the hammer fall, the cylinder must have rotated without my knowing. When I pulled the hammer back a second time it fired a live round.

My friend, Doug, slumped in the driver’s seat, dying, and another friend, who was sitting in the passenger seat, raced into the house for the phone.

The house sat beside one edge of a river valley and I knew that between the orchard at the opposite side and the next town was 20 miles of rock and pine. I was a cross-country champion in high school. I could run through the woods and find my way to my cousins, who lived far into the mountains. I could easily disappear. But I remained where I was, mindful that even if I ran, I would escape nothing. So, when the sirens finally whirred and the colored lights tumbled over the yard and the doors of the cruisers opened and a police sergeant asked who was responsible, I raised my hand and patted my chest and was arrested. 

Though the charges against me were eventually dropped, I have since been given diagnoses of a range of maladies, including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety and adult attention deficit disorders. The pharmacists fill the appropriate prescriptions, which temporarily salve my conscience, but serve neither my story nor the truth.

Where I grew up, masculinity involved schooling a mean dog to guard your truck or skipping the ignition spark to fire the points, and, of course, handling guns of all kinds. I was barely proficient in any of these areas. I understood what was expected of me and responded as best I could, but did so with distance that would, I hoped, keep me from being a total fraud in my own eyes.

Like many other young men, I mythologized guns and the ideas of manhood associated with them.

The gun lobby likes to say guns don’t kill people, people do. And they’re right, of course. I killed my friend; no one else did; no mechanism did. But this oversimplifies matters (as does the gun control advocates’ position that eliminating weapons will end violent crime).

My friend was killed by a man who misunderstood guns, who imagined that comfort with — and affection for — guns was a vital component of manhood. I did not recognize a gun for what it was: a machine constructed for a purpose, one in which I had no real interest. I treated a tool as an essential part of my identity, and the result is a dead man and a grieving family and a survivor numbed by guilt whose story lacks anything resembling a proper ending.

Bruce Holbert is the author of the novel “Lonesome Animals.”

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on April 28, 2013, on page SR8 of the New York Times, New York edition, with the headline: Sleeping With Guns.

An interview with Bruce Holbert.
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An Interview with Sherril Jaffe

A homeless woman takes up residence in a man's closet; a detective solves cases by feeling the emotions of the perpetrators; a woman happens upon a swingers' club in the back of a tire shop; a couple struggling with their pets' protracted endgame puts out a hit on them; and a man's mother, newly dead and buried, calls him to ask if she can visit.

The fifteen tales in You Are Not Alone & Other Stories are set in San Francisco. Each uses its own dream logic to illuminate the great human themes of death, love, jealousy, anger, desire, and the nature of the soul.

"These are stories where anything can happen, where we root for characters entangled by both everyday life and fantastical predicaments. Humor and loss weave tightly together through these pages, and Sherril Jaffe's formidable imagination and playful prose shine unexpected light on deep emotional truths." — Caitlin Horrocks

You Are Not Alone & Other Stories is winner of a Spokane Prize for Short Fiction.

Find out more about Sherril Jaffe, and listen to the program, on the radio or online.

• Thursday, May 2, at 7:30 p.m. on Montana Public Radio
• Thursday, May 2 at 6:30 p.m. on Yellowstone Public Radio
• Sunday, May 5 at 3 p.m. on KSJD 
• Sunday, May 5 at 6 p.m. on Spokane Public Radio
• Via the MTPR podcast