Elk River Arts & Lectures of Livingston is set to host some exciting and inspiring events during the month of October.
Elk River continues its fall series with a free reading and book signing by award-winning author of “Cowboys and East Indians,” Nina McConigley, on Thursday, October 8th, at Elk River Books, located at 120 N. Main St. in downtown Livingston. The event begins at 7pm and is open to the public. Winner of the PEN Open Book Award and the High Plains Book Award, McConigley was born in Singapore and grew up in Wyoming. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston and an MA from the University of Wyoming. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and the Asian American Literary Review, among others. She teaches at the University of Wyoming. Her short-story collection “Cowboys and East Indians” explores the immigrant experience and the collisions of cultures in the American West as seen through the eyes of outsiders. From Indian motel owners to a kleptomaniac foreign exchange student, from a cross-dressing, sari-wearing cowboy to oil-rig workers, from an adopted cowgirl to a medical tourist in India–the characters in these stories are lonely and are looking for connection, and yet they can also be problematic and aggressive in order to survive in an isolated landscape. O Magazine notes that “the real achievement is the author’s mix of hilarity and intelligence,” and Luis Alberto Urrea praises it as “a fresh and wise view of a new world?at turns delightful and sad, but surprising at every turn. I love this work, and I know it begins a fine career.” During her visit, McConigley will also work in the classroom with Park High students. events are made possible in part by a grant from Humanites Montana and co-sponsored by the Murray Hotel. Tickets go on sale October 1st for the inaugural Elk River Writers Workshop Gala Faculty Reading, featuring six nationally renowned writers, to benefit the Livingston organization’s nonprofit lecture series. Novelists William Kittredge and Rick Bass, poets William Pitt Root and Pamela Uschuk, naturalist Doug Peacock, and journalist/ghostwriter Maryanne Vollers will read from their recent work during a party at the Shane Center that will include hors d’oeuvres, a cash bar and silent auction. The reading concludes a weekend-long workshop in Paradise Valley, in which more than 30 writers from across the country gather for lectures and teaching sessions with top poets, novelists and non- fiction writers. This year’s faculty features award-winning authors, with an outdoor and Western emphasis. Kittredge is a Montana literary institution, with both Stegner and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships to his credit; Bass is a prolific writer whose work spans genres and continents, and expresses a passionate commitment to wildlands; Peacock, a Vietnam veteran and former Green Beret medic, melds memoir and natural history to produce modern classics of the American West, and has been awarded both Guggenheim and Lannan Foundation fellowships for his work; Pitt Root and Uschuk are internationally-recognized poets with countless awards and publications to their names. Together, they publish the prestigious Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, and are tireless champions for social justice and the voiceless of the earth. Vollers’ career has taken her from Rolling Stone to the plains of Africa, from the inner circles of Washington, D.C., to the backwaters of the Mississippi Delta. She has written extensively about politics, show business, crime and justice, adventure, and the environment. Proceeds from the event will benefit the nonprofit Elk River Arts & Lectures series, which brings writers to Livingston for free public readings and provides opportunities for those writers to interact with public high school students. Tickets are $20 and available from Elk River Books. The event takes place in the Shane Center ballroom at 415 E. Lewis St. Festivities will begin at 6pm on Sunday, October 25th with refreshments and the silent auction. For more information, visit elkriverarts.org or call 333-2330. •
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