2020 Local Reads

In 2019, I made it a mission to read books by local authors. I ended that year reading nine books in this category and really enjoyed the experience. My plan was to include local authors in my 2020 reading as well. The main difference in 2020 was the area I considered “local” expanded to include nearby states.

Steven Bates

Steven Bates is one of the first local authors I met in my community outside of my writing group, and he’s always impressed me by how involved he is in the mental health, veterans’, and writing communities. He’s a very generous person. In fact, the first time I met him, he gave me his first two poetry books he’d published. I soon learned I wasn’t the only one who he’d given copies of his books. Many times he’d meet a fellow veteran suffering from PTSD or someone who struggled with depression who he thought he could help by sharing his own experiences, or someone in the local writing community who he thought would enjoy his words. He’d hand over a copy of one of his books without a thought of losing profit.

Both Reflections of a Beret and The “After” Life touch on many themes including his deployment, PTSD, depression, the struggle with invisible war wounds, love, religion, politics, surviving suicide attempts, loyalty, and more. They’re poems about a veteran’s journey with wider implications about seeking, longing, and surviving.

These books contain a heartfelt collection of poems that are easily accessible, even for those who may not read much poetry.

Eugene M. Gagliano

Eugene Gagliano is the Wyoming Poet Laureate and I’ve had the pleasure of serving as a judge with him two years in a row for the Wyoming State Finals of Poetry Out Loud. We’re also in the Wyoming state poetry society, WyoPoets, together.

Gene is a retired elementary teacher and writes a lot of children’s and middle-grade fiction books, but he also writes poetry, as one might have noticed from his distinction as the Wyoming Poet Laureate.

It is so rare to find a poetry collection printed in hardback these days, yet Gene’s A Wyoming State of Mind is not only hardback, but it is filled with beautiful, full-color photographs as well.

In this collection, Gene takes special care with his descriptions of Wyoming’s landscape. There is a delicacy in his word selection in describing the wind, the land, the flora, and sunsets, which demonstrates a great love for Wyoming. My favorite poems include “Willing to Trade,” “Unexpected,” and “Plant Seeds.” I also really enjoyed the section on The Arts.

Marie Marchand

I had the pleasure of serving on the WyoPoets’ board with Marie Marchand and we even did a reading together with some of the other members of the board in 2019 to celebrate National Poetry Day.

There were many beautiful poems in Pink Sunset Luminaries, but my favorite two, the ones that lingered after finishing the book were “Crop Duster” and “The Broken Lily Lies.” It’s evident throughout the book that Marie took care over the selection of each word while making it appear effortless. What stood out above all else is Marie’s ability to find beauty in even painful things, in places where danger lurks, and in moments that could have been missed if not viewed with such a discernible eye. And perhaps my favorite lines from the collection came from “Cinder Block”:
“Poetry redeems.
The moment I stop believing this,
gone will be all my breaths….”

Nicholas Trandahl

Nicholas Trandahl is a poet who I first met in 2019, and who I now serve on the WyoPoets’ board with after I talked him into finishing out Marie Marchand’s term as Secretary when she moved last year. He’s very involved with the poetry community and is part of the Winter Goose Publishing family with me.

Similar to Eugene Gagliano, Nicholas captures the beauty of Wyoming and nature, in particular, in his poems.  In Think of Me, you’ll find the peace of the wilderness contained within the pages of his book without ever leaving home.

Poetry reveals so much about a person, things you might never discover about them in day-to-day conversations, so I enjoyed catching glimpses of what Nick craves in life through this collection, things like love, nature, poetry, and solitude and those things with which he struggles such as war, faith, and peace.

Nick’s poetry is very accessible, which is so important in breaking people’s expectations about poetry, making it enjoyable for people who left school thinking poetry wasn’t for them. That’s not to say avid poetry readers wouldn’t enjoy this as well, because there are certainly subtle and deeper meanings to pull from Nick’s work as well.

Tina Ann Forkner

I don’t think I’d ever read a women’s fiction book before 2020, and then I managed to read several this year. One of them was Waking Up Joy by Tina Ann Forkner. I happened to pick up Tina’s book a few years ago when talking to the owner of one of our used bookstores in town. He showed me a small section of books by local authors, and this one piqued my attention. I picked it up to read someday. Then in 2019, I had the pleasure of meeting Tina at a local author event at the library where authors from our community gathered and signed copies of their books.  I later recruited her to become Vice President of WyoPoets, which is a warning to other authors in town, if I know you, eventually I’ll try to get you to volunteer for WyoPoets. Just kidding, but that is a good way to let you know Tina also writes poetry.

The opening of this book was one of the most interesting and memorable beginnings I’ve read. A near-fatal accident assumed to be a suicide attempt by family members puts the protagonist, Joy, in a coma. The story is told by Joy as she listens to family members speculating what happened to her while they take her to the hospital.  The setup for the book was quite intriguing and eased me into the women’s fiction genre.

Linda M. Hasselstrom

Now Linda Hasselstrom is not an author I know personally, but I’ve heard her name several times over the past few years. She’s a poet from South Dakota and I think she may also have a home in Wyoming. She was the presenter at one of WyoPoets’ spring workshops a few years before I joined. I think I found this book at a big book sale and since I’d not yet had the opportunity to read her work, I snatched it up.

I found Linda’s poems in Bitter Creek Junction (Poetry of the American West) so deeply rooted in the West and in nature. She has this knack for embedding beautiful language and imagery into her poems and she captured a scene so well that I felt I was sitting next to her looking at the same sight that inspired the poem.

I enjoyed the entire book, but I remember in particular reaching the last poem of the third section of the collection, both also named Bitter Creek Junction, and was moved by the powerful piece that Linda notes was written for a battered woman.

Aimie K. Runyan

At the beginning of the pandemic, Tina Ann Forkner had a series of interviews she did on Facebook with local authors. Aimie Runyan, an author from Colorado, was one of those authors. I remember watching the interview and thinking Aimie’s historical fiction Across the Winding River sounded good, but it’s another genre that I don’t often read. As a nice surprise, Aimie did a giveaway of the book to someone who commented on the interview. As I had commented on every interview in Tina’s series, I left a comment on this one as well and won Aimie’s book. Honestly, books are the best thing to win ever!

The story begins with a woman named Beth who discovers a photo of her father when he was serving as a medic in WWII with his arms around a beautiful, young, pregnant woman who isn’t her mother. The novel follows three timelines that slowly interlace, and as some secrets are answered, others surface, keeping the reader’s interest as they’re pulled more fully into the story as it moves along.

This was a really great book with fantastic research and enough clues that make the reader feel clever for guessing at some connections while leaving other surprises hidden.

If you enjoyed this list, check out the 2019 Local Reads and find more great books.

Have you read any of these books? Or did you read any books by local authors from your area in 2020? Let me know your favorites in the comments.