The Write Question

"Okay to take pictures. Okay to sit on turtle. Okay to let your dog out. Okay to think your own thoughts (crackpot though they might well be)." These words greet all who visit the domain of 95-year-old Montana artist Bill Ohrmann. 

Kenneth Turan is a film critic for NPR and the LA Times. He's the author of Not To Be Missed: Fifty-Four Favorites From A Lifetime of Film.

In our Clip of the Week Turan explains why Hollywood movies seem to be losing some of their luster as they target ever larger audiences.

In 1810, John Jacob Astor sent out two advance parties to settle the wild, unclaimed western coast of North America. More than half of his men died violent deaths. The others survived starvation, madness, and greed to shape the destiny of a continent.

Listen as Peter Stark describes how the killing of a Blackfoot man by the Lewis and Clark expedition came back to haunt later fur trappers.

Pete Hurley is not the first person to have the idea that building his dream house in the country will bring him some kind of peace and happiness. But he may be the first to arrive in Montana with a World Series ring, a three-legged dog, and a thirst for self-destruction.

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell

St. Martin's Griffin, 2013

He woke quiet, ate potatoes and eggs
sitting alone on a cottonwood stump in the sun.

At noon he took a rifle, burlap bag, and handful
     of dried apples,
saddled the glass-eyed gelding, corralled
     the wayward mare,
whistled one long high note for the hound
     and was gone.

It was late the first summer, river running
     low, meadow grass tassels paled by wind.
I weeded the garden one faded row at a time
     while the goats lazed in barn shade
and the mare paced,
     nickering again and again.

During this program, Chérie Newman talks with Jo Deurbrouck about her nonfiction book, Anything Worth Doing: A true story of adventure, friendship and tragedy on the last of the West's great rivers, which won a 2012 National Outdoor Book Award.

Chérie Newman talks with Spokane author Sharma Shields about the stories in her collection, Favorite Monster, winner of an Autumn House Fiction Prize. Shields also reads two short passages from the book.

During this program, Susanna Sonnenberg talks about her new memoir, She Matters: A Life In Relationships, and the evolution of her friendships with women.

From the Publisher:

During this program, Chérie Newman talks with Spokane author Gregory Spatz about his collection of stories Half as Happy.

A grieving couple rents a desperate landlord’s house in an effort to recover lost intimacy. Twins are irrevocably separated by events both beyond and within their control. A nighttime prank and its gruesome aftermath forge human connections no one could have anticipated.