Summer greetings to everyone!

I’m very happy to tell you all that as of June 12, 2007 The Abortionist’s Daughter will be out in paperback (Vintage).  This should come as good news for book groups!  (Of course, for those who read it in hardcover, many thanks, books being so expensive these days.)  Whether you’re in a group or not, I hope you’ll choose my novel for a page-turner on the beach, in the mountains, or right there on your back deck.

(Book groups in Denver, take note:  if you’re interested in having me visit your group when you discuss my book, I’d be thrilled and honored to come – I’ve already visited a number of groups in the area and love meeting my readers!)

Spring brought the launch of The Abortionist’s Daughter in France, Germany, Portugal, Denmark, and Sweden.  Italy, Poland, and Latvia are soon to come.  What I find fascinating is that each foreign publisher has its own cover art, making for a wide variety of artistic interpretations.  I’ll be posting a collection of these covers on the web site soon.

If I have one wish right now, it’s that The Abortionist’s Daughter will reach as wide an audience here in the US as it did last summer and fall in the UK.  Thanks to the book’s promotion on The Richard and Judy show in England, PanMacmillan sold over 200,000 copies, which in turn prompted them to publish my third novel, Crazy As Chocolate, in paperback.  (A new paperback version of Crazy, by the way, was reissued here in the US this March by MacAdam/Cage, and is available online – and maybe at your local independent bookstore.)

In April my Portuguese publisher, Guerra & Paz, brought me to Lisbon for its launch of The Abortionist’s Daughter in Portuguese.  Many thanks to Manuel Fonseca and his staff for their warm welcome and accommodations in a stunningly beautiful city.  Portuguese voters recently passed a referendum legalizing first term abortions – meaning that Portuguese women no longer have to travel to Spain, or farther, for the procedure.  As a result the press in Lisbon was very interested in the book.  I wouldn’t mind living in Lisbon someday … if I can learn Portuguese (hint:  it’s NOT just like speaking French under the influence of a bottle of wine). 

Finally, Just Media has optioned the film rights and is starting to develop its ideas for the book.  Just Media is a very classy independent film company out of Denver who has made such documentaries as Chiefs, about the high school basketball team on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.   More as it happens on that front.

As for my writing days, I’m deep in the Grand Canyon, at least in my mind, as I continue work on my new novel.  The great thing about a journey story is there’s a beginning and an end – and a huge amount of latitude for what happens in between.  I remember John Gardner at Bread Loaf saying that there were basically only two stories out there:  A Guy Goes on a Journey, and A Stranger Comes to Visit.   No question here, which category my book falls into.  I hope to be finished with a draft next fall; it will be published by Knopf.

Thanks once more for checking in.  I hope you all enjoy your summer, and leave lots of time for reading!

Warmest wishes,

September 2005

Day One

One boat, one river

100 degrees and still freezing

The last day

Evening

The Inner Gorge

Sacred Datura

Vishnu

Prologue

Down in the heart of the canyon, in the bone-baking heat, they put their lives on hold.

Most of the travelers had never experienced anything quite like it. Peter Kramer, whose year in Central America included a month-long stay in an unairconditioned hospital sweating out a fever of 104, found it impossible to suck down more than short little gasps of hot air, which left him constantly breathless. Evelyn Burns, professor of biology at Georgetown University, spent the first day lecturing everyone about the tolerability of dry heat (105 in the desert being nothing compared to 90 in DC, she claimed), then vomited five minutes into the first windstorm. Dr. and Mrs. Lloyd Frankel, river veterans, lay on their sleeping mats in stunned oblivion to the velvety orange wasps that scurried in blind circles on the hot sand between them. And Amy van Doren, who unbeknownst to her mother had weighed in at 237 pounds the night before the trip, rigorously shook the bottle of hot sauce over everything on her plate, for she knew that chile peppers would make you sweat, which in turn would not only cool her off but might enable her to lose a few pounds.

JT, the head guide, had seen it all before. This being his one hundred and twenty-fifth trip down the Colorado River, he’d witnessed time and time again the universal zombie-like walk of his guests at the end of the day when they staggered up the beach in search of a campsite. He called it the Death Walk and always reminded his fellow guides not to expect much volunteer help in the first few days of any trip as guests acclimated to the sauna-like conditions of Marble Canyon. It was simply a matter of physiology: the human body wasn’t designed to go from a comfortable air-conditioned existence to the prehistoric heat of canyon life in a matter of hours, or even days. When his heat-stomped campers marveled at his energy levels in one hundred degree heat, he kept at what he was doing and quirked his one-sided smile and said, “You’ll adjust.”

JT was a man of few words.

At night it was so hot you slept without a blanket, or even a sheet, for well past midnight the winds continued to fan the heat off the sun-baked canyon walls. In early morning, as people shook sand from their clothes and answered the moan of the conch shell (indicating coffee was ready), the air could be relatively temperate, and you’d be fine in a just your bathing suit. But as soon as the sun’s rays came barreling over the canyon walls, as soon as the mid-morning blanket of heat fell upon them, out came the long-sleeved cotton shirts, which were dunked into the river and then worn, soaking wet and deliciously cold, against their bare skin.

During the midday furnace, when even the guides crawled into whatever shade they could find and collectively dreamt of that first brisk morning in October when you could see your breath, JT himself would confront the heat head on. Alone in his raft, he would kneel against the gunwales with his arms draped over the sides, staring in a kind of rapt hypnosis at the sheer walls across the river. Something in the flat midday light, he’d found, caused them to eventually start floating upstream, a mirage of the mind until he blinked and then they would snap back into place until the next daze sent them floating upstream again. It was a game he played, a game he’d never reveal to anyone lest they think him soft, or spiritual, or just plain wacky.

But in fact he was all three. JT Maroney’s heart was in those walls, and had been since his first trip twenty-five years ago. It was in the polished maroon cliffs of Marble Canyon, the dusty tan layers of Coconino sandstone; it was embedded forever in the shimmering black walls of the Inner Gorge. It was in the scorpions and the velvet wasps and the stinging red ants that sent you running for a vial of ammonia; it was in the feathery tamarisk trees and the canyon wrens’ falling notes and the black-winged California condor he always spotted without fail as they passed under Navajo Bridge the first day of every trip. It was in the tug of the water around his ankle as he splashed about, loading his raft; it was in the sun-lit droplets that danced above the roar of big water below.

Each trip changed him a little. This trip would change him a lot, to say the least. It would change everyone, in ways no one could have anticipated.

But on the Fourth of July, at the beginning of JT’s one hundred and twenty-fifth trip down the river, it wasn’t about change. It was about drinking beer, and eating pie, and dreaming up new ways to fly the stars and stripes over the grandest river in the west.