Abby Quillen

Reviews– The Garden of Dead Dreams

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The Garden of Dead Dreams By Abby Quillen Sidewalk Press: 2014 ISBN: 978-0-9899822-3-8 $13.95, 253 pp. Reviewed by Eduardo Rey Brummel In her novel’s opening lines, Abby Quillen tells us: Etta Lawrence wasn’t the only one who came to Roosevelt Lodge to become someone else. That’s why they’d all come. Forty-some years earlier, Vincent Buchanan …

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Want Peas With That?

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By Abby Quillen

I’d spied the “9 Ways to Raise Healthy Eaters” and “7 Ways to Get Your Kids to Eat Veggies” headlines on the covers of parenting magazines. So I was delighted that my infant son Ezra gobbled up squash, spinach, beets, carrots, green beans and cauliflower. He devoured soupy, squishy vegetable combinations that didn’t look appetizing even to me, and I love veggies. Perhaps we’d dodged the picky-eating issues and could get a head start on agonizing about the piercings and tattoos he’d get during his teenage years.
Then Ezra turned one.

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Breaking the Shackles of Time

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By Abby Quillen

As many know, my dad died last summer, and I’ve been compiling an anthology of his work. By November 1, Deeper into the Heart of the Rockies will be available on amazon.com and at select bookstores.

Occasionally, over the months of anthologizing, I’ve needed to access my dad’s email account to retrieve an address. It’s creepy to see press releases, pitches, newsletters and advertorials still piling up there, five or six of them a day with cheerful salutations – “Hello Mr. Quillen!” “Congratulations!” I haven’t read much of my dad’s actual correspondence, because it still feels like I’d be violating his privacy. But occasionally I’ll click on a message, and there’s my dad’s voice on the screen – unpolished, off-the-cuff, typos and all.

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Coming soon: A New Ed Quillen Anthology

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A daughter compiles a collection of her late father’s columns.

Popular Denver Post columnist Ed Quillen died suddenly last June, leaving behind a lifetime of writing, including thousands of weekly columns.

Abby Quillen, his daughter, is compiling his later columns into a sequel to his 1998 collection, Deep in the Heart of the Rockies. The new anthology will be entitled Deeper into the Heart of the Rockies, and the release date is scheduled for November 1. The book will include 120 of Quillen’s best columns published between 1999 and 2012.

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Anthologizing

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By Abby Quillen

My four-year-old son Ezra takes a bite of his toast. “What happens when we die?” he asks after he swallows.

I stare at my coffee. “I don’t know.”

“Grandpa knows,” Ezra says.

I nod. We’ve had this conversation quite a few times in the six months since my dad died. It’s like a skipping record, the same question again and again.

“Do you want to hear a story about Grandpa?” I ask.

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My Father is Joyful

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By Abby Quillen

My father named me Abigail, which means, “My father is joyful.”

“You were supposed to arrive for your mom’s birthday,” he’d often tell me. “Instead you waited for mine.” I was born ten days before my dad turned 27.

Growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, many of my friends had divorced parents. Some of my friends rarely saw their dads, who worked long hours or lived across town. My best friend didn’t know his father at all.

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Out of the Wild

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by Abby Quillen

I grew up in Central Colorado, and most weekends my family piled into a canary-yellow 1975 Chevy pickup and pitched down rutted-out, rock-strewn roads to hike, explore, or cross-country ski at places with names like Mosquito Pass, Missouri Gulch, and Cochetopa Creek.

By the time my sister and I were 18, we’d both sucked in the thin air on top of a 14,000 foot mountain, run across high-mountain meadows, visited too many ghost towns to list, waded barefoot in ice-cold streams, and spent countless nights sleeping with only a tent and a sleeping bag between our bodies and the hard, cold ground.

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