Letter from Mike Hartmann
Literature – February 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
My father is looking for a book. He can’t remember the title or author, but it’s a mystery novel written sometime in the 1970s about cloud-seeding in the San Luis Valley. It involves a rancher from Colorado Springs who moves to Monte Vista, and does part-time work as a private investigator. The plot revolves around his investigation of cloud-seeding.
Review by Lynda La Rocca
Literature – January 2008 – Colorado Central Magazine
I have sung the praises of Gregory Maguire before (for proof, see the December 2004 issue of Colorado Central), and now I’m at it again. The author of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West revisits Oz in Son of a Witch, another enchanting, wildly imaginative fable that, like its predecessor, employs humor, drama, horror, and scathing political satire to examine the nature of good and evil.
Brief by Central Staff
Literature – September 2007 – Colorado Central Magazine
If you’re a writer, you might want to enter the Writers Contest at the Seventh Annual Readers Festival, scheduled for October 20 at Mesa State College in Grand Junction.
Review by Lynda La Rocca
Literature – January 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
I’M PROBABLY THE LAST PERSON in the world to catch on to the fact that Willa Cather was an incredible writer. A friend who has never traveled outside New England has urged me for years to read Cather’s works. She rhapsodizes over Cather’s glorious depictions of the great American prairie during its transition from a magnificent ocean of grass into a platted, plowed, and planted landscape of farm communities built on the backs of bewildered yet hopeful immigrants. And now I understand why my friend feels this way.
Review by Lynda La Rocca
Literature – February 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
For most of the past year, I was on a fantasy fiction kick. Unfortunately, the books I randomly selected were, for the most part, formulaic and forgettable, neither enchanting nor transporting me to fantastic realms filled with magic and wonder.
Finally, I decided to revisit the master, so I plunged again into J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy which, along with Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, may be the finest collection of fantasy fiction ever written.
Brief by Central Staff
Literature – April 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
Poetic Opportunities
April is National Poetry Month (don’t ask us who makes such declarations, because if we knew, we’d ask for a “National Support Your Small Regional Monthly Magazine Month”), and so the Book Mine in Leadville is sponsoring a poetry contest.
Brief by Central Staff
Literature – April 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
Just in case you’ve written a one-act play, now there’s a chance to see it staged.
The Crystal Mountain Center for the Performing Arts in Westcliffe is holding its third annual one-act play competition for Colorado playwrights.
Five plays will be selected for recognition, and two will receive prizes of $200 each, along with a staged reading at the Jones Theatre in Westcliffe next summer.
Column by Hal Walter
Literature – March 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
IF YOU WERE TO TAKE an analytical look at the businesses in Westcliffe and try to make some sense out of the population, you might surmise a populace of heavy-drinking real-estate investors who buy a lot of tools, are wired on coffee and subsist on pizza, but do not eat fresh vegetables or read books.
Essay by Martha Quillen
Literature – January 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
THE ASSIGNMENT — if I chose to accept it — was to make a list of some of my favorite books (including, of course, only books currently in print and readily available in 2000). That sounds easy, doesn’t it? Or at least it certainly didn’t sound like a mission impossible. But when I tried to come up with some titles, I found myself faltering.
Letter from Michael Dzubinski
Literature – February 1995 – Colorado Central Magazine
In your review of Mysterious Places of the West in January’s issue of Colorado Central, you called The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield a “fabrication” that stays on the ~non-fiction bestseller lists for æons.”