WPM Book Club
Every three months, we’ll meet up in person in Laramie and online over Zoom to chat about a book by a Wyoming author, or set in or about the Cowboy State.
You can find our July pick below - we’ll meet in September to discuss it - and our October pick, which we'll meet in December for.
The Song of the Blue Bottle Tree
Disguised by years in exile and a name she found on a gravestone, an unconventional young woman returns to her childhood home in rural 1967 Arkansas in this hauntingly visceral Southern tale of desperate choices, found family, folk magic and noisy ghosts.
Check it out on Goodreads
About the author
India was born in southwestern Arkansas more than a century after her ancestors settled there in the 1830s. She became a Border Patrol Brat at the age of three and spent her childhood and adolescence following her father’s law enforcement career across Texas and California. Upon graduating from college, she took to heart the advice, “If you can’t stand the heat and humidity, get out of the South,” and relocated to Wyoming where she’s spent nearly five decades. She has mapped prairie dog towns, located raptor nests, enumerated frogs, trolled rivers in search of Colorado cutthroat trout, performed pre-mining vegetative surveys, studied rattlesnakes, and worked as a wildlife museum naturalist. She spent ten years as a first responder for the sheriff’s office’s victim response unit and several decades teaching subjects that ranged from row crop technology to Middle Eastern dance.
Read more about India Hayford on her website
How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder
Summer, 1986. The Creel sisters, Georgie Ayyar and Agatha Krishna, welcome their aunt, uncle and young cousin—newly arrived from India—into their house in rural Wyoming where they’ll all live together. Because this is what families do. That is, until the sisters decide that it’s time for their uncle to die.
According to Georgie, the British are to blame. And to understand why, you need to hear her story. She details the violence hiding in their house and history, her once-unshakeable bond with Agatha Krishna, and her understanding of herself as an Indian-American in the heart of the West. Her account is, at every turn, cheeky, unflinching, and infectiously inflected with the trappings of teendom, including the magazine quizzes that help her make sense of her life. At its heart, the tale she weaves is:
a) a vivid portrait of an extended family
b) a moving story of sisterhood
c) a playful ode to the 80s
d) a murder mystery (of sorts)
e) an unexpected and unwaveringly powerful meditation on history and language, trauma and healing, and the meaning of independence
Or maybe it’s really:
f) all of the above.
Check it out on Goodreads
About the author
Nina McConigley is the author of the story collection Cowboys and East Indians, which was the winner of the PEN/Open Book Award and the High Plains Book Award. She has received grants and fellowships from the NEA, the Radcliffe Institute, Bread Loaf, Vermont Studio Center, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She was a recipient of the Wyoming Arts Council’s Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award and a finalist for a National Magazine Award for her columns in High Country News. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, Orion, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Salon, among other outlets. Born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming, she now lives in Colorado and teaches at Colorado State University.
Read more about Nina McConigley on her website