Creative Writing

How to pen that novel: ‘Put your heart’s blood on the page’

Anonymous — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:28:50 +0000

How to pen that novel: ‘Put your heart’s blood on the page’ Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 12/21/2023 - 17:28

Maxwell Garby

Award-winning author and ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Professor Stephen Graham Jones shares advice with writers who are reflecting on their 50,000 words from National Novel Writing Month

That sigh you’re hearing—and have been hearing for more than two weeks—is relief. For the hundreds of thousands of writers worldwide who participated in National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for short), now is the time to sit back, take a deep breath and reflect on what’s been accomplished.

When NaNoWriMo began in 1999, the goal for participants was simple: write 50,000 words of a novel during the 30 days of November. NaNoWriMo founder Chris Baty declared, “Write first! Ask questions later!”

So, in the weeks since NaNoWriMo ended, participating writers have been doing just that: Do I have something here? Is this any good? Did I love doing it? What did I gain from writing that many words in that many days?

Stephen Graham Jones is the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Ivena Baldwin Professor of English and a college professor of distinction.

These are questions that Stephen Graham Jones knows well. The critically acclaimed author of more than 20 novels and short story collections, including the Ray Bradbury Prize-winning The Only Good Indians, Jones has been publishing since 2000 but writing for most of his life. He also is the University of Colorado Boulder Ivena Baldwin Professor of English and a college professor of distinction.

He recently spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about what a writer can gain from participating in something like NaNoWriMo and the enduring joy of forming words into stories.

Question: Have you ever participated in National Novel Writing Month?

Jones: No, but I used to do the three-day novel contest back in the early 2000s, which was a good time. You start at midnight on the Friday of Labor Day weekend and then you write until Monday at midnight. So, 72 hours to write a novel. That was a pretty good time; actually, I got one of those published, called The Long Trial of NolandDugatti.

Question: What were some of the challenges you faced with that writing challenge?

Jones: The first 72-hour novel I wrote wasn’t good because I thought it was all about staying awake as long as I could. What I learned the next time I did the challenge was that it’s not about trying to stay awake as long as I can, it’s about working in little chunks of about 90 minutes at a time. Then go do something else and come back and work another 90 (minutes). That suits the way I write a whole lot better.

I generally don't try to hit these challenges head on. Instead, I ride my bike or go to a movie, or just go do something else for an hour or two. Let it cook in the back of my head and when I come back, it's a lot easier. You could sit there and bang your head against the screen, trying to figure out this story, or line, but the trick with fiction is you can't muscle stuff onto the page.

Question: Do you think that people should spend a lot of time preparing beforehand, or do you think they should embrace the spontaneous side?

Jones: They should do whatever works for them; all writers are different. For me, it's always spontaneous. One of the rules of the three-day writing contest was you can't do any planning, any outlining, anything at all before midnight on Friday. So, I would not let myself think of anything until midnight on Friday, and then I just hit the ground running and see what's going to happen.

With the novels I write today, I don't plan them at all, and I try not to do research either until I have to. I like to stumble into things and feel my way through.

Jones' novel The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti originated from a three-day writing challenge

Question: Regarding NaNoWriMo, some people might see the goal of writing 50,000 words as a daunting task. How feasible do you think that is for aspiring writers?

Jones: Just getting words down on the page, that's no problem at all. That's like three or four pages a day. That's nothing, man. The trick with writing a novel quickly isn't crossing the distance, the length, the page count. Instead, the difficult part is telling either a good story or a complete story. Really, 50,000 words isn't enough to tell a novel. You've got to write a few wrong before you figure out how to write one right.

When people are having trouble writing the next word, the next sentence and next paragraph, the next chapter, it's rarely because they don't know what is supposed to happen or what would be good for the story. We can throw anything against the wall and make it stick, it’s just that their standards are too high.

They feel all of the critics looking over their shoulder, they feel their peers looking over their shoulder. They feel history looking over their shoulder, and when you have all these eyes on your cursor, it's very hard to push that cursor to the right. So, just lower your standards and say, ‘This doesn't count, I'm just doing this for fun, I'm just doing this for me, it’s just a long joke that I'm telling.’ The more you lower your standards, the more words you can get on the page and there will be some dumb scenes and some awkward lines in there, but you can always go back and fix stuff. It's more important to get stuff on the page.

Question: How rough should this first draft be?

Jones: The trick with me and writing is, anything I can do to turn my brain off, anything I can do to stop thinking, that’s what’s good. I don't think thinking is remotely good for writing. Thinking is good for revising, but you use your heart on the first draft. You use your mind on the revision.

My own rough drafts are all grammatically correct, but variables such as the names of people and places are all in the air because I don't know how the story is going to fall out. A lot of times, I just put placeholders in. Sometimes I write a scene, and I know that it's probably going to get cut, but I'll leave it in because it kind of exerts a fun gravity in the rest of the story while I'm writing it, and I can always delete it later. The most fun part about revision is just going through and deleting thousands and thousands of words.

Question: What might be some benefits that writers can gain by participating in something like NaNoWriMo?

Jones: Discipline. Just choosing writing, that's the important part. That's the hardest part about being a writer, I think, is choosing writing over going to the bar, going to the football game or doing the 10,000 other things that the world and life wants you to do.

The only things more important than writing to me are family and health. After that, everything else can fall away as far as I'm concerned, and fiction is the only thing that matters—just getting the right feeling, the right thoughts, down on the page.

Question: Would you say that people should just be writing for themselves?

Jones: They shouldn't write for the critics. People have different things that get them moving. (Writer) Joe Lansdale says, ‘Write as if everyone you know is dead,’ which I think is a pretty good policy.

I also think writing for the person you consider your worst enemy is a good tactic because then it allows you to never fall below a certain quality level, because if you do, that person you consider your enemy can make fun of you.

You use your heart on the first draft. You use your mind on the revision.”

If you start writing to please too many people at once, you're going to fail, because you can't please everybody at all. I do think the first person you have to please is yourself. I write a lot of horror, and the first person I have to scare is myself, and if I can scare myself, then maybe I have a chance of scaring other people.

Question: When writing novels now, what are you looking to learn from that experience?

Jones: I'm looking for an idea that is broken at the level of conception, an idea that just seems really stupid—and that's the only novel I want to write. I want to write the ones that have a lot of red flags telling me I shouldn’t write this novel. I don't want to write novels I know I can write.

To me, that’s boring and isn’t any fun. I want to be in unfamiliar territory, new narrative terrain. I want to write from the angle of characters I don't necessarily know and whom I must learn about, in the world I don't know about and maybe with a form I'm not familiar with. There are so many challenges and stupid ideas, and if I can make a stupid idea have real people and real feelings in it, then I consider that a win. It’s good to feel like you’re writing against something.

Question: Do you think the writing process is an effective way to start a conversation about sensitive topics?

Jones: Art doesn't provide answers, but art can ask questions and provoke discussion. I think that if there is a purpose for art, that's probably it. Some people say it's to encode culture and pass it on down to the next generations and preserve it, but I don't think that's its purpose. I think it's more of a side effect. That's why Plato didn't want any poets in his republic, because they stir things up, they ask questions. That's what we're supposed to do.

Horror specifically, as far as society is concerned, functions as a funhouse mirror that distorts our anxieties of the time back at us, partially so we can process them. I guess this can be seen as some form of therapy, but largely just so we can see them and be aware of them and not have somebody preaching or lecturing to us about this and that. We're screaming, we're laughing, we're having fun, and our defenses are down, and that’s when we can accidentally think of something that we need to be talking about with the world.

Question: Do you often want to provoke discussion through your work?

Jones: Yeah, we all have our axes to grind. Since fiction is my art, it’s what I always have my fingers in, and that's where I'm going to find space to grind my axes with how people are treated here or there, or what’s the world, or how the politics are, what's happening in the environment, all that stuff, it's going to find its way onto the page, whether I want it to or not.

I don't go in with a checklist if I want to address this, this and this, but I've got all this stuff inside me and once I take the cap off the pen, it just starts flowing through there.

Jones' 2020 novel The Only Good Indians won the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction.

Question: So, you're always just trying to push yourself and put yourself out of your comfort zone?

Jones: I am, yeah, for sure. My comfort zone is anything that allows me to talk about cars or trucks, maybe boots and hunting, too. Right now, I'm writing a novel set in the 19th century, so I'm denying myself any vehicles at all, which is kind of fun.

Question: Some people might struggle to write from a perspective that isn’t theirs. Do you have any holdups when writing from a perspective that isn't yours?

Jones: I don’t know about hold up, but I definitely have my hesitations. Zadie Smith says that today's world is a stay-in-your-own-lane world, and we get our wrist slapped if we step over into another identity. And that's good, because oftentimes when we do step into another lane, or into another identity—be it cultural, gender, sexual, political, etc.—oftentimes, we're silencing the people who would have been speaking from that actual authentic place. That's the danger of it for sure.

So, I think any time that you are going to cross lanes like that, you need to interrogate yourself and ask, ‘Why am I doing this? Am I doing it because it's exotic? Am I doing it because I feel like I have to have a representative of every culture in my book?’ And those are both stupid reasons.

If you're doing it because that's the only way it'll work, and if you’re doing the necessary footwork to get something close to authenticity, then maybe you can do it.

I've written a few books from a high school girl’s point of view, and I don't know what it's like to be a high school girl, so I would give it to friends who had been high school girls and ask them, ‘What's up with this?’

I think it's unfair to ask people, ‘Is this an accurate representation?’ That puts too much pressure on them, but you can ask them, ‘Where am I being stupid? What am I doing wrong?’ And if enough people tell you this, this, that and that is wrong, then that kind of steers you back onto a less terrible path.

There's just so much stuff that I'll never know about, and you can’t just do a Google search, which won't tell you a lot. What you need to do, really, is go read a first-person memoir from somebody in that moment and culture, and then you can get a sense of what's going on.

You'll never get a sense enough to be a participant of that culture, probably, but possibly you can write in an authentic way from approximately that position.

Question: Any final advice to budding or aspiring writers?

Jones: Just be aware that in a longer work like a novel, you're probably going to end up cutting the first eight or 10% of the book once you get to the revision stage. It takes you a while in a novel to figure out what you're doing, so you kind of warming up for a while and then you find that starting point.

And once you get to the revision stage, you can’t be afraid to lose those first 2,500 words. The first part of a novel, you read that over and over. The first 10% of your novel, you might read that 500 times. The next 10% of the novel, you might read that 300 times, and it gets less and less as you go further and further, just because you can't sit down at the computer and read 80 pages before you start on page 81. So, the result of that is that the opening of novels always get really polished to the point where everything gleams—the rhythm, the word choice, the syntax, everything is perfect.

But if you're aware that you're going to have to cut probably the first eight or 10%, never be afraid that you're going to run out of juice. There’s always going to be more ideas. There are always going to be more words. Don't be afraid to just delete, delete, delete.

Don't be afraid to just go for it, just bleed on the page, put your heart's blood on the page and try to make some pretty shapes in it, that someone else might recognize.

Did you enjoy this article? Subcribe to our newsletter. Passionate about English? Show your support.

Award-winning author and ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Professor Stephen Graham Jones shares advice with writers who are reflecting on their 50,000 words from National Novel Writing Month.

Traditional

White

Why Disneyland on the mountain never happened

Anonymous — Mon, 16 Oct 2023 18:26:47 +0000

Why Disneyland on the mountain never happened Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/16/2023 - 12:26

Bradley Worrell

CU alum and his wife write book about the little-known story of Disney’s plan build a mountain ski resort in California

Celebrating its 100th anniversary today, The Walt Disney Co. is an entertainment powerhouse, known for its movie studios, its retail stores, its cruise ship line and most widely for its theme parks.

One chapter in the Disney story is much less commonly known today, however. Walt Disney once planned to create a premiere ski resort in Mineral King valley in central California. When Disney announced his plans to great fanfare in 1965, the project had the backing of the state’s powerful political and business establishment, skiers and, initially, even the Sierra Club.

And yet, it was not to be.

University of Colorado Boulder alumnus Greg Glasgow (MEngl’99) first heard about the ill-fated ski resort in 2018, when he and his wife, Kathryn Mayer, were touring the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco. The ski project warranted a brief mention on a big display showing the major events in Disney’s life.

Walt Disney’s plans in the 1960s to build a premiere ski resort in Mineral King valley in Central California is a little known chapter in the company’s 100-year history. The ill-fated ski resort is the subject of a new book, Disneyland on the Mountain, by CU alum Greg Glasgow and his wife, Kathryn Mayer.

Things might have ended there, with a brief acknowledgement, before moving on—except that Glasgow and Mayer noticed that Willy Schaeffler, a renowned Olympic ski coach who also served as head ski coach for the University of Denver, was hired by Walt Disney to help develop the ski village and mountain resort. The couple were very familiar with Schaeffler, as they both had worked in communications for the University of Denver.

“So, that’s a name (Schaeffler) that we immediately recognized, and it got us interested in looking into things,” says Glasgow, who, along with Mayer, is a veteran journalist.

“And then we discovered this whole environmental battle that went along with (the ski resort), and the Supreme Court case that happened, and we couldn’t believe the story had never been fully told before.”

The result of the couple’s multi-pronged efforts—involving about five years of research, interviewing sources and writing—culminated in the recent release of their first book, Disneyland on the Mountain: Walt, the Environmentalists, and the Ski Resort That Never Was.

Recently, Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine spoke with Glasgow about his book, discussing what he discovered in his research and how the book came together. His answers have been lightly edited and condensed for space.

Question: If you would, set the stage for what prompted Walt Disney to consider opening a ski resort. And, this wasn’t just going to be any ski resort, correct?

Glasgow: Disney was the chairman of pageantry at the 1960 Winter Olympics, which were held in California, and he helped create the modern opening ceremonies and closing ceremonies. Things like working on entertainment for the athletes, bringing up a lot of celebrities from Hollywood and things like that.

Walt was already a skier at the time, and he really liked the sport. Disneyland had just opened, and I think Walt’s mind was already working on: What can I do next? How can I take the lessons of Disneyland in terms of entertaining large groups of people in this kind of live, experiential setting, mixed with what happened at the Olympics, plus his love of the sport.

And then meeting Willy Schaeffler, whom Walt met at the Winter Olympics in 1960, where Willy designed all of the downhill courses—I think all of those things together got his wheels turning and thinking (a ski resort) would be his next big thing to do. …

Walt made a point early on of saying, ‘This is not going to be an amusement park; it’s not going to be Disneyland.’ But being Disney, they did think, ‘We need some sort of entertainment that people are used to from the company.’ So, they created this band of musical bears that they said came out of the mountains and learned how to play instruments and sing, and they would entertain guests.

And that, of course, later became the Country Bear Jamboree that people probably know from the Disney parks, but that started off as an attraction developed for Mineral King.

Question: When Disney announces he’s won a concession with the U.S. Forest Service to develop Mineral King as a ski resort, the news is received very positively by the state’s business and political interests. When did things start to change?

Glasgow: A lot of our research came out of newspaper stories from the time—this was the end of 1965 when it was announced—and there was a lot of positivity and excitement. Governor (Pat) Brown was very much behind it. The photo on our book cover was from a press conference in 1966, where he announced the state was working with the federal government to expand the road into the area. All of the politicians were for it, all of the economic boosters and all of the business owners and skiers.

CU alum Greg Glasgow and his wife, Kathryn Mayer, both veteran journalists, are the authors of a recent book about Walt Disney’s ill-fated plans in the 1960s to build a ski resort in central California.

There were a small group of environmentalists who were worried about it, but really, when things were first announced, the overall sentiment was very positive. …

It was interesting to chart the course of things. So, the Forest Service put this area up for a bid for a long-term lease, and Walt was one of six different companies that bid to develop the area, and Walt won the bid.

And then, unfortunately, Walt died just a year after Disney won the bid, and that’s when the momentum started to shift a bit. Disney (company) soldiers on with the project, and they made a point of saying, ‘We want to fulfill this project for him; in his honor, we want to make this project happen.’ …

Once the Sierra Club filed its first lawsuit against the project, which happened in the summer of 1969, I think that was really the death knell in terms of it happening. The following April was the first Earth Day, and Disney’s timing was bad in that they encounter a growing environmental movement and this sentiment of, ‘We don’t want every beautiful area in the country to be developed.’

So, you see a shift in the newspaper coverage (from pro-development to anti-development) … and then a lot of politicians from the other side got involved and started drafting these measures to save Mineral King or put the area in Sequoia National Park.

[Editor’s note: An extended court battle over Mineral King made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, with a ruling that allowed the Forest Service to continue with its plan to issue a long-term lease for the area’s development. However, in 1978, Congress passed an omnibus bill that put Mineral King into Sequoia National Park and protect it from development.]

Question: Whom did you speak with for your book?

Glasgow: We were able to connect with Michael McCloskey, who was the head of the Sierra Club at the time this is all going down, and he still has a lot of great memories and was able to walk us through a lot of what was happening at the time and how it fit into the bigger picture of what that organization was all about.

Authors Greg Glasgow and Kathryn Mayer will discuss and sign their new book, "Disneyland on the Mountain," at 6:30 p.m. Thursday at Boulder Book Store, 1107 Pearl Street in Boulder.

We also talked to a great woman named Jean Koch, who was a Mineral King cabin owner. She was one of about 60 people who had these summer cabins at Mineral King and she was, of course, very concerned about what this (ski resort) project was going to mean for that cabin community. …

She unfortunately passed away back in April of this year, at age 100. Even so, when we spoke with her, her memories were really sharp and she was able to bring to life her passion for that area and her great memories.

We talked to three or four people on the Disney side, former employees who were involved with the project or in some cases, children of people who were involved with it.

Question: Did corporate Disney have any reaction when you asked them for contacts or resources and let them know you were planning on writing a book about Mineral King?

Glasgow: We really just reached out to Disney about artwork, mainly to say we’d love to use some of their concept drawings and different photos they had of and around the project. We went back and forth with them for a while, and they were slow to respond. This was during COVID and their archive was closed. …

Mineral King is not some deep, dark secret they have. As we talk about in the book, they even have a few winking references to it in some of their other projects and movies they’ve done. There is an animated Christmas special where Mickey and Donald and Goofy go up to Mineral King to go skiing. …

For our part, we certainly don’t paint Disney as any kind of villain in the book. We wanted to be fair to both sides.

Question: Was there anything you learned during your research and speaking with sources that surprised you?

Glasgow: One thing we weren’t aware of is that Walt, really all of his life, had been this big nature lover and conservationist. He did this whole line of wildlife documentaries in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s called the True Life Adventures series, which were wildlife documentaries that people would see in the theaters or on his Sunday night show, that kind of helped introduce the whole world of nature and animals to people.

That was really a big part of him. He had won a lot of awards from different groups, including the Sierra Club, which actually gave him an honorary lifetime membership at one point. …

Another interesting thing we talked about in the book was that the Sierra Club, back in the 1940s, had actually recommended Mineral King as a good area to build a ski resort. They had opposed development in another area, so they went out looking for alternatives that they could present, and they came across this area (Mineral King) and said, ‘This area looks great for skiing.’

So, there was this weird connection where, at one point, they said, ‘This is a great area for development’ and then (later) they’re saying, ‘Don’t develop it.’

That was one of the battles within the Sierra Club itself, with some of the older members saying, ‘Well, gee, we already said this was OK, now we’re going back on our word and saying it’s not.’

Question: You received your undergraduate degree in journalism from Colorado State University, and then earned a master’s degree from ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��. Do you feel like that education helped prepare you to write this book?

Glasgow: The best thing about the CU creative writing program is that you got to immerse yourself in writing because of the assignments, and you’re with a bunch of really talented writers that keep setting the bar higher and higher while you’re honing your craft.

There were a lot of fiction classes. But what was cool about our book is, we tried to use a lot of characters and storytelling, so a lot of the fiction techniques that I worked on during my grad school career really came to bear on this project.

Did you enjoy this article? Subcribe to our newsletter. Passionate about English? Show your support.

CU alum and his wife write book about the little-known story of Disney’s plan build a mountain ski resort in California.

Traditional

White

Author drops Southern Gothic into California

Anonymous — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 23:36:35 +0000

Author drops Southern Gothic into California Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/24/2019 - 17:36

Clay Bonnyman Evans

Everything he’s done, from serving as a Marine to working at the former Joder Arabian Horse Ranch in Boulder, has fed his career, says Christopher David Rosales

Christopher David Rosales hadn’t yet seen 25 years of life when he enrolled in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing in 2007. But he’d already accumulated more life experience than many people twice or even three times his age.

Christopher David Rosales. Photo by J. Michael Martinez.

He grew up in Paramount, California, a largely Latino city in the South Central area of Los Angeles, where his family had lived for generations.

At 3 a.m. on the day following his graduation from high school, Rosales boarded a bus for boot camp with the U.S. Marine Corps, graduating just 10 days before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

He had performed his own songs at L.A.’s famous Whisky a Go Go club on Sunset Boulevard, following in the footsteps of such legendary acts as The Doors, Led Zeppelin and Guns N’ Roses.

He’d worked in wildfire prevention in northern Arizona.

“Son, you are going to get all the life experience life can hand you, all the experience you need,” Rosales (MFAEngl’10) recalls his undergraduate mentor, Rafael Zapeda, at California State University, Long Beach, telling him, “If you are going to be a writer, that’s your work, so write.”

If you are going to be a writer, that’s your work, so write.”
—Advice from Rosales' mentor

More than a decade on, Rosales has found success in both writing and academia, and recently published his new book “Word is Bone.” His resume now includes three consecutive Thompson Writing Awards from the Center of the American West; three published novels; a PhD in creative writing from the University of Denver; a stint as the Writing Fellow at the National Archives at Philadelphia; and a position on the writing faculty at Boulder’s Naropa University.

Everything he’s done—from serving as a Marine to working at the former Joder Arabian Horse Ranch in Boulder—has fed his career, Rosales says.

“I’m still part musician, and when I talk to students I sometimes revert back to a musical analogy,” says Rosales, 36. “I tell them to learn all the riffs you can, learn jazz, learn everything. Break the rules, get out of the box, and then come back to the things you love.”

His own literary roots go back to childhood, when, his father would retell—verbatim, from memory—stories from the Amber novels of the late science-fiction and fantasy writer Roger Zelazny. He loved reading so much as a boy that his parents had to physically drag him out from beneath the covers, where he was reading with a flashlight, to go to school in the morning. He wrote his first novel, a fantasy, in fourth grade.

“I disappeared into these other worlds,” he says.

He published his first short story in 2007, following it up with dozens more stories, essays and book reviews. In 2015 he published his first novel, “Silence the Bird, Silence the Keeper,” a mélange of magic realism and dystopian fiction set in a violent, gritty 1990s L.A. His second novel, “Gods on the Lam” (2016), was another genre-busting work, set in the firefighting world he’d come to know while working in northern Arizona.

His new novel, “Word is Bone,” published in February, tells the story of an ex-con named June’s return to his native L.A. to bury his father in 1999.

“It’s a crime story, though I see a lot of (Cormac) McCarthy, Faulkner and (Flannery) O’Connor in it,” Rosales says. “I really wanted to take Southern Gothic and drop it into Southern California.”

Even as it flirts with surrealism, the novel has been praised for its vividly realistic depiction of a time and place unfamiliar to most Americans.

“If all stories are really either about someone leaving town or someone getting to town, then ‘Word is Bone’ is, pretty much, all stories,” says Stephen Graham Jones, author and professor of English at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��, “but in a way that's so particular to southern California and the nineties that you'll find yourself looking down at your own feet, expecting them to be wrapped in June's cowboy boots.”

For Rosales, telling stories set in the city where he grew up is a way of giving back.

“I see it as giving a voice to a community that doesn’t necessarily get heard,” he says.

Rosales ticks off an impressively eclectic list of influences, from Zelazny to O’Connor, Thomas McGuane, Raymond Carver and Toni Morrison. He is now at work on a new novel, which he describes as a modern retelling of Graham Greene’s thriller, “The Third Man,” set on the U.S.-Mexico border rather than Venice, Italy.

“It’s about trying to shift our country’s relationship to Mexico,” he says. “It’s a thriller, but I’m always going to trick you. It’s not just about being thrilled, but about being real.”

Everything he’s done, from serving as a Marine to working at the former Joder Arabian Horse Ranch in Boulder, has fed his career, says alumnus Christopher David Rosales.

Traditional

White

Creative Writing

How to pen that novel: ‘Put your heart’s blood on the page’

Related Articles

Why Disneyland on the mountain never happened

Related Articles

Author drops Southern Gothic into California

Everything he’s done, from serving as a Marine to working at the former Joder Arabian Horse Ranch in Boulder, has fed his career, says Christopher David Rosales

Related Articles