This Week at Bookworks

This past week I went to three events at Bookworks, one of Albuquerque's remaining independent bookstores. The first was at 11:00 a.m. last Sunday--I don't usually go there on Sunday morning. It was Valerie Raleigh Yow speaking. She's the author of a biography of Betty Smith, who herself was the author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I remember reading the book when I was a teenager, maybe younger, and loving it, as well as the movie in black and white. I still have some of those images in my mind. The film came out in 1945, when I was four years old, so I must have seen it later on television. It was the first directorial effort of Elia Kazan, and starred Dorothy McGuire, Joan Blondell, Peggy Ann Garner as the young protagonist, and James Dunn. As for Betty Smith, I never knew she wrote anything by A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but she wrote three other novels, none as successful, and many plays. She's one of those women who was creative and prolific and well-known in her time, but has been moved to the backrooms of obscurity, so no one knows her name when some sexist asks, why have there never been any great women writers, or playwrights?

The next event at Bookworks was on Tuesday evening, a celebration of Tony Hillerman. About a half dozen writers who had been close friends of Hillerman's told anecdotes about their friendship with him. Included were Jim Belshaw, columnist at the Albuquerque Journal, Max Evans, Judith Van Giesen, a local mystery novelist, and Luther Wilson, director of the UNM Press. Several of them were weekly poker buddies of Hillerman. The event was videotaped (is that still the word to use when it's actually digital?) and will be put on the Bookworks website eventually, but it's not there yet.

Then, skipping over Wednesday because I wasn't interested in that event, and besides I had a party to go to at Pingo Studio and Gallery, on Thursday it was Luci Tapahonso reading her poetry. I always love to hear her, because she reads with such humor, and I recorded the talk on my little digital recorder. However, afterward I bought her latest book, A Radiant Curve (University of Arizona Press, $35 hardback, $17.95 paperback) and discovered that she has included, at the back of the book, a CD of her reading a selection of her poems, not just from the new book. So, that will be a delight to listen to. I have a recording of an earlier talk, about two-and-a-half years ago, she gave at the University of New Mexico, when I bought some other of her recent books. Sad to say, although I greatly enjoyed hearing her read them, I haven't read through all the books yet myself. I did give one as a gift when I went to France that year.