Author Archives: Bonnie McCune

About Bonnie McCune

Bonnie is a Denver-based author whose interest in writing led to her career in nonprofits doing public and community relations and marketing. She’s worked for libraries, directed a small arts organization and managed Denver's beautification program. Simultaneously, she’s been a free lance writer with publications in local, regional, and specialty publications for news and features. Her main interest now is fiction writing, and her pieces have won several awards.

What I’m Reading, January 2013

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  • Consider This, Señora, Harriet Doerr. A compact novel that manages superbly to weave the stories of three American women and one man into the fabric of life in a tiny Mexican village. In succinct prose as illuminating and delicate as pen and ink drawings, the book is an intimate survey of the people and country.
  • Cream of Kohlrabi, Floyd Skloot. This book of sixteen stories spotlights the author’s award-winning style, addressing characters who are aging, struggling to deal with external life’s impacts on themselves, or sports. Each contains a fascinating picture of how the main character adjusts, well or not.
  • Forged in Fire: Essays by Idaho Writers, editors Mary Clearman Blew, Phil Druker. A collection of personal essays by Idaho writers that all center around fire. Idaho is familiar with the terror, exhaustion, and incomparable exhilaration of the element, and these pieces present excellent, vivid interpretations.
  • Dinner with Osama, Marilyn Krysl. The author’s ironic and acerbic point of view expands the reader’s understanding of this very confusing and often disheartening world. Politics, mythology, and life in Boulder come to the forefront. The final third of the collection is the most piercing. Here her prose is a slap across the face to awaken you to true evil possible in the human condition, set in war-torn and famine-pinched Africa.
  • Wild Bunch Women, Michael Rutter. While many are familiar with Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and related desperadoes, these men were not abstinent. Their female chums, lovers, even wives often were as feisty and drawn to risks as they, although the lives of these women are lost in the sands of the desert and time. Rutter patches together a history for each of nine women, relying on rumor, hearsay, and myth.

Something to Think About

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“Everything Is Fiction,” a blog on the New Yorker by novelist Keith Ridgway, who points out we’re all living stories every day.

“I don’t know how to write. Which is unfortunate, as I do it for a living. Mind you, I don’t know how to live either. . . When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events.”

NEWS

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  • Short Story America, Volume Two. Is now available from the website.  My story ‘The Desk’ is part of the collection.  Link from main page.
  • Change is constant, and publishers are no different.  My publisher, Inspirational Romance Novels is now Prism Book Group as they add and refine categories.  Visit their site to order my work and others.  A new promo video explains what Prism Book Group is, its goal, and manuscript submission policies.
  • “Irish Episode,” my novella, is now available in paperback from me directly for $5.  Contact me if you want a copy.  Set in the early 1970s, it immerses an American woman in the life and times of a struggling Irish musician.  See description at Amazon Kindle, where you can also order an electronic version for 99¢.
  • The Denver Woman’s Press Club held its first Salon Sunday afternoon, September 16. Twenty-three writers of all stripes, from mystery, children’s book, and short story authors to screenwriters and novelists were on hand to learn more about forming a critique group. I was one of the hosts along with two members of my critique group: playwright and mystery author Elizabeth Cook, and mystery author and short story writer Suzanne Young.  Free salons continue on the third Sunday of each month, 3 to 5 p.m.

Regular news from me is issued every month or two. If you want to receive email notice of updates, let me know by sending an email to Bonnie@BonnieMcCune.com.

What I’m Reading, October 2012

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  • The Deportees and Other Stories, Roddy Doyle.  An overlooked treasure by an Irish writer who shows off all nuances of his style in this fine collection.  Every story deals in some way with Ireland’s influx of immigrants, and all the characters illustrate the wonderful diversity of their personalities.
  • Peace, Love & Healing, Bernie S Siegel, M.D.  A treatise on how to help yourself heal from serious diseases and conditions; not guaranteed to cure but well able to support your self-healing.  Siegel uses the techniques in his book to treat his own patients and now enables all of us to explore them.
  • The Proposal, Mary Balogh.  A romance in the Regency genre, this is one of a set of books with loosely connected plots, but it features a commoner(!) awarded a title for valour who woos a lady, knowing that they’ll never (what, never?) be a couple.  A relaxing evening’s read.
  • The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes.  Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2011, this tells the story of an older man as he considers his youth and the friend (now deceased) and woman (still alive)who have dogged him emotionally throughout his life, the lessons he learns, the peace he tries to achieve.
  • Shine, Shine, Shine, Lydia Netzer.  Billed as scifi, which it is most definitely NOT, even though the husband in the story is on a flight to the moon to plant a robot colony, the writing style of this debut is absolutely compelling.  Add a pregnant bald heroine, an autistic son, and a dying mother, trace the action and development over several decades, and you have a unique and compelling novel.