Literary Arts Program
The Literary Arts are supported and encouraged at the Gunnison Arts Center. The GAC Writers’ Group meets regularly throughout the year, for anyone interested in using peer review and just rubbing elbows with the local writing talent. The ‘Book Talk’ group begins meeting each Fall and continues through the Spring, taking the summer months off. The book list for the Book Talk group is published in the Fall, and discussions take place monthly on the first Thursday of the month. All activities within the Literary Arts program are free and open to public participation.
2010-2011 Book Talk Selections
Thursday, September 1st
Discussion Leader: Lyda Hardy
Ship Breaker
By: Paolo Bacigalupi
In a futuristic world, teenaged Nailer scavenges copper wiring from grounded oil tankers for a living, but when he finds a beached clipper ship with a girl in its wreckage, he has to decide if he should strip the ship for its wealth or rescue the girl.
Thursday, Oct 6th
Discussion Leader: Judy Junkman
NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children
By: Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman
The authors use research to demonstrate that many of modern society’s strategies for nurturing children are in fact backfiring because they are built on false assumptions.
Thursday, Nov 3rd
Discussion Leader: Betsy Janney
Just Fine the Way It Is:Wyoming Stories 3
By: Annie Proulx
A series of highly imaginative and traditional short stories set in Wyoming (and hell) from 1885 to the present.
Thursday, Dec 1st
Discussion Leader: Susan Searles
The Queen of the Tamborine
By: Jane Gardman
In letters, Eliza Peabody, a smart and wildly imaginative woman who has become unbearably isolated in her prosperous London neighborhood, admonishes her neighbor for abandoning family and home to see the world, but Eliza is found to be an unreliable narrator, wanting to tell her own story.
Thursday, January 5th
Discussion Leader: Narcissa Channell
Parrot and Olivier in America
By: Peter Carey
Olivier—based on Alexis de Tocqueville—is an aristocrat born just after the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English engraver. Their lives are joined when they set sail for the New World as forced traveling companions.
Thursday, February 2nd
Discussion Leader: Pat Venturo
The Catcher in the Rye
By: J.D. Salinger
In 1951, Holden Caulfield is expelled from prep school and spends two days adrift in New York City, confused, disillusioned, and searching.
Thursday, March 1st
Discussion Leader: Ellen Harriman
Finding Nouf
By: Zoe Ferraris
Hired by wealthy friends to find their missing daughter, Saudi Arabian desert guide Nayir al-Sharqi discovers the girl apparently drowned in a flash flood in the desert, but he suspects that all is not as it seems.
Thursday, Apr 5th
Discussion Leader: Ellen Pedersen
Just Like Us
By: Helen Thorpe
A chronicle of four girls’ lives through their high school years, outlining the important difference that will separate them and shape their futures: legal status.
Thursday, May 3rd
Discussion Leader: Vikki Roach Archuleta
A Visit from the Goon Squad
By: Jennifer Egan
Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Their pasts are uncovered in a time-hopping narrative, along with the inner lives of a host of other intersecting characters.
Thursday, June 7th
Discussion Leader: Pat Sterling
Fire Season
By: Phillip Connors
Connors left work as an editor at the Wall Street Journal for a job at one of the last fire lookouts, 10,000 feet above sea level in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest, one of the most fire-prone forests in the country.
