Boulder Magazine Winter/Spring 2007-08
feature article

Writing in the Bubble

By Lisa Jones

I’m at Pekoe teahouse in North Boulder, writing in my notebook. So is the twentyish man next to me. At the sunny tables near the window, the laptops have bloomed like flowers—an older man taps away rhythmically on his Dell, while a woman stares dreamily into her iMac.

What are they all writing about? I don’t know, but this is Boulder, and the people are writing. Where else do you bounce your way through African dance class next to an environmental journalist who writes for the New York Times Magazine and Outside? Where else do you reach for a can of kidney beans at Ideal Market, while someone who is a dead ringer for Jon Krakauer reaches for garbanzos?

A writers’ group that gets down to the quick (left to right): Gail Donohue Storey, Janis Hallowell, Marilyn Krysl, Julene Bair, Elisabeth Hyde, Lisa Jones. Photo by Julia Layton

I graduated from CU, so I knew something about the richness of Boulder’s literary community when I moved back here two years ago, more than twenty years after finishing college. Still, when my husband enrolled in a graduate program at Naropa, I arrived kicking and screaming. I had spent most of my adult life in a tiny, beautiful, close-knit community on the far side of the Colorado Rockies. I loved it there, and had thrived as a magazine writer. I was in no rush to return to a place that felt expensive and anonymous to me. I feared that during the solitary act of writing my first book, I would not only go crazy (a known risk among authors) but might actually disappear.

Sure enough, I was homesick. And I went a bit crazy as I wrote and wrote and nobody read my manuscript except my agent, who kept saying “Great! Now rewrite it!” Mood-wise, I noticed I became a much nicer person if I cut down on the writing and watched Scrubs reruns for a good part of the day. But I also realized that I could take breaks from writing and walk all around my new neighborhood without running into twelve of my best friends. I could go to the grocery store without having to hug all the cashiers. I could think.

Among the Lionesses

And then I had a stroke of serious luck. I was invited to join a writing group of women who were, to my eyes, full-fledged literary lionesses. Unlike me, they had all had published at least one book, some by New York publishers like Knopf and William Morrow. They had websites. They had received literary prizes and residencies at writers’ colonies, and taught at universities. In fact, I recognized one of the women in the group as my creative writing professor at CU.

“Marilyn Krysl!” I squawked. “I’m Lisa Jones! Do you remember me?” She looked at me blankly. Dear me. She’d been the director of the Creative Writing Program; she’d probably had thousands of students. She had published ten books. John Updike had read her short stories “with pleasure, surprise and admiration.”

Still, Marilyn was very friendly, and so were the other four women who became regulars. We started meeting weekly for four or five hours. We scurried to do last-minute improvements to our manuscripts before our Thursday meetings. Each of us read from her book in progress, and our critiques progressed from tentative to honest. We could tell when someone was ducking the truth in her writing, because we knew how we wrote when we ducked it ourselves. We drank wine and discussed the craft of narrative—not a subject that comes up in general conversation, even in Boulder. We became ravenous for each other’s company.

Finding the group was not my only stroke of luck. Boulder’s terrific coffee shops and the open space around town had rejuvenated my mind since I arrived here. And slowly, and often in the company of my new writer friends, I started sampling the palette of literary events available here courtesy of its bookstores, libraries and two universities.

“The Boulder Book Store sponsors wonderful readings and supports local writers,” points out Elisabeth Hyde, a member of our group who has published four novels, most recently The Abortionist’s Daughter and Crazy as Chocolate, both set in Colorado. “I just spent this morning down at Vic’s,” she adds, to work on her fifth novel, about a group of tourists on a river trip through the Grand Canyon. “I got so much done. I put earphones on.”

Spiritual Life in the Bubble

Julene Bair, who pulled up stakes in Laramie two years ago, has found the spiritual component of life in Boulder helpful in the process of writing The Whole Song, a gorgeous, heartbreaking account of the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer at the hands of west Kansas corn farmers like her beloved and hardworking father.

“People talked about the Boulder bubble, about how indulgent and wealthy people are here,” said Julene. “But that’s not at all what’s happening with the Buddhists here. They know we don’t get our way and we need to accept that. I think that’s made me more disciplined. It helps my writing. I meditate in the mornings now. Getting centered in whatever egolessness I can muster makes me more courageous as a writer.”

Gail Donohue Storey finds Boulder a more restful place to write than Houston, where she wrote two novels and from where she moved a couple of years ago. “There’s enough stimulation here, but you can also get up from your desk and go out and hike and bike,” says Gail, who does just that for at least two hours every day, often before sitting down to work on her hilarious memoir, I Never Much Cared for Nature: Hiking the PCT on HRT (the PCT being the Pacific Crest Trail, and HRT—well, if you don’t know what that is, you’ll find out soon enough).

Janis Hallowell’s second novel, She Was, is slated for publication in May. It concerns a mild-mannered Denver dentist —and former student radical—whose political crime during the Vietnam War comes full circle during the Iraq War. The first thing she read to us was a scene about a sweet, elderly janitor being blown to bits by a bomb while on the job. When she finished, we coughed weakly and could not speak, the writing was so powerful. In contrast, here is a typical writing day for its author: “Yoga on the back deck, breakfast, work, walk up the mountain, lunch, work, family time, work, read, sleep. Ahhhh. I am so lucky.”

Come on. Who were these women? All fit and joyful, and not at all like the person schlumping around the house in an old bathrobe that I had been for much of the past two years?

“Well,” Janis said, “I forgot to say the part about how eventually we start drinking gin out of the cat bowl, spend too much time on eBay and grow strange and unhealthy attachments to the UPS truck.”

A sense of humor is vital to the writer’s life. Add that to a town and county with a blend of literary culture, excellent coffee, and vast wilderness in which to gain perspective. And every now and then a group of writers who come together to help each other over the obstacles most of their peers have to face alone. Moving to Boulder was one of the biggest strokes of luck in my writing life.

Boulder Magazine wanted to know why so many writers call Boulder County home. Is it something in the air? Here, a few of the experts—successful local authors—weigh in. Read their responses, available only on GetBoulder.com.

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