Tonight on Bibliocracy, KPFK 90.7 FM at 8 PM: SHAWN VESTAL. My guest this week was perhaps given lemons, sour
and sweet, by way of family, culture, religion and politics, but out of it he
has squeezed literary lemonade indeed, co-opting and transforming and
repurposing the myths and tropes and vernacular of his Mormon upbringing into
serious, sincere short literary fiction.
Somehow not exactly disrespecting that religion but instead perhaps
respecting more the resisters, doubters, overlooked or victimized and even
maybe himself, Shawn Vestal has
rewritten past and present and future toward creating alternative and
transgressive, often funny and frequently very much darker versions of the
already dark, weird and fascinating tales of that experience. Author of the new collection of short stories, Godforsaken Idaho, Vestal takes
the iconography, stories, obsessions and cultural practices of the “family home
evenings” tradition and reworks them for audiences in a big wink or grimace,
you decide, but in nine stories elegant, smart, funny and resonant. His day job is as a regular columnist for
Spokane, Washington’s Spokesman-Review, and these and other stories have
appeared in McSweeney’s, Tin House and in the new anthology from Ecotone
magazine called Astoria to Zion: Twenty-Six Stories of Risk and Abandon from
Ecotone's First Decade. This is one of my most favorite recent short story
collections, covering past, present ant future, from heaven to the mythic
stories of the conquest of the American West. Thanks for listening, on the radio or online,
or as a download whenever you like, free from the KPFK audio archives.
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