7 JULY 31-AUGUST 6, 2025 westword.com WESTWORD | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | Governor Jared Polis has blown up the pro- posed 150th anniversary bridge at the Colo- rado State Capitol. Good. Because we have an alternative: Books can build a bridge, too. Their contents can connect people, taking concepts much fur- ther than that boondoggle. We were working on our annual summer reading list of new books by Coloradans when we got snarled in the war of the words over the CO150 Pedestrian Walkway. While untangling them, thinking about mending bridges with the 80,000 Coloradans who’d submitted surveys on that proposal and all the others who did not, we wondered: Why not put everyone on the same page? In fact, we could take a page from Montana, that Western upstart that published an anthol- ogy of its own literary traditions to mark its 100th birthday in 1989: The Last Best Place. Why not show that Coloradans can write the West, too? This is not a new idea, of course. Back in 2011, I talked with Chris Ransick, then Denver’s poet laureate, who’d worked with authors Annick Smith and William Kittredge on The Last Best Place at the University of Montana before he moved to Colorado in 1990. At the time, he was surprised that nothing similar existed in this state. “It was always in the back of my mind that we would have to do that when the time comes,” he told me then. In fact, a few years earlier, he’d decided the time had come, and he’d pulled together a crew of literary enthusi- asts from across the state. Working with some seed money from Colorado Humanities, they were in the process of “collecting anchoring texts,” Ransick said, “the gimmes, the authors whose work we know really belongs. That’s the easier step, in one sense. The later phase is going to be more obscure works. We’re looking at this much more comprehensively, representing populations and people.” While Montana’s book came out for that state’s centennial, Ransick did not have a particular timeline. “I am not going to rush this thing,” he said. “We won’t take it to completion unless we can do it really right.” Sadly, Ransick did not get the chance to do it right; he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, moved to Oregon for his health and died in 2019. Some of his original Colorado group pressed on, but the concept morphed into a less ambitious project. That, too, failed to come together as people were distracted by other projects, however. By life. Finally, one of the collaborators, author Peter Andersen, took all the material he’d gathered to Bower House, which published Reading Colorado: A Literary Road Guide, in 2023. “This isn’t the comprehensive anthology that my old pal Ransick envisioned,” Anderson notes in the book’s acknowledgments, “but I hope it carries forward some of the inspirations that we all shared in those early meetings.” It may not be a comprehensive anthol- ogy, but it’s an inspirational book, fi lled with excerpts of Colorado-based works that come together to create road trips across the state, from Ken Kesey’s description of Rocky Ford in Sometimes a Great Notion to Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House for Mancos/Mesa Verde. And while Reading Colorado makes for a perfect starting point to explore Colorado’s literary landscape, another worthy project is in the works, too. Bob Baron, the founder of Fulcrum Publishing, might be slowing down at 91, but he’s still got plans for an appropriate way to mark the sesquicentennial of Colo- rado. He’s authorized an update of Fulcrum’s The Colorado Book, a 1993 anthology of writ- ings about Colorado, which authors Sandra Dallas (who worked MONIKA SWIDERSKI continued on page 8
