Attitudes at Altitude August with Mara Purl

Oh my ... it’s time to get ready for a night to remember!

Have you got your seat? The Induction Gala is happening in six weeks. Weekly press releases are being published, and the Inductees are excited about their big night.

You have until August 20 to get a discounted room at the hotel—many of us are staying there ... save $50. The direct link is on the website to get the hotel discount ... and of course your tickets for the evening. We are ¾ to being sold out now. I have my dress up to wear ... now for the shoes.

Details on the website have been added for tables and sponsor opportunities. It’s always fun, and the sharing the Inductees do of their author walks is a delightful surprise to attendees at the evening Inductee Gala. Mix 100’s Dom Testa will be our emcee this year, and guitarist Phil Grinrod will provide pre-dinner guitar music.

Meet the Class of 2023 Inductees – their bios are up on the website. Please get your tickets and meet and hear them or their reps in person on September 11th.

Living

Jeanne Abrams
Kathleen O’Neal Gear
Temple Grandin
William Hamilton
Peter Heller
Mary Kelly
Patricia Limerick
Tom Noel
Linda Wommack
Philip Yancey

Legacy
Abelardo “Lalo” Delgado
John Denver

Below, celebrate the works of Inductees Ann Parker and Dick Weissman. Ann has had multiple doses of grand news. Her book, The Secret in the Wall, has been nominated for the Macavity Sue Feder Memorial Award for Best Historical Mystery and the Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award for Best Mystery.

Board member and award-winning author Mara Purl shares her pearls of wisdom with readers this month.

Did you miss a month? You can listen to and watch previous Happy Hour videos can be viewed HERE:

https://coloradoauthorshalloffame.org/friday-author-happy-hour.html

Onward … Don’t miss out on August's Friday Author Happy Hour with Will Rogers medalist Charlotte Hinger. She’s a 2021 Hall Inductee. Writing in fiction and nonfiction genres, she has a breadth of insights into writing and the persistence of being an author. Each month, one of our Inductees is featured on the second Friday of the month. What they are currently working on in their writing ... and life.

It's the Hall’s gift to anyone, supporters of authors and books. Be part of it. You will have the opportunity to ask the featured author questions. Answers are sometimes surprising, as past Inductees have revealed.

A separate email will go out with registration to attend. All sessions will be recorded, with replays emailed to those who registered. Hold the date on your calendar: Friday, August 11th, with Charlotte and me.

And... why not get your seat now for the Induction Gala? ... September 11th is the big night for the 3rd Induction Gala for the Colorado Authors Hall of Fame.

Get your TICKETS HERE:
https://coloradoauthorshalloffame.org/2023-induction-ceremony.html

Attitudes at Altitude’s promise to our readers…

We celebrate the outstanding authors inducted into the Colorado Authors’ Hall of Fame in 2019 and 2021. They are the first in the U.S. with a connection to Colorado to have been honored as published authors highlighting the impact and breadth of their work.

• Each month, past Inductees are featured with their backgrounds and latest books.

• One of our past Inductees will offer their sage advice on "how they do it"—whatever "it" is.

• You will be the first to hear about planned Hall Events. Meet a favorite author ... or a new one that has delivered mega hours of reading enjoyment ... one that has made an impact on society or their field.

The Inductees are thrilled to be part of the upcoming third Induction of the Authors Hall of Fame. Their information has been forwarded for the website and the Gala brochure.

Press releases started rolling out in early July. New ones are posted each week until the big event.

Are you ready to meet them and to hear their stories as they speak at the September 11th event? And to celebrate them at the Induction?

Why not grab your ticket now … or host a table with book-lover friends at the Induction Gala? The tables are for 8. The location is the DoubleTree by Hilton Denver Tech in Greenwood Village.

Grab your tickets for the Gala Induction on September 11th HERE:

https://coloradoauthorshalloffame.org/2023-induction-ceremony.html

Who is Charlotte Hinger?

✔ She writes the West ... fiction and nonfiction—from the Lottie Albright mystery series to the Race and Culture in the American West.

✔ She was the Will Rogers Silver Medallion winner.

✔ She is a Kansas Notable Book recipient.

✔ She has published more than a dozen books.

✔ She was inducted into the Colorado Authors Hall of Fame in 2021.

It's a great author stop and awe time with the Inductees of the Colorado Authors Hall of Fame. All sessions will
be recorded, and registrants will receive the replay ... and they are FREE.

Listen in. Join in the conversation. Have fun. Ask Charlotte your questions.

Author Happy Talk is live the second Friday of each month and features one of the Colorado Authors Hall of Fame Inductees. Next month, on September 8th, Patricia Raybon is featured.

Register NOW for one or all sessions slated for 2023 HERE: https://bit.ly/FRIAuthorHappyHour

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email. On Friday, you will get a reminder and Zoom link.

Charlotte and I look forward to our hour with you

Bethany Herbert—young, newly freed, and very skilled at healing—joins a group of other freed slaves who have been promised a veritable paradise in Kansas. There is, of course, no paradise awaiting them, but through their hard work, they wrestle a community out of the harsh, unforgiving prairie. In this starkly realistic story, the townspeople struggle against outside threats and internal conflict to survive, giving a new voice to those whose history the author recounted in her earlier work. VERDICT Somewhat reminiscent of Jane Kirkpatrick’s A Light in the Wilderness, this is far grittier. Readers who appreciate historical accuracy in their fiction will find this a powerful read. The impressive degree of realism and Hinger’s skillful weaving of personalities and storylines make it a real page-turner.

Ann Parker

is the author of the Silver Rush Mystery Series, including six novels set in the 1880s mountain town of Leadville, Colorado. Her books have won multiple awards, and her series was chosen as the “Booksellers Favorite” by the Mountains and Plains Independent Bookseller Association. Book Awards include the Colorado Book Award finalist, Macavity Historical Novel Award finalist, Agatha Best Historical Mystery finalist, WILLA finalist, ForeWord Indies Finalist, Sarton Women’s Book Award, and a CIPA EVVY award. Her books have been the “Recommended Read” of Colorado Country Life Magazine and the “Favorite Read” of True West Magazine.

Reading her books is like entering a time machine, with the fascinating accuracy of details about everything from clothing and cooking to transportation and construction, much of it told from a female perspective so often missing from historical chronicles. By exploring her ancestral roots, Ann has uncovered a tremendously rich vein in Colorado's history, all connected to the state’s many years of mining for Gold, Silver, and other metals.

Books of note: Silver Lies, Iron Ties and Leaden Skies

Richard "Dick" Weissman

As one of the most productive and important authors writing about American roots music and the music business, Dick Weissman's Music Business: Career Opportunities & Self Defense has sold over 100,000 copies and is used in many college music programs. His work was among the earliest books written about the music business. It is also the first book written from a musician’s point of view rather than that of a lawyer or music business executive. He was inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame, reflecting his contributions as an author, college professor, composer, and performer.

Dick’s books about the music business have been in widespread use at colleges for many years. Talkin ‘Bout A Revolution is one of the first books to provide a careful analysis of the interactions between American music and politics in a variety of musical idioms. Other published work includes Creating Melodies, The Folk Music Sourcebook, Making A Living In Your Local Music Market, and Which Side Are You On? The Music Never Stops, The Folk Music of the United States and Canada, and Blues The Basics. His next book will deliver an analysis of black-and-white musical interactions in a variety of musical genres.

Books of note: Talkin' 'Bout a Revolution, Understanding the Music Business and The Music Never Stops

The Author's Path - by Mara Purl

This piece might be called “The Path of the Whale,”—though it more accurately describes the path I took in creating a book. Before authors can offer a journey to their readers, we must take the journey ourselves. Briefly, my path was: experience; extensive journaling with added research; writing the non-fiction versions of the story; expanding to the fiction version.

As a member of a Greenpeace voyage to save whales, I traveled 6,000 miles in the North Pacific. This life-changing experience led to working on a documentary for ABC, being interviewed on NBC’s TODAY show, writing for Rolling Stone and writing the following essay for The Christian Science Monitor.

I treasured the opportunities to chronicle this real-life experience shared only by my crewmates. Yet in my heart, I yearned to write about the super-intelligent creatures we had met when they were not being hunted and killed. Who were they when they were at home? Years later, I was able to write When Whales Watch as part of my Milford-Haven Novels series. Not only was I able to put my readers up close and personal atop the waves, I was able to plunge beneath the surface to show the intelligent, loving, and protective behaviors of one of Earth’s most mysterious species. The book became an Amazon #1 bestseller in several categories and won four literary awards. But what it really did was connect humans and whales heart-to-heart.

FLOATING MIRROR

In the logs of sailing ships that plied the Pacific a hundred years ago, we are told never a day went by without mention of a whale. Whales were to the sea what clouds are to the sky – it was a rare day when one didn’t see them. They seem, by all accounts, to have been creatures of great innocence. They cavorted through the waves and plumbed the depths with a vigor that reveled in their enormous strength. Their great weight was translated into weightless muscle tone, and their big warm eyes spotted each other in the depths. Sometimes their ‘sounding” was for food. Other times they seemed fairly to explode out of the water for sheer joy.

I have read these accounts – those of the ancestral captains and those of the contemporary whale watchers. Unfortunately, my own encounter with the mammoth cetaceans was not so joyful nor so innocent. We were leaving the California coast full of enthusiasm and determination, the fourth Pacific Greenpeace voyage. At first, we indulged in our reveries, drawing whale cartoons, writing whale poetry, and rushing topside to look for genuine articles.

Days went by. We clung to the rail and squinted through our binoculars. Not a single spout. Not a fluke, not a dark shape in the water. We tried the crow’s nest and posted a permanent watch around the clock, desperate to see any sign of the leviathan.

It was in our fifth week at sea that we finally caught sight of our first whale. We didn’t spot it by a fluke or a spray of water as we had expected. We spotted it by the marker that had been left protruding from its back. It had been suspended at the surface for some time. Fortunately, it was dead. Suddenly our crew went from a friendly family group to a tightly drawn organization with a mission. We grabbed our life jackets; we slipped over the side into three-person motorboats; we sped toward the huge mechanical whaling ship, rising ten stories out of the water and looming six hundred feet in length.

It wasn’t the red water staining our boats and our memories. It wasn’t the carcasses tugged to the flensing deck by ragged ropes. It wasn’t the gentle eyes silently imploring us for some last-minute reprieve. These images and smells and sounds are now only part of the mental movie.

It was the single human face filling a lower porthole in the mammoth mother whaling ship. It looked cheerfully out at the foreigners in their attempt to save their fellow creatures. “Come join us!” the man had seemed to say as he beckoned with a gesture. “Come join us!” we had replied in his native tongue. How could it be that we were at odds with this single sailor? How could we have steamed six thousand miles and spent $80,000 in donations to confront – a smiling face?

And here we found our lesson. We hadn’t come to confront any man at all. We had come to confront that mind which is enmity against life. We had come to confront it in ourselves. After all, that smiling face was us. We had come not to save the whales – but to learn from their gentle surrender how to save ourselves.

The democratization of knowledge and information has been a key theme for me as an educator over the past three decades. Having independent authors serve as effective voices in an increasingly concentrated and commoditized literary world is absolutely necessary now more than ever. The Hall of Fame can provide a platform for the tools, techniques, and know-how to allow independent authors to meet the demands of this important role. Their voices need to be heard, and I hope to be a part of the solution of guiding aspiring authors to be impactful and effective role as independent voices.

Support the Hall

The Colorado Authors' Hall of Fame celebrates the accomplishments of living and past authors connected to Colorado—their words, wisdom, accomplishments, and the life-changing impact their works create. The result: their legacy lives on.

The Hall is an all-volunteer-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that honors and celebrates authors connected with Colorado by birth; by residence; by temporary residency for writing encouragement and support; by writing about elements within Colorado; or by placing storylines in or about Colorado.

Authors’ words have immense power and impact on others’ lives. They solve problems, bring awareness to a topic, and provide hours of pleasurable reading. It’s the power of their words.

Your financial assistance through donations and participation at events supports the bi-annual Induction Gala in odd-numbered years, the Aspiring Author Scholarships, and the general operation to bring these events to the public.

Support the Hall for this year and in the future.

Authors' Hall of Fame (coloradoauthorshalloffame.org)