Bumper stickers

I am so tickled! "The Library Journal" for October 1, 2007, has cute coverage of the
Wyoming libraries bumper sticker campaign geared to 18 to 30 year olds. Bring the World to Wyoming has been the poster/campaign effort for a couple of years but this
year we have jumped off the deep end!

We are promoting the "mud flap girl" to encourage young men to read. "We're shifting gears" reads the mud flap girl bumper sticker. Bizarre you think? Not I, and not in Gillette where we see shift workers all day long. The library offers so much reading material for everyone -- why buy books, magazines, newspapers, DVD when you can borrow them for nothing? This is just a reminder for our young men that the library is a place for them to find books too.

Two other bumper stickers "You can have my book when you pry it from my cold dead fingers" and "My other card is a library card" sport the Wyoming library logo of a cowboy riding a book. Aren't we a sassy bunch!

And if you want more -- Wyoming State Library is offering a huge selection of library logo items for sale --- http://www.wyominglibraries.org/ under Marketing libraries.
Whoopee! Christmas shopping is almost done.

Cather and Lockhart

For the past few weeks, I've been immersed in the world of female, Western writers. The Big Read has been studying Willa Cather through MY ANTONIA, and it has been great fun deciphering the novel and the autobiography that Cather has imbued in the stories.
Cather combined her knowledge of immigrant settlers from her years in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and developed her writing style with advice from other writers to "write what you know." Antonia arrived on the Nebraska prairies with no English, worked as a hired girl, became a "fallen woman," and finally succeeded as a wife and happy mother of a brood of children. Her journey was typical of numerous immigrants and settlers.

Caroline Lockhart has been compared to Cather as a woman writing about the West, but Lockhart was impassioned with the mythology of the cowboy. Her novels too became convoluted with her personality and blended fact and fiction in a less than flattering way for herself and her heroes. Still Lockhart is a Wyoming legend. She first visited Cody in 1904, and she wrote her novels from her Wyoming home. THE COWBOY GIRL; THE LIFE OF CAROLINE LOCKHART by John Clayton is a good read about the woman who pursued her dream of western adventure and independence.

Two women writers, two totally different visions of the west. Both of them have made my life more interesting this month, and they have challenged me to take up my pen again.