Get ready to fight like a girl.
John Larison’s new novel “Whiskey When We’re Dry” has racked up almost as many awards as the slew of different dangers faced by its protagonist.
In the spring of 1885, 17-year-old Jessilyn Harney finds herself orphaned and alone on her family’s homestead. Desperate to fend off starvation and predatory neighbors, she cuts off her hair, binds her chest, saddles her beloved mare, and sets off across the mountains to find her outlaw brother Noah and bring him home.
A talented sharpshooter herself, Jess’s quest lands her in the employ of the territory’s violent and capricious governor, whose militia is also hunting for Noah — dead or alive.
Wrestling with her brother’s outlaw identity and haunted by questions about her own, Jess must outmaneuver those who underestimate her and ultimately rise to become a hero in her own right.
It’s Charles Portis with a bloody lip.
A John Ford story with a Hawksian heroine.
Or, as The Oprah Magazine said, “’Mulan’ meets ‘Deadwood.’”
It has also garnered a hefty saddlebag’s worth of awards, having been named a Best Book by Entertainment Weekly, O Magazine, Goodreads, Southern Living, Outside Magazine, Oprah.com, HelloGiggles, Parade, Fodor’s Travel, Sioux City Journal, Read it Forward, Medium.com, and NPR’s “All Things Considered.”
Additionally, it was selected as the 2020 Port Townsend Community Read, and the author’s appearance and surrounding events were all set and actually did begin.
Then, COVID.
“The event was originally scheduled as our grand finale in March for the Community Read [but] when COVID happened we closed and rescheduled it for November, thinking at the time, we’d be able to have him here in person at the Maritime Center,” said Port Townsend Public Library Manager Keith Darrock.
“At the time we rescheduled for November … we were thinking ‘Gosh, November seems like a long way out. That’s going to be fine.”
Spoiler alert: It wasn’t fine.
However, the main event at least, the free public author reading, will at last take place via the Zoom videoconferencing platform at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 12.
Larison will talk about his book and the writing process. Local author Adrianne Harun will facilitate an “in conversation” author-to-author talk following that, and the night is set to cap with questions from the audience.
It is, in a way, not so different from the typical main event of the Community Read.
“We pick a book and an author and then we always bring the author out to talk in person. And then we do a whole month-long series of programs around the book,” Darrock said. “We buy like 500 copies of the book, and we give them away to people in the community and you can pick one up at the library and everybody hands them off; it’s super cool.”
Copies of “Whiskey When We’re Dry” are now available for would-be participants to borrow at the library.
Visit the “Calendar” section of www.ptpubliclibrary.org/library to learn more and find the Zoom event link.
After more than a decade of Community Read events, the library’s “signature program series of the year,” Darrock said, this is the first Western ever selected.
“We had a lot of really positive responses to the book,” he said. “He’s a great writer, so the writing is really beautiful. He sets the place really well … It’s hard to tell where in the West it is; it could be Montana or Idaho, somewhere in the West. The sprawling landscape of the West and that time period.
“It’s a Western, but it’s a really unusual Western in that it’s kind of blending genres and talking a lot about gender.”
More so than just introducing people to a new book, or maybe encouraging new patrons to visit the library, Darock said the Community Read event is about fostering relationships — something that will not change if it’s held digitally.
“We’re trying to connect the community, bring the community together through writing, through a book,” he said. “We try to pick books that are going to be read by a wide variety of people, that people will like, but also people who don’t necessarily use the library all the time.”
Larison, whose earlier books include the novels “Holding Lies” and “Northwest of Normal,” as well as the nonfiction guide “The Complete Steelheader: Successful Fly-Fishing Tactics,” lives with his family near Bellfountain, Oregon.
Born in Oregon in 1979, he worked as a fly-fishing guide and high school English teacher before turning fulltime to writing.
“Whiskey When We’re Dry” is currently being developed for a feature film.
Visit www.johnlarison.com to learn more.
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