Fiction at Literati: Rebecca Clarren: Kickdown

We welcome award-winning journalist Rebecca Clarren, in support of her debut novel Kickdown, as part of our ongoing Fiction at Literati series! Rebecca will be joined in conversation by Emily Strelow, author of The Wild Birds. The event is free and open to the public. 

About Kickdown:
When Jackie Dunbar’s father dies, she takes a leave from medical school and goes back to the family cattle ranch in Colorado to set affairs in order. But what she finds derails her: the Dunbar ranch is bankrupt, her sister is having a nervous breakdown, and the oil and gas industry has changed the landscape of this small western town both literally and figuratively, tempting her to sell a gas lease to save the family land.
There is fencing to be repaired and calves to be born, and no one–except Jackie herself–to take control. But then a gas well explodes in the neighboring ranch, and the fallout sets off a chain of events that will strain trust, sever old relationships, and ignite new ones.

Rebecca Clarren’s Kickdown is a tautly written debut novel about two sisters and the Iraq war veteran who steps in to help. It is a timeless and timely meditation on the grief wrought by death, war, and environmental destruction. Kickdown, like Kent Haruf’s Plainsong or Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone, weaves together the threads of land, family, failure, and perseverance to create a gritty tale about rural America.

Rebecca Clarren, an award-winning journalist, has been writing about the rural West for nearly twenty years. Her journalism, for which she has won the Hillman Prize and an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, has appeared in such publications as Mother Jones, High Country News, the Nation, and Salon.com. Kickdown, shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize, is her first novel. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and two young sons.

Emily Strelow was born and raised in Oregon’s Willamette Valley but has lived all over the West and now, the Midwest. For the last decade she combined teaching writing with doing seasonal avian field biology with her husband. While doing field jobs she camped and wrote in remote areas in the desert, mountains and by the ocean. She is a mother to two boys, a naturalist, and writer. She lives in Ann Arbor, MI. The Wild Birds is her first novel.