Benjamin Kunkel on Colorado

Benjamin Kunkel is one of young American writers I follow. I loved his novel Indecision and try to stay on top of his magazine n+1 when I can. Over at the Amazon.com blog they write about Kunkel's contribution to State by State, the book of essays by writers about each state in America. It's on his native state of Colorado. Here's how he describes growing up near Eagle, Colorado:

The first of the beautiful ordinary things I remember are the creek gabbling away in its bed and the smell of rained-on sage bringing out an unsuspected sweetness from the land: thoughts of water in a dry place. But the thinness and dryness of the air on clear days–as of something brittle that would never break–was also thrilling, and what I liked doing on days like that was to clamber up the red mountain, which always offered some new place to be discovered among its troughs of brilliant dirt and tilted spines.

Nice. I love nature and the outdoors and enjoy Colorado for this reason. I plan to spend most of my life in major world cities but also plan to spend significant chunks of time in remote nature settings.

See the whole post for Kunkel's picks on the best books of or about Colorado.

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2 comments on “Benjamin Kunkel on Colorado
  • The best thing I enjoy in fine writers is their impeccable use of metaphors. But I’d like your take on stuff like “trough of brilliant dirt” – is that a good classification? Will it be “dull dirt” near Boulder, CO 🙂

    Rocky, soily, earthly or even colorish something like brown, red, green etc., could have been far less rankling as they align better with dirt.

    I am not against *poetic license* but would develop occasional indigestion – perhaps a sign of weak metabolism than to do with what went in 🙂

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