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Wondering How To Make Your Bookstores Rock? Read This!

It's 1995 and Denver is humming. Telecommunications inventors and investors chase after fame and big bucks, all trying to produce the "next big thing." Hawk Kidree, a mixed-race Nanticoke Indian, watches the scene using a skeptical eye. One night, Hawk has a vision: He watches the brilliant, neon sign of Telwest flicker out because the skyline of Denver is plunged into darkness. Before long, this "outsider" finds himself caught up in a mysterious complex of corporate forces.

This may be the story ? of a culture unmanageable then one man's journey towards the far wall of the darkness ? told in Soundings, the newest book by Silver City author William Charland (Wheatmark,$17.95).

Though Soundings is Charland's first novel, it can be in no way his first book. He's published six works of nonfiction, all variations with a theme to build a meaningful life and finding rewarding work ? including The Complete Idiot's Guide to Changing Careers, published by then-Alpha Books, a publishing company later purchased by McMillan.

With a doctorate in religion, an extended career in outplacement and years of living in Denver, where he also wrote a careers column, Charland's foray into fiction seems a natural progression. His fictionalized version in the Mile High City provides perfect setting through which to understand more about and expose the darker side of life, greed and ambition he'd observed from a lot of living there in real life.

Charland started writing Soundings about six in the past, as they and the wife, Phoebe, were surviving in Mexico. "I was looking back in my years in Denver from your perspective of another culture ? the one that moves much slower and cultivates some deeper human values," he states. "I may not attended on top of the storyline had I not experienced Mexico."

He'd found a publisher in Barbed Wire Press in Las Cruces, then run by George Stein, a one-time high-tech communications manager, who keyed straight into Charland's description of Denver's "go-go" years. The plan would have been to bring the book out this season, but then Stein died of a sudden heart attack. Charland shopped around and made a decision to bring the ebook out himself through Tucson-based Wheatmark, a self-publishing and print-on-demand house that gives marketing support because of its authors.

Truth may be stranger than fiction, as the saying goes, but fiction is harder than research and relating facts, Charland says, something he did for years writing journalism (for the Denver Post, Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Examiner and many others) and in the concept of academia.

I find writing fiction far more challenging than anything else I've done, he admits that. "You need to listen for the story to emerge. It's almost given to you, wonderful."

He's written another novel, based on the closing of his South Dakota alma mater as well as the conversion of these campus to some prison. As in Soundings, according to him, a good bit of this story is situated actually. He promises to bring that book out the coming year, also through Wheatmark.

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harland and the wife gone after Silver City from Denver four in years past ? via Guadalajara, where they lived for that better part of your year anf the husband taught English inside a university. His wife, Phoebe, is produced by Tucumcari, so moving to New Mexico would be a sort of homecoming on her. And Charland, having attended college in the little town of Yankton, SD, inside them for hours lived in other small towns, says he feels right in your own home in Silver City. Not quite able to be completely retired, Charland works part-time, directing the honors program at WNMU.

Of Hawk Kidree, his main character in Soundings, Charland says, "I wanted a character to be 'in and not of' the field of high-tech mania such as I saw in Denver within the mid-1990s." He adds that their own quiet "outsider" quality often leaves him feeling outside social groups.

He could also correspond with Hawk's vision. "I'm very attuned to visions, especially in my dream life," he admits that. "I think many Native American cultures possess a sensitivity to this side of life that technologically driven cultures go beyond."

And Hawk Kidree is an excellent vehicle to present voice to Charland's observations on standard of living and character. "Most of most, I hope that readers are certain to get involved inside a story that invites another take a look at our race to get a constant round of the latest technology," Charland says. "Denver, in the period I wrote about, was obsessed using a new era in telecommunications. I've been struck with the figure of Joe Nacchio, ex-CEO of Qwest, who was considered almost a messianic estimate Denver from the mid-90s. Now, of course, he's a convicted felon facing a long prison sentence.

To some degree, I think most of us fed from the excesses inside the 1990s, he adds. "At some level, we had arrived all Joe Nacchio, in their ambition and greed. I'd like to help readers take an extra have a look at that part of our culture as well as ourselves."