Book It: Time for Colorado to Give Itself a Real Birthday Gift

Governor Jared Polis has blown up the proposed 150th anniversary bridge at the Colorado State Capitol. Good.

Because we have an alternative: Books can build a bridge, too. Their contents can connect people, taking concepts much further than that boondoggle.

We were working on our annual summer reading list of new books by Coloradans when we got snarled in the war of the words over the CO150 Pedestrian Walkway. While untangling them, thinking about mending bridges with the 80,000 Coloradans who'd submitted surveys on that proposal and all the others who did not, we wondered: Why not put everyone on the same page? In fact, we could take a page from Montana, that Western upstart that published an anthology of its own literary traditions to mark its 100th birthday in 1989: The Last Best Place.

Why not show that Coloradans can write the West, too?

This is not a new idea, of course. Back in 2011, I talked with Chris Ransick, then Denver's poet laureate, who'd worked with authors Annick Smith and William Kittredge on The Last Best Place at the University of Montana before he moved to Colorado in 1990. At the time, he was surprised that nothing similar existed in this state.

"It was always in the back of my mind that we would have to do that when the time comes," he told me then. In fact, a few years earlier, he'd decided the time had come, and he'd pulled together a crew of literary enthusiasts from across the state. Working with some seed money from Colorado Humanities, they were in the process of "collecting anchoring texts," Ransick said, "the gimmes, the authors whose work we know really belongs. That's the easier step, in one sense. The later phase is going to be more obscure works. We're looking at this much more comprehensively, representing populations and people."

While Montana's book came out for that state's centennial, Ransick did not have a particular timeline. "I am not going to rush this thing," he said. "We won't take it to completion unless we can do it really right."

Sadly, Ransick did not get the chance to do it right; he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, moved to Oregon for his health and died in 2019. Some of his original Colorado group pressed on, but the concept morphed into a less ambitious project. That, too, failed to come together as people were distracted by other projects. By life.

Finally, one of the collaborators, author Peter Andersen, took all the material he'd gathered to Bower House, which published Reading Colorado: A Literary Road Guide, in 2023. "This isn't the comprehensive anthology that my old pal Ransick envisioned," Anderson notes in the book's acknowledgments, "but I hope it carries forward some of the inspirations that we all shared in those early meetings."
It may not be a comprehensive anthology, but it's an inspirational book, filled with excerpts of Colorado-based works that come together to create road trips across the state, from Ken Kesey's description of Rocky Ford in Sometimes a Great Notion to Willa Cather's The Professor's House for Mancos/Mesa Verde.

And while Reading Colorado makes for a perfect starting point to explore Colorado's literary landscape, another worthy project is in the works, too. Bob Baron, the founder of Fulcrum Publishing, might be slowing down at 91, but he's still got plans for an appropriate way to mark the sesquicentennial of Colorado. He's authorized an update of Fulcrum's The Colorado Book, a 1993 anthology of writings about Colorado, which authors Sandra Dallas (who worked on the original) and Tom Noel, the historian known as Dr. Colorado, who's written more than fifty Colorado-based books, are working on right now.

They're adding everything from excerpts of books published over the last thirty years, to poems and songs, as well as a few items overlooked the first time (work by nature writer Enos Mills, as well as the state's first official historian, Leroy Hafen), while also subtracting about half of the original content. Both John Denver and Judy Collins made the cut for the update, as did Allen Ginsberg's "Plutonium Ode." The target publication date is in time for Colorado's 150th birthday on August 1, 2026.

There are other plot twists, too. One Book, One Denver, the citywide reading program started by John Hickenlooper when he was mayor, is coming back this year; the choice will be announced by the Denver Public Library next week. (With any luck, the library will even pick a work by a Colorado author this time, rather than the pap that had turned the program into the literary equivalent of a Happy Meal before then-mayor Michael Hancock killed it altogether.) After ownership changes, the Bookies and Tattered Cover are starting new chapters that look promising; Lighthouse Writers Workshop keeps illuminating the interest that Colorado residents have in the written word.

And Colorado Humanities just announced the impressive winners of this year's Colorado Book Awards, although the future of that project, as well as other Colorado Humanities efforts, is in doubt after major federal cuts this spring.

The America 250 - Colorado 150 commission established by the Colorado Legislature back in 2022 could go a long way to start a new literary chapter for this state; after all, one of its charges was "the promotion of scholarship and research that illuminates the history of the American West and Colorado within the larger story of the United States." While the election of Donald Trump has changed much of the larger story of the United States and how its history is regarded (if it's regarded at all), Colorado can still stay the course.

And Governor Polis, who'd planned on using $8.5 million in public funds on that bridge, could now use some of that money to write a few wrongs.

Watch for our starter set of must-read Colorado books later this week.