Norwood novelist wins Colorado Book Award

Norwood writer Amy Irvine McHarg is going to have to build a bigger shelf. Her novel “Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land,” has won yet another award, the Colorado Book Award for creative nonfiction. McHarg won the 2008 Orion Book Award and the Ellen Meloy Fund’s 2009 Desert Writer’s Award earlier this year. “Trespass” is McHarg’s memoir, following her as she scurries to the outskirts of her Utah homeland. She grew up an insider, a sixth generation Mormon rancher, but finds herself at odds with the predominant culture as she becomes an environmental advocate. As McHarg processes her father’s suicide, she finds herself pushed both figuratively outside the church’s reach and physically outside the Deseret boundaries, in Norwood. It was here, away from the onus of her Utah roots that she was able to finish the book. Throughout the book, McHarg sketches the metaphor of the coyote. Like people outside the church, banished to the edges of Deseret, or the conservationists run out of southern Utah’s wilderness by the storm of motorized recreation, the coyote is scorned and hunted and driven from its homeland. Despite all this, the coyote thrives. McHarg, who resolves “Trespass” in a somber key, reassures her fans that like the coyote she has flourished in her new digs...Telluride