Blue Rodeo: A Novel - Hardcover

Mapson, Jo-Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060169443 ISBN 13: 9780060169442

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1994

Synopsis

The past catches up with Margaret Yearwood after she abandons her orderly life in California for rural New Mexico, falls in love with her neighbor, and begins a tentative communication with her newly deaf son

About this title

About the Author

Jo-Ann Mapson, a third generation Californian, grew up in Fullerton as a middle child with four siblings. She dropped out of college to marry, but later finished a creative writing degree at California State University, Long Beach. Following her son's birth in 1978, Mapson worked an assortment of odd jobs teaching horseback riding, cleaning houses, typing resumes, and working retail. After earning a graduate degree from Vermont College's low residency program, she taught at Orange Coast College for six years before turning to full-time writing in 1996. Mapson is the author of the acclaimed novels Shadow Ranch, Blue Rodeo, Hank Chloe, and Loving Chloe."The land is as much a character as the people," Mapson has said. Whether writing about the stark beauty of a California canyon or the poverty of an Arizona reservation, Mapson's landscapes are imbued with life. Setting her fiction in the Southwest, Mapson writes about a region that she knows well; after growing up in California and living for a time in Arizona and New Mexico, Mapson lives today in Cosa Mesa, California. She attributes her focus on setting to the influence of Wallace Stegner.Like many of her characters, Mapson has ridden horses since she was a child. She owns a 35-year-old Appaloosa and has said that she learned about writing from learning to jump her horse, Tonto. "I realized," she said, "that the same thing that had been wrong with my riding was the same thing that had been wrong with my writing. In riding there is a term called the moment of suspension, ' when you're over the fence, just hanging in the air. I had to give myself up to it, let go, trust the motion. Once I got that right, everything fell into place."

Edition details

• Publisher: Harpercollins
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060169443
• ISBN 13: 9780060169442
• Binding: Hardcover