A conversation with Anne Trujillo on Denver Channel 7's weekly political affairs program.

Anne ensured it was a relaxed interaction.

But war correspondent? Not so much. I did not write the intro. Interesting how often people assume a foreign correspondent is a war correspondent.

https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/politics/writer-finds-war-conversations-more-obvious-in-colorados-small-towns-inner-cities

Military veteran and first-time novelist Matthew Robinson tells me he has a compulsion to try to bridge the divide between the tiny population of Americans who have fought the war on terror and the rest of us, whose obliviousness can seem like cruelty.

In her Pioneer Girl, novelist Bich Minh Nguyen offers us Lee, a protagonist who is both a thief and a literary sleuth. The morally complex detectives of the best mysteries always interest me more than the whodunnit puzzles of the stories' crimes.

My friend Himanee Gupta-Carlson asks, “Could there be a way to think of America differently?”

She offers a model for doing just that in her honest, sometimes painful, always graceful book Muncie, India(na): Middletown and Asian America. It is part memoirs, part ethnographic study -- personally engaging, academically thorough.

I’ve been a Post subscriber since we moved to Denver almost six years ago. Every day I find at least one story that makes me glad to find the paper in my driveway. Besides, no one can harvest my personal data when I’m holding ink-on-newsprint in my hands

Scores of people crowded into a ballroom and sat at tables furiously taking notes, even more furiously tapping out tweets and urgently asking questions at a Sunshine Week workshop on ensuring information flows freely.

Let’s say I were like the journalist Mahmoud al-Sawadi in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, who  lucked into a period of preventive detention and had time to dive into the “many books he had bought but had never read and others he wanted to reread.”

I’d reread Frankenstein in Baghdad. I just tore through it, enchanted by Saadawi’s tone, empathy and perspective.