ROME ANE B BETH
How to escape the office and never go back Denverite Wendy Fox wins the Colorado Book Award for literary fiction with short story collection about corporate lives
by Bart Schaneman
T
aking the suffering of working for years in corporate America and turning the material into an award-winning book is the kind of revenge
But when Wendy Fox found out her book, What If We Were Somewhere Else for the Colorado Book Awards, she tempered her
cidence, even though they might have really different types of backgrounds or a natural way to link these people who might not
-
The choice to write a collection of linked stories was also a result of how the corporate world was a time where a lot of my work life did not seem man-
The book follows a group of characters who are
Many of the pieces explore the lives of the work-
as they experience fraught friendships, bad bosses, losing their jobs and other common torments of the
Lake City in the middle of the night to bring a friend
Once the book was published, Fox quickly found out how universal readers found the settings and
Fox masterfully inhabits each character, using differing points of view and voices to make each story
wanted to tell me about their absolutely terrible bosses Fox worked for many years in the marketing department of a technology company, and drew upon
the groundwork for the rest of the book via a list of
swirling of violent winds, the whoosh of air being displaced, but we all knew it was only the HVAC, which we pronounced in what we believed to be the expert way, H-vack, and so we did not worry about it in
temporary culture of people living on the Front Range, She hits a high note with her prose in the story “When You Talk About the Weather,” when she skewers the tendency of people here to be armchair
Fox’s top 5 books set in and around Colorado Bratwurst Haven, Rachel King day about these Front Range sausage factory workers Kids in America: A Gen X Reckoning, Liz Prato Prato offers an insightful look at the cultural forces that Winter Counts, David Heska Wanbli Weidan
have to talk about the weather, because we live in Fox was slightly ahead of the trend of people working from home that began during 2020 and the start of the
Out Front The Following Sea, Leah Angstman A deeply researched historical novel from a writer based in Louisville, this book is, at its heart, a story of Trapline, Mark Stevens The third in an excellent series from Colora-
culture and society as a whole as many people decide together disparate personalities and mesh them “People are often pushed together in a hiring coinBOULDER COUNTY’S INDEPENDENT VOICE
tracking down two murders and uncovering a troubling
much resistance there is to go back to that type of Email: editorial@boulderweekly.com l
JULY 7, 2022
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