Art and Culture: Denverite Wendy Fox wins the Colorado Book Award for literary fiction

How to escape the o ce 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

Taking 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 The book follows a group of characters who are as they experience fraught friendships, bad bosses, losing their jobs and other common torments of the Once the book was published, Fox quickly found out how universal readers found the settings and 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 together disparate personalities and mesh them “People are often pushed together in a hiring coincidence, 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 Many of the pieces explore the lives of the work Lake City in the middle of the night to bring a friend Fox masterfully inhabits each character, using differing points of view and voices to make each story 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 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 culture and society as a whole as many people decide much resistance there is to go back to that type of Email: editorial@boulderweekly.com

BETHANE BROME

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

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 tracking down two murders and uncovering a troubling