Fremont County’s One County One Book literacy event concludes with a final celebration with the author scheduled for 7 p.m. on Thursday, October 21 at the Lander Valley High School Auditorium. Community members are invited to attend this free event to discuss “Lifting the Sky".
Readers of all ages have been reading the novel and participating in book discussions since early September when Fremont County libraries kicked off the event. The book won the Fiction Award from the Wyoming State Historical Society and is the first novel by D’Arge. “Lifting the Sky” is about Blue, a young girl who finds a home when she and her ranch-hand mother move to a tumbledown ranch near Crowheart.
A Q&A forum will be offered to learn more about the author and the novel and d’Arge’s tapestries will also be available for viewing.
More about author Mackie d'Arge:
"Bloom where you're planted" could be the motto of both the author of "Lifting the Sky" and Blue, her main character. Mackie d'Arge was born in Panama in 1941. On her 9th birthday her dad, an engineer, got a job in Turkey. From there they moved on to Greece, Morocco, and Italy. Mackie studied art in Lausanne, Florence, and Paris.
In France she started out on a metaphysical quest that led to a study of folklore and traditions of indigenous cultures. She headed off to lead a simple life in villages in southern France, Crete, and Sri Lanka. After marriage and the birth of a son in Hawaii, she moved with her new family to India.
Two years later she was divorced and back in France, where she met and soon married a professor who brought her to Wyoming in 1975. Within two years she was on her own again, with a whole new way of life raising two young sons on a windswept, rundown ranch on the side of Elk Mountain.
In 1981, after the death of her father, she began making applique tapestries with her mother, June McBride, as a form of therapy. She moved to the Wind River Reservation in 1989, and now lives in the mountains above Crowheart with her ranching partner and husband, Rod Johnson.
She is now working on something that involves both writing and painting. In visiting with children at schools around Wyoming, Mackie has become aware of how little many of them know about the reservation and the people who live there. She hopes her book gives a sense of that place, and of its real landscape and its inhabitants.
http://www.mackiedarge.com
