STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK
Julie Weston will discuss her novel “Basque Moon” at 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 16, at the Hailey Public Library.
The book recently won a WILLA Award in the historical fiction category. WILLA literary awards are presented by Women Writing the West, honoring outstanding literature featuring women’s stories set in the Western United States.
The award is named in honor of Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather, who penned such stories as “O Pioneers!” and “My Antonia” in the early 1900s..
The idea for “Basque Moon” came from a sheepherding tale set in the Stanley Basin that she’d heard from Basque friends. Weston spent months perusing newspaper clippings at the Community Library’s Regional History Department and walking the ground near places like Fourth of July Creek to flesh out the idea, turning it into a novel.
She borrowed her character Pearl, for instance, from Dick d’Easum’s “Sawtooth Tales.”
The novel, set in the mid-20th century, features a Chicago photographer named Nellie Burns and her black Labrador dog Moonshine who join a sheep rancher and his Basque sheepherder on a trip to the Stanley Basin where she plans to spend several weeks photographing scenes for a railroad company’s travel brochure.
There they find a dead herder, a moonshiner’s camp, a range war between cowboys and sheep ranchers and, of course, murder and mayhem.
Weston, who lives north of Hailey, has written three books set in Idaho. Her mystery novel “Moonshadows” is set in the mountains north of Ketchum. It introduced Nellie Burns who, in that case, walked into the Wood River Valley’s mining history—and a couple murders.
Her first book, “The Good Times Are All Gone: Life, Death and Rebirth in an Idaho Mining Town” is a memoir about growing up in the silver mining country of Kellogg in North Idaho.
She is working on a third murder mystery set at Craters of the Moon National Park.