Alix Christie in Conversation with Candace Wellman, The Shining Mountains - Fiction

Join us in the Readings Gallery for a conversation between two celebrated authors!

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The Shining Mountains is an epic story of the American Northwest and the marriage of the fur trade and indigenous worlds, based on the author’s own family. In 1838 a young Scotsman, Angus McDonald, lands at Hudson’s Bay. His journey takes him west to the unclaimed Oregon Country and a meeting with Catherine Baptiste, kin to Nez Perce chiefs. The world in which they fall in love will soon be torn apart by competing claims: between British fur traders, American settlers, and the Native peoples who have lived for millennia in the valleys and plateaus of the Shining Mountains.

Alix Christie is the direct descendant of Angus McDonald’s brother Duncan. She consulted extensively with her Nez Perce and Salish-Pend d’Oreille cousins to research their blended family history, receiving official support for the project from the cultural committees of both tribes. Winner of the 2021 Editor’s Prize in fiction from the Missouri Review, she published her debut novel, Gutenberg’s Apprentice, with Harper Books in 2014.

Candace Wellman is the author of two national award-winning books. Peace Weavers (2017) and Interwoven Lives (2019) from WSU Press are biographies of eight indigenous women in local 19 th century cross-cultural marriages. Her new biography, Man of Treacherous Charm, is about E.C. Fitzhugh, Sehome Coal Mine manager who was appointed to the territorial supreme and district courts in 1858 while under indictment for murder.