Why a Booktrail?
1980s: Holt may be fictional in name but it is apparently based on Yuma Colorado – one of Haruf’s residences in the early 1980s.
Plainsong
What you need to know before your trail
Set on the High Plains east of Denver, this is story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity
It is a simple story describing the lives of some of the residents in fictional Holt, Colorado. The language used is stark and effectively plain as if to mimic the landscape.
It is a study of small town life, told through several characters in alternating chapters. Evocative in many ways.
Travel Guide
Sometimes you just want to escape and get away from it all and the landscape of Holt/Yuma Colorado is the place to go. A small community in a small mid western town on flat barren land. In such a small place people know one another and as we get to know them, they come to live and bring the landscape with them off the page. The landscape is their home and they are tied to it – The grumpy farmers in particular were great characters to get to know – bachelors, brothers and struggling to live off the land. And the landscape is part of them all –
“Here was this man Tom Guthrie in Holt standing at the back window in the kitchen of his house smoking cigarettes and looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up.”
Streetview Maps
B) "Holt"
C) Yuma or Holt?
Booktrail Boarding Pass Information: Plainsong
Author/Guide: Kent Haruf Destination: Colorado, Fictional ‘Holt” Departure Time: 2000s
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