Lions (20 page)

Acknowledgments

Tremendous thanks to Kate Johnson and Corinna Barsan; to Georges and Valerie Borchardt; to the whole team at Grove Atlantic; thanks to Georgianna Pulver, Emerson Perez, and Marybeth Sharpe, and thanks to the many who read and reread these pages and gave me incisive and generous feedback, especially Gregory Blake Smith, Kyla Carter, Katie Cassis, John Thorp, Bryan Hurt, Jeffrey Nadzam, and Jeremy Chignell. Thanks to all of my teachers in Los Angeles. As a fiction writer I've taken liberties with history and benefited from the influence of other sources. I am particularly indebted to Willa Cather (whose work inspired the story of the homeless man drowning himself in a water tower), to Jonathan Raban's
Bad Land
, to David Lavender's
Bent's Fort
,
to Perry Eberhart's
Ghosts of the Colorado Plains,
and to Eric Twitty & SWCA Environmental Consultants'
Silver Wedge: The Sugar Beet Industry in Fort Collins