Maker, Mentor, Muse Reading - Alix Christie, Author of The Shining Mountains

Maker, Mentor, Muse & Alta Mesa Center for the Arts Presents

August Reading: Alix Christie, Author of The Shining Mountains
Sunday, August 10th - 1pm PDT
Zoom

Join us on Sunday, August 10th at 1pm PT for a reading and conversation with Alix Christie, author of The Shining Mountains. 

About The Shining Mountains

The year is 1838. A young Scotsman forced from his homeland arrives at Hudson's Bay. Angus McDonald is contracted to British masters to trade for fur. But the world he discovers is beyond even a Highlander's wildest imaginings: raging rivers, buffalo hunts, and the powerful daughter of an ancient and magnificent people. In Catherine Baptiste, kin to Nez Perce chiefs, Angus recognizes a kindred spirit. The Rocky Mountain West in which they meet 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' western slopes.

"The Shining Mountains takes its history seriously. Love, treachery, violence and honour, it is all here [in] a novel to be savoured."Sarah Dunant, author of In the Name of the Family

"An impressively original, truly epic, and memorable saga" Midwest Book Review

"I admire The Shining Mountains for its vivid and emotionally rendered characters, its magnificent landscape, and how Christie captures the extraordinary power of living story." Debra Magpie Earling, author of The Lost Journals of Sacajawea

About Alix Christie

Alix Christie is the author of the historical novels Gutenberg’s Apprentice, long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Prize, and The Shining Mountains, an Editor’s Choice title from the Historical Novels Review. Her short fiction has won a Pushcart Prize and been a finalist for the Sunday Times (UK) Short Story Award. A native Californian, she earned a Master of Fine Arts in fiction from St Mary’s College of California and a Masters in Journalism from UC Berkeley, and worked as a reporter and editor for the San Francisco Chronicle and Oakland Tribune. She currently divides her time between Berlin and San Francisco.

Maker, Mentor, Muse is a teaching platform founded in 2022 by Mary Volmer, Maw Shein Win, and Dawn Angelicca Barcelona. Hailing from three distinct backgrounds, generations, and spiritual traditions we believe community is essential to building a satisfying and sustainable literary life and that true success requires balancing all three artistic roles: maker, mentor, muse. In collaboration with Alta Mesa Center for the Arts, sponsored by Orinda Community Church, we are building a place where artists embrace practices that honor process, spiritual growth, connection, and ongoing community with other writers.