Deep in the Heart of the Rockies: Selected Columns from the Denver Post, 1985-1998

Music Mountain Press, 1998. Trade paperback. Very Good. Small previous owner sticker. Quillen began selling occasional columns to the Denver Post in 1984, and in 1986 became a regular columnist. His column was the longest-running of any on The Denver Postop-ed page. He was also a regular contributor to High Country News, and he wrote for many other publications, including Empire, then the Sunday magazine of the Denver Post; Computer Shopper (he was the assembly-language columnist for a while); PC Computing; Profiles (the Kaypro computer users magazine; he was the CP/M columnist), Farm Journal, Country Journal, Bloomsbury Review, Clean Scene (a laundry trade journal), Utne Reader, Midnight Engineering, Spirit: the Magazine of the Southwest; Colorado Homes and Lifestyles, and the Los Angeles Times. "Deep in the Heart of the Rockies is a dose of some of Quillen's finer ravings from these columns, and as his readers can tell you, Quillen doesn't rest easily in any of the handy traditional political or philosophical categories. A registered Republican until 1993, he distrusts the Republican Party; although hard on Gov. Roy Romer ( "who never met a growth he didn't like'') and Californians moving to Colorado, he speaks kindly of Texans and chides no-growthers for pushing zoning laws; while in favor of government spending for mass transportation, he is against public funding for the arts; he despises the English-only movement, but also is against the multicultural movement in schools. And he loathes water diverters of any type. And so on and so on, as he grabs another beer and sparks another cigarette. You get the idea: There's something for everyone both to cheer and fear. Quillen is unafraid to direct his literary mortars at dishonest politicians from either party and at hypocrisy from big business and the environmental movement. He rails against concentrations of power anywhere, either political or economic. He also likes the impoverished, hard, rough-hewn rural life once offered in Colorado's mountain towns, and he believes freedom should include the freedom to be both poor and irresponsible".