In the center of the rural boomtown of Soda Springs, Idaho, stands the historic Enders Hotel, Café, and Bar, a three-story brick building that has been many things to many people. But to one family who bought it as an attempt to renew themselves it was home, a place they desperately tried to hold on to and yet, after seventeen years of living there, the very place from which they wanted to escape.
Growing up under its leaking roof, Brandon R. Schrand watched a cast of broken characters pass through the hotel doors—an alcoholic artist, a forgotten boxing champ, an ex-con, a homeless family—and tried to find his own identity among those revolving faces. Haunted by a father he had never seen, he tested the faces of those drifters for familiarity. Winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, The Enders Hotel reveals the promises and warnings of western boomtown life—stories of alcoholism, murder, betrayal, hope, and finally, redemption.
Brandon R. Schrand is the coordinator of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Idaho. His work has appeared in such periodicals as The Utne Reader, Tin House, Green Mountains Review, Colorado Review, River Teeth, Ecotone, and other journals.
Table of Contents
1. Restless Men 2. Reconstruction 3. A Storied History 4. A Traceable Past 5. Patterns 6. Initiation 7. Guns 8. Apparitions 9. Generations 10. The Boxer 11. Boom and Bust 12. Boys 13. The Artist 14. The Texans 15. The Knock of Experience 16. The Trapper 17. The Ex-Con and the Ex-Professor 18. Legacy 19. Two Men in a Car 20. Substitute 21. The Man Missing 22. A New Year 23. Requiem 24. Visitors 25. The Hand Out 26. Apprentice 27. The Man on the Stairs 28. The Man in the Phone Booth 29. The Waitress 30. Father to Son 31. A Common Story 32. Bear 33. Other Places 34. Trouble 35. The Cowboy 36. B.J. 37. After Labor Day 38. New Management 39. College 40. Enders Epilogue