In the Company of Writers

(and a writing prompt)

This past weekend I had the honor of attending the High Plains Book Awards festival in Billings, Montana where Man, Underground was a finalist for the fiction and the Big Sky awards. The festival focuses on literature by authors from and books about the High Plains region—Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. I’ve lived in the region all my life along the spine of the Rockies in Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. We were blessed with unseasonably warm days behind the windshield for this cross-Montana venture (not precisely true, Billings is only a bit east of the center of MT even though it is six and a half hours away from my home in Western MT), which anyone who travels in the Rockies can appreciate, for snow in early October is not entirely unusual, and our drive was marred only by smoky skies (troubling for October) and extreme winds. I’d rather see smaller concentrations of the state by foot, but a fall drive among vibrant colors reminded me not to take Montana’s stunning beauty and vast open spaces for granted.

This weekend’s festival was fulfilling and reaffirming, particularly as expressed through a rich array of fascinating and vibrant panel discussions—brilliantly moderated by Julie Schultz, a HPBA board member and a bookseller for This House of Books, a cooperative bookstore in Billings. Panel discussions can be a lot of things, ranging from the esoteric to the mundane, but the Saturday panels were exactly what I want from a gathering of writers—thoughtful and thought-provoking, eloquent and funny, revealing and inspiring. Those qualities were present all day long and certainly extended to the panel in which I was a participant, one focused on trauma in literature and featuring poet Roy Beckemeyer, novelist, short story writer, and publisher Leah Angstman, and memoirist Charlotte Bellows.

The volunteers who serve on the board of HPBA, those who sponsor its prizes, the ones who “wrangle” the numerous readers and judges for the awards contest, those readers and judges, and those who make the festival itself such a pleasurable event are amazing people dedicated to keeping books at the center of people’s lives and showcasing the best of a huge but often overlooked region. I’m sure it’s true in a lot of industries, but book people are special people. I can honestly say I did not meet a single author who was not kind and generous with their time and who did not astound me with something profound or original shared in conversation or in a panel discussion. Accomplished writers all, they also are engineers, biologists, teachers, photographers, activists, scholars, researchers, artists, art curators…to name just a few professions represented (all heeding the wise advice given to any aspiring writer—“Don’t quit your day job.” But I was floored again and again by the depth of knowledge they possessed and the skills of being both original and synthetic (as in able to see the intersections of ideas) thinkers. I’m sure any given industry has numerous individuals who share such traits, but whenever I am among writers I’m reminded by how much raw intelligence exists in the world, how much eloquence, how much curiosity, traits that can be easy to lose sight of when our larger public discourse has become so impoverished and when we are frequently assaulted with messages that we should distrust intellectualism and that the well-read and the highly educated are elitists. How refreshing it always is to be in rooms where everyone present—presenters and audience members alike—are smart, curious, and collegial. Moments among such people always fill me with hope.

While Man, Underground did not win an award, it was truly humbling to be in such talented company. The fiction award went to Shelley Read for Go as a River, one of a number of awards this beautiful novel has earned domestically and internationally. I loved this book and highly recommend it. It’s a great fit for lovers of historical fiction, straddling several decades in the middle part of the 20^th Century, for those who are drawn to incredibly strong women protagonists who defy every odd, and for those who love the Rocky Mountain West. I fit all three of those categories and appreciated the book for those and other dimensions, but as someone with deep family ties to Colorado and who lived there for almost twenty years, including my most formative years as a writer and those when we raised our family, the Colorado connection is strong for me. The novel is set in one of the most intriguing and beautiful parts of Colorado, its Western Slope, specifically in a town that now lies underneath Blue Mesa Reservoir and in Palisades, CO on a peach orchard (and if you don’t know about Palisades peaches, you’ve missed out on one of the true gifts of the earth). It is a book about finding strength in self and through commitment to the land, about surviving loss and deadly prejudice. Beautifully written and featuring a leading character you will never forget, I encourage you to add this novel to your “to be read” stack.

Bryce Andrews won the Big Sky Award, which is given to an outstanding Montana author each year, as well as the creative nonfiction award for Holding Fire. Bryce is that guy who will disarm you with his quick, original humor one moment and then smack you with eloquence and startling depth of insight the next. He is a gorgeous, nuanced writer. But he also should be in the running for the “nicest human on the planet” (why isn’t there such an award?). The word “authentic” get used with regularity in our current culture, too often by very fit, attractive social media “influencers” with good hair giving you unsolicited life advice, but dictionaries should define “authentic” by simply including a photograph of Bryce. Genuinely humble, Bryce will hate all the descriptors I have used in this paragraph. The elevator pitch for Holding Fire should garner your interest on its own: “A memoir of inheritance, history, and one gun’s role in the violence that shaped the American West—and an impassioned call to forge a new way forward.” (And the “forge” part of that description is applied literally in the book as well.) I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Bryce read from the book before, have read excerpts on my own (typically while stealing time in a bookstore or library) and I so look forward to reading its entirety. In Billings, after Bryce joked about how signing books continues to remind him of writing the sort of silly or saccharine lines we were probably all guilty of when signing high school yearbooks, Patti and I shamed him into adding the line “Stay cool,” to a more adult-ish sentence he used when inscribing our copy of his book; I’ll laugh at that every time I pick up his book or see it on my bookshelf.

One last writer I must highlight—and there are so many who are so deserving—is Charlotte Bellows (linked above), the author of the memoir The Definition of Beautiful and winner of the “First Book” award. The book tells of how Charlotte succumbed to perfectionism and became so entranced by self- and other- perception that she became anorexic. It is also, thankfully, the story of how she found health, healing, and the will to survive. Remarkable enough that a writer is willing to expose the most painful and private parts of herself in prose, but equally remarkable is that Charlotte wrote the book as a high school student. Then she showed the professionalism to seek out readers to invest fully in the complex process of revision and the guts and tenacity to seek and find a publisher who saw the beauty and the wisdom of her words, all before graduation. We should all celebrate our children’s achievements and do so in full recognition that accomplishment looks different for every individual and every hurdle crossed towards success is individualized as well, but Charlotte’s accomplishment puts our sometimes-boastful parental cheerleading in a useful perspective, not only for her beautiful audacity to write a book but for the strength to overcome a disease most cannot understand. I’ll cheer loudly and with absolute pride when one of the grandchildren scores a goal, wins a match, masters a song, earns a difficult grade…just as I did when their mothers accomplished such feats…but I’ll remind myself to cheer even more loudly when they show perseverance, do what someone tells them is impossible, treat others with kindness, achieve a goal and immediately set another, or simply behave in the ways that make others cherish their presence and respect their integrity. Charlotte’s book is an extraordinary achievement, so it was little wonder that this young woman comported herself with such humility, intelligence, and grace when thrust into a world where suddenly all her “peers” were decades older than her. I can’t wait to read her book and to see what she will do next.

Monday Writing Prompt:

Typically, I try to offer quite specific prompts that can be directly incorporated into work-in-progress. Today something a little different. As a nod and a counter-balance to my shameless attack on “influencers” earlier in this newsletter, let’s steal something likely to show up in one of their curated, picture-perfect social media posts: Offer yourself three affirmations as you start another writing week (I really do believe in the mindset of “picture it to help you achieve it”): what are three things you know you do well as a writer whether those are technical elements of your writing, process elements, abilities of insight, or any other. Then set three attainable goals for your writing week. Do so in whatever way works for you (completing a scene you have struggled with, writing a set number of words, revising a story you’ve left behind, hitting “send” on ten queries…the possibilities are endless), but try to be extremely concrete in stating your goals, make them measurable, and then hold yourself accountable.

Happy writing.

And Some Musical Inspiration

Just one music obsession this week. Within a couple of hours of our return from Billings we had the incredible experience of watching five unbelievably talented musicians in concert. With a thrilling mash-up of hip-hop, R & B, and classical music, Black Violin really did bring a musical journey to our less-than-diverse corner of rural America.