Bozeman News

SHARING THE RESPONSIBILITY

Two days ago on my morning trip down to the coffee shop to get a little wisdom at the ORG (Old Retired Guys) Table, a driver blasted right through a stop sign and almost made it my last day on a bicycle. So what did I do?

Two things. First, since I ended up about five feet from the driver’s window, I did not yell or make obscene gestures, not even any dagger eyes, Instead, I waved and smiled and tried to give him my best “no worries, we all make mistakes” look. Second, I decided to write this commentary--and the “other side” for next week.

I’ve already written several columns about the prickly relationship between cyclists and motorists sharing our public roadways, but today, I’m talking directly to cyclists, not motorists. 

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Western Book Roundup

Raise your hand if you’ve ever taken a creative writing class.  Keep your hand raised if you ever wrote a poem while in class that ended up being published in the New Yorker. Everyone’s hands should have gone down now except for that of one very talented University of Idaho MFA poetry student, Ciara Shuttleworth.

Robert Wrigley recently asked his MFA poetry students to study sestinas, which, according to Wikipedia, are “highly structured poem(s) consisting of six six-line stanzas followed by a tercet (called its envoy or tornada), for a total of thirty-nine lines.” Sounds complicated, but Ms. Shuttleworth and probably Eminem can do it.

Wrigley assigned his class to read a sestina by Lloyd Schwartz that consisted of only six words repeated in different patterns. After the class moved on to another poem, Shuttleworth wrote her own sestina, which also uses six words repeated seven times each.  She revised her poem, sent it into the New Yorker, and the editors accepted it for publication this fall. 

I am curious to read it, so I’ll look out for it and let everybody know when it turns up in the magazine.

• Benjamin Percy recently announced on Twitter that Iowa State’s MFA program in Creative Writing and the Environment just hired Rick Bass as affiliate faculty.  Percy, who also teaches at Iowa State, reported, “He’ll visit each year, serve as thesis advisor, and host students in Yaak.”

Also in the Roundup: The Tattered Cover in the news, how to read New West’s book page on your Kindle, and the new issue of Alaska Quarterly Review features some western writers.

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MISSOURI RIVER WALLEYES--AND MORE

Now I know what I’ve been missing every time I sped through Loma, Montana, on my way to somewhere else. This sleepy little ranching and farming community, located 55 miles north of Great Falls on U.S. Highway 87, is a gateway to some fast-action fishing like you probably have never experienced--catching a variety of warm-water species on a free-flowing section of the Mighty Mo.

To call it “diverse” might an understatement. In our first hole, for example, we quickly caught five fish, all different species. At the same time, all around us, we could soak in the incredible diversity of flora and fauna and the unspoiled scenery of this still wild stretch of the Missouri River.

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BEST IDEA IN A HUNDRED YEARS?

Remember the last time you heard somebody say a federal agency did a great job? Not recently, eh? I, too, confess to not saying it often, but I’m saying it today.

Three years ago (click here). I wrote about an innovative new shuttle system getting underway in Glacier National Park. In my first line, I asked, “If we built it, will they come?”

The results are in, and the answer is yes. In 2009, in fact, 157,000 of people used shuttle buses instead of driving personal vehicles over the traffic-choked Going-to-the-Sun Highway, and according to Glacier’s public affairs manager Amy Vanderbilt, “We will easily exceed that figure this year.”

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GUEST COMMENTARY

Whether or not you care about the recovery of grizzly bears, we face a serious challenge today of how to protect the safety of people who live and recreate in grizzly country, as whitebark pine, the driver of the health of the population for Yellowstone grizzly bear population, continues to suffer from a climate-driven beetle epidemic. At this critical juncture, it has been confusing and unconstructive to see grizzly bear management agencies flip-flop on the fundamental question of whether or not whitebark pine matters to the Yellowstone grizzly bear population, and the effects of its loss on human-bear conflicts.

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New West Book Review

Do Princesses Wear Hiking Boots?
by Carmela LaVigna Coyle
Rising Moon, 32 pages, $15.95, ages 4-8

The Cowgirl Way: Hats Off to America’s Women of the West
by Holly George-Warren
Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 128 pages, $18, ages 9-12

If there’s a little girl in your life, perhaps you’ve noticed: the world has become infested with princesses.  According to Newsweek, Disney created its Princess line in 2000, packaging old princesses Belle, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, Jasmine and Ariel together and marketing them “as a team,” and since then it’s grown into a four-billion-dollar industry, producing everything from plastic dolls to wedding gowns for grown-up women.  I don’t mind the dress-up aspects of the princess philosophy, but I have to say that the literature is execrable.

A Moment to Remember, Volume 11 in the Disney Princess Storybook Library, entered my house through a birthday party gift bag brought home by my four-year-old daughter.  It stars Sleeping Beauty, better known as Aurora when she’s awake.  No specific author is credited; the story must have oozed forth from the collective brain at Disney Princess headquarters.  The plot: Aurora is frustrated because her handlers force her to plan too many fancy balls.  (I find Cinderella more relatable—being forced to scrub too many toilets, now that’s a problem I wrangle with daily.)

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