Western Book Conferences & Festivals
Missoula Teemed with Back-Slapping Writers and Enthusiastic Readers Last Weekend
The intrepid David Abrams gorges on the whole enchilada of Festival of the Book activity.By David Abrams, Guest Writer, 11-02-10
Montana Festival of the Book
Where: Missoula, Montana
When: Annually, in October. This year’s festival was held October 29 through 30.
What: Readings, panel discussions, parties, and a book fair focused on all genres of literature from Montana and the West.
Cost: Almost all events are free and open to the public.
Friday, October 29, 7:30 a.m. I’m speeding along I-90 from Butte to Missoula, hurrying to meet Benjamin Percy for an interview before we both plunge into all the activities the Humanities Montana Festival of the Book has to offer. I race through the Blackfoot River corridor, my Hyundai hugging the dark ribbon of interstate. Roadkill carcasses line the shoulder—half a mule deer here, a smear of skunk there.
I feel like I’m in a story by Ben Percy—or any one of the more than 100 other writers converging on Missoula. Even on an ordinary day, the so-called “Paris of the Rockies” is teeming with literary hotshots—swing a roadkill by the tail and you’re bound to hit a writer.
This year marks the 11th annual Festival of the Book and offers sessions on everything from “Storytime with Curious George” to “Curiouser & Curiouser: Fun Montana Facts with Ednor Therriault.” In between, attendees can bounce between readings by Jim Lynch (Border Songs), Kevin Canty (Everything), Stan Lynde (To Kill a Copper King), and David Allen Cates (Freeman Walker). Or they can listen to Ellen Baumler spin ghost stories, Hugh Ambrose describe the War in the Pacific, and Jack Horner tell “How to Build a Dinosaur.” Last year (my first festival), I was only able to stay for half a day; this year, I’m going for the whole enchilada.
(Technically, I’m two bites shy of the whole enchilada since the Festival of the Book started the previous night with a wine-and-cheese party at Fact & Fiction Bookstore and a fundraiser for Cutbank literary journal.)
9 a.m. I meet Percy in the lower level of the Holiday Inn. All around us, exhibitors unpack boxes of books, set out brochures advertising writing workshops, and square-up stacks of festival posters—which, this year, is a lush, Maxfield Parrish-style painting of a giant book coming out of boiling clouds on the horizon. The book dwarfs the landscape.
Percy and I find a quiet corner to talk. He’s on the tail end of a draining book tour for his debut novel The Wilding, fueling himself with a steady flow of coffee. “If I could drag around an IV drip of espresso, I would,” he says in a voice that comes from the bottom of his feet. If you’re not prepared for it, Percy’s voice can startle you with its deep bass. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever heard. It is licorice, it is the sludge at the bottom of a day-old coffee pot, it is the car tire running over the interstate rumble strip.
“I’m really glad to cap my five-week tour here in Missoula,” he says. “I love Montana; it’s one of my favorite states.”
Percy is just one of this year’s headliners. Others who have come to the three-day event, for minimal compensation, include James Lee Burke (The Glass Rainbow), C. J. Box (Nowhere to Run), Jess Walter (The Financial Lives of the Poets), and poet Robert Wrigley (Beautiful Country).
Festival director Kim Anderson tells me, “It’s true that publishers are re-trenching and cutting costs, but I think that makes authors even more eager to come to a festival like this where they can connect with audiences.”
The Festival of the Book does not strictly limit itself to Big Sky writers. Last year, for instance, Anderson was able to attract East Coast mystery writers Laura Lippman and George Pelecanos. “We call it ‘The Writing of the West,’ but sometimes that means the West is Minnesota,” she adds with a laugh.
11 a.m. Laura Munson (This is Not the Story You Think It Is), steps to the microphone, scans the room, and says, “Wow! This is like a writerly Woodstock!”
As the festival gets underway, Munson, Julia Horn (All Rise: Break the Spell), and Reiko Rizzuto (Hiroshima in the Morning) read wrenching passages from their memoirs—Horn about her time as a public defender in Chicago, Rizzuto of how she sought her family’s heritage in the cooled ashes of Hiroshima, Munson about the day her husband said he didn’t love her anymore. The selections drain the audience as well as the authors; their voices grow husky with emotion as they read.
To the writers in the crowd—of which there seem to be many—Munson describes how she wrote 14 unpublished novels (“Not good books,” she says candidly) before she sold her memoir. “So, for you writers out there, one word: persevere.”
12:30 p.m. I’m sitting with Craig Lancaster (600 Hours of Edward) in the Holiday Inn’s restaurant. I’ve ordered lunch, but it never arrives; the one waitress is kept busy as she ping-pongs between tables of readers and writers.
Like me, this is Lancaster’s second Festival of the Book and he’s still a little agog at all the talent that has flowed into Missoula for the event. Everywhere we look, writers are back-slapping each other (as opposed to back-stabbing) with congratulations for one award or another, patrons of the arts from eastern Montana are hugging patrons of the arts in western Montana saying it’s been too long since they last saw each other and that they should never let a year go by between them again. At a table in the corner, a husband and wife chew their food and don’t speak to each other—they’re both too busy reading paperback novels.
“You know, it’s great to come to festivals like this,” Lancaster says. “I mean, we writers are such solitary creatures. Normally, we live hermetically-sealed lifestyles.” His eyes keep darting to the table next to us where Percy is dining with William Kittredge and Annick Smith. “Wow,” he says, “is that Benjamin Percy?”
I nod. “Cool guy,” I say with some authority.
3 p.m. In a low-ceilinged room in the basement of the Missoula Public Library, Henry Gonshak and Jack Crowley are holding forth on Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. About 40 of us have crowded into the room to hear the two Montana Tech professors give a lively mini-lecture on “Butte and the Birth of Noir.”
Crowley talks about the 1929 novel’s thinly-veiled depiction of the Mining City. Even though Hammett left no written verification that Personville was Butte, Crowley offers up at least three distinct pieces of evidence that Hammett intended his fictional town to be a portrait of that city. Crowley is a gumshoe on the trail of the enigmatic writer. “In the so-called ‘Poisonville,’ Hammett created a darker, more sinister and more dangerous place than the actual Butte,” he tells us.
Gonshak joins the discourse, saying, “Red Harvest is violent even by the standards of noir fiction. It’s a harvest of blood…This is an absolutely vicious portrayal of Butte. Hammett will never get the key to the city, that’s for sure.”
4 p.m. Sticking with that same theme of blurring reality in literature, I’m back at the Holiday Inn for a panel discussion called “The Fact in the Fiction: Getting the Facts Right While You’re Making it Up.” The panelists—Percy, Lynch, Lynde, Rick DeMarinis (Mama’s Boy), and Jess Walter (The Financial Lives of the Poets)—are diverse in their approach to how closely they cling to the truth in their fiction.
Lynch: “When in doubt, I research. It has to feel real to me before I can convince you, the reader, it’s real.”
DeMarinis: “I’m not a good researcher. I get bored too easily.”
Percy: “I consider every short story a research project. If I’m going to write about a taxidermist, I’ll go to a few studios, talk to the guys who do this for a living. I’ll finger the glass eyeballs, run my hands over the polyurethane forms. That way, if a taxidermist ever reads your story, he won’t be jarred out of the narrative.”
Walter: “You are not writing how the world is, but how it could be.”
4:45 p.m. Percy and I are talking about where he goes from here: back home to Iowa and trick-or-treating with his kids. “We’re thinking about dressing up as the Berenstain Bears family this year,” he says. Appropriate for a guy whose novel features a grizzly stalking three men in the Oregon woods.
We’re just outside the festival’s “bookstore”—a fort of tables piled with books in the middle of hotel’s lower level. Readers with glazed eyes are lining up at the cash registers, books spilling out of their arms. “Have you seen this novel?” one person says to another. “It’s by this carpenter from Idaho. I just heard him read, and it was awesome!”
An older woman, highball in hand, lurches up to Percy and me. She has a foam pumpkin pasted on one cheek and seems to have wandered in from another party. “Who are all these writers?” she says in an overloud voice. “And what the hell are they all doing here?”
Percy and I look at each other and cock our eyebrows, but she’s gone before we can answer.
“You ‘writer types,’” I smirk.
“Yeah, look at all of us here,” Percy says.
8 p.m. The writer-types are in full force at Missoula’s Wilma Theater for a Gala Reading with Walter, poet Robert Wrigley (Beautiful Country), and mystery novelist C. J. Box (Nowhere to Run). Humanities Montana director Ken Egan steps to the center of the stage and tells us how gratifying it is to see so many lovers of literature filling the theater seats. “This is testament to the power of language,” he says. “The written word is a conduit to new worlds, and then they bring us home again.”
He yields the stage to Walter who starts off with a snappy wisecrack: “I was a little surprised when I heard that it was the Festival of the Book. I was flattered, thinking that meant it was going to be all about my book. So you can imagine my shock when I got here and saw all these other authors!”
Walter then reads a new short story, “Bleacher Couch Man,” about a middle-aged slacker and his equally-loser best friends, teammates on a perpetually-losing city basketball team, who build a three-tiered sofa designed to resemble cushioned seats in a bleacher. Laughter ripples through the Wilma as Walter reads, “The bleacher couch is a place where homophobic males can lie on three different levels watching TV without ever having to touch.”
Next, Wrigley comes on to read several poems from his new collection. The winner of the 2000 Kingsley Tufts Award from Idaho is a force to be reckoned with. His voice is a timpani drum, rolling louder with each stanza. In the theater lights, a spritz of energetic spittle arcs toward the front row. He has us hanging on every word, especially the blazing “American Fear,” a litany of national phobias:
The fear of poetry
is metrophobia, and melophobes fear music, cringing
at the ballgame through “God Bless America.”
Our ears are pinned back against our skulls; our hands, when we applaud, tingle.
Box follows Wrigley, doffing his trademark black cowboy hat as he reads us the opening chapter from his next novel, Cold Wind, which is due to hit bookstores next March. In the excerpt, a greedy, arrogant landowner surveys his acreage on horseback. As is the case with most Joe Pickett novels, the first chapter ends with a bullet piercing the man’s chest.
Box thumbs ahead in his manuscript, telling us, “I think most writers have that one perfect sentence, the one they spend all day writing and then can’t wait to go out and read to their family and friends. Well, here’s mine: Nothing spells trouble like two drunk cowboys with a rocket launcher.”
Outside the Wilma, I wait at the streetlight, bound for the Holiday Inn and ready to call it a night. My head is buzzing with words, words, words. I think I’ll go back to my room and read a Wrigley poem as a nightcap to lullaby me to sleep.
On the corner outside a bar, there’s a man in a Michael Myers mask wearing a tutu; standing next to him: a bunny holding a beer. Early Halloween revelers. “American Fear,” indeed.
Saturday, October 31, 7:30 a.m. I wake up late, groggy with a language hangover. I stumble downstairs, slug back a cup of coffee, then hurry to a darkened conference room for “Celebrating Glacier National Park,” a slide show of Marsha Karle’s paintings narrated by her husband, writer Paul Schullery. The watercolors of grizzlies, Avalanche Creek, and Upper Grinnell Lake are a soft, soothing oasis, reminding me of the beauties of (as Schullery and Karle have titled their latest book) “This High, Wild Country.”
11 a.m. Box, Canty, Alyson Hagy (Ghosts of Wyoming), and Brian Hart (“that carpenter from Idaho” who wrote Then Came the Evening) are on a panel, mulling over the question of “What makes a good ending in stories?” While each writer is unique in his or her approach, all agree on the answer: “I have no idea.”
Canty reads the final lines of a Joy Williams short story which, he says, is a good example of how to exit a tale. “But that’s just one way to do it,” he admits. “Every writer takes a little different approach.”
Box tells us he always works backward from the end of his mysteries. “There’s a lot of nuance to the end, many different directions it can go…There are a couple of endings I wish I could go back and re-do. Some of them took a turn I wasn’t expecting.”
Hagy says, “I almost never know the ending before I leap. I find the ending, the seed, as I write.” Others on the panel nod in agreement. “Working from the gut is really important if you’re trying to find the right ending,” she adds.
The writer-types in the audience (including me) feverishly scribble the advice in their notebooks. This is what we’ve come to hear, to grab for these pearls of wisdom as they break loose from the necklace and bounce across the floor. Even if, as the panelists claim, they couldn’t really tell you how they do what they do.
12:30 p.m. At midday, the lower level of the Holiday Inn is swollen with people. In the maze of tables at the bookstore, browsers edge tightly past each other, purses and butts knocking stacks of paperbacks askew. Around the perimeter of the room, exhibitors like High Desert Journal, Montana Public Radio, the University of Nebraska Press, and the 406 Writers’ Workshop are doing a brisk business signing up folks for mailing lists and handing out bookmarks and brochures. Chet Gecko and Snow White work the crowd, which is decidedly more family-friendly on this Saturday. In another room, Montana Poet Laureate Henry Real Bird leads bard-wannabes in a poetry salon. In a hallway, two writers catch up on the news about a mutual friend who, one tells the other, is suffering from macular degeneration: “So sad—probably the worst thing that could happen to a reader and writer like her.” On the other side of the room, a festival-goer has climbed onto a plastic tree stump (“Stump for Poetry”) to read a poem by Montana writer Judy Blunt. At the autograph table, James Lee Burke crinkles his eyes and grins as he runs a pen across the title page of his latest Dave Robicheaux novel, The Glass Rainbow, for a speechless fan. The entire lower level of the hotel seems to vibrate with enough love for books that it could lift the building off its foundation.
2:30 p.m. A photo of something brown, glistening and split down the middle flashes onto the screen. “No, this is not something out of C.S.I. ,” quips Ednor Therriault. “It’s a pasty from Joe’s Pasty Shop in Butte.”
Therriault (aka Bob Wire, and the author of Montana Curiosities) is giving us a side-splitting behind-the-scenes tour of the oddball places highlighted in his equally-oddball book. Over the course of six months and 8,000 miles, Therriault traveled the state—“from Wolf Creek to Alzada”—in search of the weird and wonderful things of Montana. But mostly weird.
Therriault advances to the next picture. “Okay, here’s another two-headed calf,” he says. This is the fourth taxidermied freak of nature we’ve seen. “I’ve found that the farther east you go in the state, the more you see them. You’ll notice they’re all calves. None of them survived very long after birth.” He looks out at our faces—half plastered with grins, the other half curled with “ewww.” “Can you imagine what it would have been like if they lived longer than two days?” Pause. “It would have been an udder disaster.” Rimshot.
4:30 p.m. James Lee Burke is fielding questions from fans who have packed the room. “What’s your writing routine?” “What’s the favorite of all your books?” “What advice would you give writers just starting out?”
Burke is in his element, cheerfully—nay, giddily—tossing back answers, often interrupting himself mid-thought to follow the thread of another story. An explanation of technique leads to a possibly apocryphal tale about baseball pitcher Dizzy Dean, another story leads to the genius of Mozart in Amadeus, still another memory takes Burke off on a tangent about how hard it was for him to crack the book-business code—even after he’d written and published several novels early in his career.
“You know, The Lost Get Back Boogie, was under submission for nine years—111 rejections—it still holds the publishing-industry record, all the New York City publishers concede this fact,” he says. “It was not only rejected, it was flung back at me with a dung-fork! I’ve never seen a manuscript that looked more like an abused child. It had stab holes in it. It had brown rings, unidentifiable stains. Editors must have used it as a coaster for their coffee cups.”
Burke revels in telling tales on himself, and in reassuring young writers in the audience to buck up, be of good cheer. Keep at it and it’s bound to get better.
Like a Pez candy machine, he dispenses more advice: “It’s better to overwrite than underwrite. You can always go back and take something out. A good writer creates more with what he takes out. There’s nothing that speaks louder in dialogue than the pause.”
And then he’s off on another story about Dizzy Dean and the literary significance of the curveball.
5 p.m. The crowds have thinned, leaving diehard writers gathered in small knots around the lobby of the Holiday Inn, making plans to meet later for drinks and to catch the tail end of the Griz game. In the bar, the festival is winding to a close with a “Hugo Karaoke” session. Mayor John Engen emcees as enthusiastic readers step up to the microphone to recite Richard Hugo’s poetry. I’m tempted to slam out a few stanzas about Milltown (“You could love here, not the lovely goat/in plexiglass nor the elk shot/in the middle of a joke, but honest drunks”), but it’s late, I’m exhausted, and it’s a long drive back to Butte. The mule deer will be darting across the interstate soon and I must be wary.
5:45 p.m. I’m curving back through the Blackfoot River corridor. In the back seat, books—a fresh pile of winter reading—slop from side to side. I keep my eyes on the landscape—the rocks, the river, the pines—and think of the hundreds of ways I’ve heard the West described in just the past two days. My head throbs with words. I’m happy—drained, but happy. This has been an energetic 48-hour confluence of writers and readers. Most of us have branched apart now, gone our separate ways to read, and write, and read some more.
But still, the festival echoes. Back at the bar, somebody is no doubt reciting amplified Hugo:
The Blackfoot bends, pools deep around
The cliff that bends it, and a brave man arcs down
Yelling ‘hey.’ He splits the river clean.
In the photos, from top to bottom:
• Benjamin Percy reads from his debut novel, The Wilding.
• Rick DeMarinis signs one of his books for a reader.
• Jim Lynch (left) and Benjamin Percy take a break from the busy schedule.
• A festival-goer browses in the bookstore.
• A reader recites one of her favorite poems during the on-going “Stump for Poetry” open-mike reading.
• James Lee Burke talks about the art of the craft in one of the festival’s final events on Saturday.
David Abrams’ short stories and essays have appeared in Esquire, Glimmer Train Stories, The Missouri Review, and The North Dakota Review, among other publications. He is currently working on a novel loosely based on his experiences during the Iraq War, and his blog is The Quivering Pen. He and his wife live in Butte, Montana.
Also in this series:
• Aspen Summer Words Fest: Southern Lit, Secret Hopes and a Surprise Stand-In by Jennifer Lee Sullivan
• The Tin House Summer Writers Workshop in Portland, Oregon by Bonnie ZoBell
• Summer Fishtrap in Oregon by Naomi Gibbs
• Booksellers Tell Writers Like It Is At New Conference by Jenny Shank
• Equality State Book Fair Celebrates Regional Writers in Wyoming by Nina McConigley
Plus: The Map!
• Check out NewWest’s comprehensive map and rundown of regional events, Book Festivals of the West.
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