Bozeman News

Book Excerpt

For 26 years, Carter Niemeyer worked for USDA Animal Damage Control in Montana, where he was a trapper, a district supervisor, and the West’s wolf management specialist. He retired in 2006 from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as the federal wolf recovery coordinator for Idaho. The following is an excerpt from his new memoir Wolfer (BottleFly Press, 374 pages, $17.99). Niemeyer’s speaking engagements are listed on his website.

Once the shine of reintroduction had worn off, the troubles between people and wolves resumed, each living up to their worst traits.

After returning from a trip to Albuquerque, where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was wrestling with problems related to Mexican wolves, there was more trouble in the Ninemile: this time on a ranch in Huson, Montana, owned by actress Andie MacDowell.

Western Book Roundup

In this week’s Roundup I’ll take a look at some books of special interest to Western readers that will be published during the first half of this year:

January

• Kings of Colorado, the debut novel by Austin’s David E. Hilton is out this week.  To learn more about it, check out my interview with him or the review I wrote for the Dallas Morning News.

• Annie Proulx’s new memoir Bird Cloud is now in stores—it has been getting a strange mix of glowing and/or disapproving reviews.  Among the people who loved it are Tim Gautreaux, who covered it for the San Francisco Chronicle, and Donna Seaman, who gave it a starred review for Booklist.  Not as enamored were Alexandra Fuller and Dwight Garner, who both wrote about it for the New York Times—Garner’s review is really funny. 

Western Poets

A few short months after arriving in Montana, I made a point of stopping at The Milltown Union Bar, the working-class watering hole immortalized by Richard Hugo in his poem by that name. The bar, as it was in Hugo’s time, is really called Harold’s, “Harold’s Dine Drink and Dance” the sign reads. Driving west on Interstate 90 toward Missoula you see it at the exit for Bonner and barely need to wet your lips and twist your wrist 10 degrees in order to slice off the highway and circle down the ramp in its direction. 

Western Book Roundup

Happy New Year, everyone.  Now back to work, right?  I’ve got a backlog of Western book news to share today, so here we go:

• A few weeks ago, the New York Times discussed the Montana writer Annick Smith’s efforts to block “Imperial Oil, a Canadian subsidiary of ExxonMobil” from moving “its oversize oil-processing equipment from a port in Idaho to Canada, along a path that includes some of the nation’s most scenic highways.” Other writers are joining the fight—David James Duncan and Rick Bass have written a book, The Heart of the Monster, and the proceeds will go to a group called All Against the Haul.  (Steve Bunk summarized the court battle over megaloads on Highway 12 recently for New West.) My new favorite website, Northwest Book Lovers, recently caught up with Bass and Duncan to discuss the project. Check out All Against the Haul’s Twitter feed for more information.

Also in the Roundup: Western writers in Poets & Writers magazine, the Brokeback Mountain screenwriters are at work on new westerns, a fundraiser for Charles Bock, and Pitchapalooza at the Tattered Cover.

Western Book Roundup

I like the funny ones best.  That statement applies to everything, really—people, bears, hats—but especially books.  Throughout the year, I try to make note of the funniest lines and passages I come across in my reading.  Sometimes this proves problematic, as with Brady Udall’s funny-all-the-way through book, The Lonely Polygamist.  When I was typing out my selections from that one, my husband asked, “Why are you retyping that entire novel?” So here’s my second annual list of funny passages from the western books I read this year.  This one goes out to everyone who proudly sports a blue smear of a tattoo that once read “Charlene.”

• From Kevin Canty’s Everything

“She came inside as ever with her basket and jar and several other bags and bundles.  She moved though life in the middle of her own rummage sale, surrounded by rummage.  Some of it was knitting, some of it was food.”

“RL used to love the hippie girls—yes, he did—before they all turned thirty and became strict and sour.”

“She was good for her age but it was not a good age.”

A New Take on Old West Lit

In the September High Country News, Laura Pritchett wrote that she doesn’t want to live up to some stereotyped image of the “new” western woman if it means she has to gut trout (“The Western Lit Blues”). She’s “starting to get a little worried” that westerners have lives that are more complex than the ones she sometimes sees portrayed on the printed page. “There’s more going on with life out here in the West than is often rendered in books,” she says. But the publishers—mostly in New York--“expect certain patterns” and “want stereotypes to be affirmed.” At the same time, they want a novel to reflect the “authentic” West.

In a novel, the plot is driven by one of two questions. One is, “What is the character thinking? The other is, “What happens next?” Thanks to a very complicated interplay of literary supply and demand, the nineteenth and early twentieth West produced an inordinate number of “What happens next” books. Adventure books, romance books. In 1902 Owen Wister called his own novel, The Virginian, a “colonial romance.” And the demand for horse operas and ten-penny potboilers led to books called “westerns” and “westerns” led to all this stereotyping.

A New Take On Old West Lit

She won “Best Leading Actor” from the Omaha Actor’s Guild, packed the theater as Emily Dickinson in “The Belle of Amherst” and now she was on the phone asking me for Christmas material.

“I need a western piece to read for some charity appearances,” she said. “I won’t have time to read them all, so just pick one and I’ll cut it to fit the time requirements.”

Cripes. If there’s anything I hate worse than making decisions it’s making other people’s decisions.

Okay, so what makes a good Christmas story? The answer’s as obvious as an elephant in an outhouse. It shows how Christmas is a time when Evil is banished by Good and self-isolated people crave society. Look at A Christmas Carol or How the Grinch Stole Christmas. For that matter, look at “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or even The Nutcracker. Christmas is magic, Evil is overcome by Good and people celebrate.

This made Owen Wister’s “A Journey in Search of Christmas” my prime candidate. Lin McLean has a wad of roundup money in his jeans and an ache in his heart. Everyone in Cheyenne seems to know that a woman has made a fool of him by marrying him when she already had a husband. Looking to be alone, Lin takes the train to Denver. He intends to spend Christmas Eve by punishing a power of whiskey and blowing himself to a fine meal. He might even go to the theater. 

Words for the Western Landscape

In his introduction to Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, editor Barry Lopez writes, “The land beyond our towns, for many, has become a generalized landscape of hills and valleys, of beaches, rivers and monotonous deserts…almost without our knowing it, the particulars of these landscapes have slipped away from us.” Published this year in a paperback edition by Trinity University Press, Home Ground (480 pages, $19.95) seeks to preserve terms that describe the natural landscape by compiling definitions written by accomplished writers.  Over the past several weeks, New West has featured excerpts from Home Ground.  Today’s term is “racetrack valley,” as described by Stephen Graham Jones.  Jones is the author of several books, including the new story collection The One That Got Away.

Western Book Roundup

First, I want to thank all the readers who participated in last week’s book giveaway contest by leaving a comment on one of the three Best Books in the West posts.  I wrote everybody’s names on slips of paper and my daughter drew the winner from a bowl--she can’t read, so she couldn’t cheat.  Congratulations to Liz Clift of Ames, Iowa.  Your copy of Benjamin Percy’s The Wilding is on its way.  It’s convenient that she lives in Ames, because Percy lives there too, and she can track him down to sign her book.

And I have to say that I think New West Books & Writers readers and commenters are the best in the web—you are all so smart, well-read, and polite.  Even when I make a stupid mistake, you let me know with such tact.  It’s not like this everywhere on the web, compadres—for proof, just click over to the comment threads on any of New West’s articles about wolves or wilderness management.  Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.  I hope to do more book giveaways soon.  Okay, enough with the mushy stuff!

• The biggest news in the book world last week was Google’s announcement that its eBookstore opened for business.  Many indie bookstores had been sitting on the sidelines while Amazon and its Kindle and Apple and its iPad duked it out for digital book supremacy.  Google’s eBookstore allows indie booksellers to get in the digital book game because it provides e-books that are not formatted for a particular device (they work on most browsers, e-book readers, and iPhones), and Google allows individual bookstores to sell these e-books from their websites. 

Also in the Roundup: More on Google eBooks, The Denver Post reduces its book section, Craig Lancaster sells a Christmas story for charity, The Whitefish Review celebrates a new issue, and CutBank hosts a writing contest.

Western Writers

Novelist Liza Campbell grew up in Los Alamos, New Mexico, about forty miles from Santa Fe, where her debut novel and first published work of fiction, The Dissemblers, is set.  Campbell studied English at Wellesley College and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco.  After that, she moved to Boulder to work for VeloPress “and to pursue my dreams of being a hardcore endurance athlete,” she says.  “Thank goodness I’ve grown out of that stage,” she adds.  Campbell left Boulder to live in Bozeman for a couple of years, and then returned to Colorado to attend nursing school.  The Dissemblers (The Permanent Press, 199 pages, $28) is an elegantly crafted, introspective novel that tells the story of a young painter named Ivy Wilkes who moves to Santa Fe to work at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.  O’Keeffe is Ivy’s artistic idol, and Ivy becomes frustrated that her own paintings can’t compare to O’Keeffe’s.  When a friend suggests she try copying O’Keeffe’s work for profit, Ivy puts aside her moral qualms and plunges into the world of art forgery.  Liza Campbell will discuss The Dissembers at the Boulder Book Store on Wednesday, December 8 at 7:30 p.m. (I should note that we share the same publisher—The Permanent Press will publish my novel, The Ringer, in March.)

New West: Growing up in New Mexico, were you aware of Georgia O’Keeffe’s art since you were a kid?  Are you as big an admirer of O’Keeffe as Ivy is?

Liza Campbell: I was only loosely aware of O’Keeffe’s work.  Primarily, I had seen her famous paintings of skulls with flowers, which are not my favorite.  I didn’t really become familiar with her work until after I started writing the book, but the more I learned about her the more I admired her.  So I would say yes, now I am as big of an O’Keeffe admirer as Ivy is, but that came through writing the book.