Missoula News

Western Book Roundup

This year’s Montana Book Award winner is Ruth McLaughlin’s moving memoir, Bound Like Grass: A Memoir from the Western High Plains (University of Oklahoma Press). The prize committee praised it for its “acute observation,” honesty, and beautiful writing. The committee also named four honor books published in 2010:

Everything by Kevin Canty (Nan A. Talese)

Goodbye Wifes and Daughters by Susan Resnick (University of Nebraska Press)

The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking)

Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photographing the Northern Rocky Mountains by Dan Flores (University of Oklahoma Press)

The winners will be honored at the Montana Library Association conference in Billings on April 7. McLaughlin will do a victory lap at several bookstores in Montana: in Bozeman at the Country Bookshelf on March 29, in Hamilton at Chapter One Bookstore on March 30, and in Missoula at Fact and Fiction on March 31. All readings are at 7 p.m.

Also in the Roundup: Boise’s Alan Heathcock launches Volt, Benjamin Percy reads in Denver, and three Western bookstores are in the running for the Bookstore of the Year Award.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Lord deliver me from the Disney Channel. And iCarly. And SpongeBob. Of the last seven school days, I have had a sick child home for five of them. First Speaker, and now Rusty. Not much I can do but make them comfortable, push the juice, and keep those instant mashed potatoes comin’.

These are the times when a parent (well, a parent as shallow as me) uses the TV as a handy hypnotist. When that TV’s on and the kids are watching, Barb and I could be having sex openly on the living room floor and the kids would not even notice. (Note to self: vacuum living room today.)

Obscure Winter Sports

It was 11 degrees on a Sunday morning in Missoula, Montana. While most of the town was still at home, tucked in bed or sipping coffee, I got up and headed to the Glacier Ice Rink at 9 to find myself some curlers. It turns out a few dozen dedicated members of the Missoula Curling Club sliding were already there, sliding enormous rocks and sweeping the ice. The brand-new curling club practices and plays matches at odd hours on Saturday nights and Sunday mornings to work around hockey schedules.

After watching for a bit and trying to discern what on earth was going on, I introduced myself to Meredith Stewart, an eight-year curling veteran. Stewart, a freshman at the University of Montana, has been curling since she was a fourth-grader in Duluth, Minnesota. She read about the new Missoula league, so every weekend since January, Stewart gets on the ice to practice and play. She explained some of the rules to me.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

I am either the worst tour guide ever, or the best tour guide ever. Depends on who you ask, and how much they know. If you’re one of the seventh-graders I led on a winding path through the sprawling campus of the University of Montana last week, you probably just feel sorry for me.

Lucky for me one of my favorite things is messing with seventh-graders. I never attended the University of Montana, and my knowledge of its history, its features, and its very geography is next to zilch. Still, I’d volunteered to give this group of ten middle school brainiacs a brief tour after their grueling morning of math competition tests in the University Center ballroom.

Western Book Roundup

Last week, Borders Books filed for bankruptcy and announced the closure of 30 percent of its stores. The stores slated to close include six in Colorado (in Boulder, Dillon, Littleton, Aurora, Greeley, and Grand Junction), two in New Mexico (Santa Fe and Albuquerque), two in Utah (Murray and Logan), and one in Montana (Bozeman). The Wall Street Journal put together a chart of the closing stores here.

Meanwhile, EdRants.com offers a list of independent alternatives to the closing Borders stores, with the mileage between the closing store and the existing indie bookstore. In Colorado, there are indie bookstores close at hand in every city with a closing Borders. Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article stated there were no independent bookstores in Grand Junction, Colo. In fact, there are two: Twice Upon A Time Bookshop at 2885 North Avenue and Grand Valley Books at 350 Main Street.

Also in the Roundup: Emma Donoghue in Aspen, the Los Angeles Times Book Award finalists announced, and Jonathan Evison brings his book tour to Colorado and Utah.

mountain town news

Consider it the grown-up version of the neighbor’s boy coming asking to shovel your walk for a few dollars, but Dominico Cianciotto hopes this unusually snowy winter will help him earn a college degree.

Financial trouble forced Cianciotto to take a semester off from his course work at the University of Montana. With jobs hard to come by, Cianciotto decided to start his own business with an eye toward earning enough money to complete his film-production degree. That’s where the weather stepped in to supply him an opportunity.

Snowfall in the Missoula area, like much of the Rocky Mountain region, has been heavy this year. That, combined with work ethic from a father in the lawn and landscaping business, was all he needed to start the “College Fund Snow Removal” in November.

Western Book Roundup

For some time I’ve noticed that the majority of the books submitted to me for review are written by men, a ratio I’d estimate at five books by men for every one book by a woman. I noticed this discrepancy particularly among the big six publishers—very few of the books set in the West produced by major publishers are written by women. I am more likely to find books written by women from small and academic presses. I wondered if this male dominance was just a Western thing.

As I read and enjoyed books regardless of the gender of their authors, I also noticed a disturbing trend, a formula that Western books by major publishers included again and again: a depiction of horses plus violence against women in books written by men. Usually these authors are compared to Cormac McCarthy, either in the blurbs or the jacket copy. I realize it weakens my argument not to mention these books by name, but I don’t want to single out anybody, because I think each writer chose to use these elements for personal, artistic reasons, and I don’t blame any of them for it. But I just may have been a wee bit crankier in my reviews of these books.

I began to dread reading books with horses on the cover. Sure, on the outside, it’s all the pretty horses, but on the inside it’s going to be all the beaten, cowering women.

Also in the Roundup: Denver Center Theatre Company to adapt Helen Thorpe’s Just Like Us, Books Editor Tom Walker leaves the Denver Post, David Abrams writes about the thriving Idaho literary scene, and Casper College hosts its Humanities Fest.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

I like to consider myself a bargain hunter; to others, I’m just a cheap bastard. In the summer I’m a yard sale junkie. The rest of the year I haunt the area thrift shops, and the “To Give Away” section of the classifieds is frequently the first thing I read in the newspaper. So to be able to shop for used, unwanted, heavily discounted or slightly busted junk from the comfort of my second-hand computer chair is completely irresistible.

Of course I’m talking about craigslist, and I’m hopelessly addicted. Half the categories listed in the Missoula craigslist main page on my computer are highlight colored, as I click several categories daily, just to see what’s out there. Even if I’m not looking for anything specific, I wander through craigslist like it’s the local Goodwill, just looking for bargains or things I wasn’t aware I couldn’t live without.

New West Book Review

Bound Like Grass: A Memoir from the Western High Plains
By Ruth McLaughlin
University of Oklahoma Press, 184 pages,

In her tough and moving memoir Bound Like Grass, Ruth McLaughlin records her family’s history of farming wheat and cattle in Culbertson, Montana, near the North Dakota border. This book serves as an elegy and a monument—without it, there would be no remaining sign of the family’s Montana existence, and few, if anyone, would remember McLaughlin’s two deceased sisters. McLaughlin’s grandparents homesteaded in eastern Montana, her parents continued farming in a mode of spectacular frugality and grim defeat, and McLaughlin and her three siblings grew up there in the ‘50s and ‘60s, only to put as much ground between them and Culbertson as possible.

McLaughlin’s single surviving sibling, Dwight, headed to California the first chance he got, but Ruth, who now lives in Great Falls, was more bound to the land, visiting regularly even after her parents died, until someone bought the property and burned down all the structures, effectively erasing all signs that their family had ever been there. As McLaughlin puts it, “Our family had a ninety-seven-year fling here; now we are gone. Ten have been left behind, including six children, planted in two cemeteries.”

Ruth McLaughlin will read at Chapter One Books in Hamilton, Mont. on March 30.

Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

There will be trash talking, heads butting, spittle and blood flying through the air, and the meaty thump of huge bodies colliding with savage force on Sunday. And that’s just me making guacamole.

Yes, Barb and I are having a Super Bowl get-together, like we do every year. If one of our teams, the Patriots or Dolphins, is actually in the game, then the get-together becomes a party. Now, as the big game approaches, I’m concentrating on a few issues surrounding the whole shebang, and being a shirttail member of the mass media, I’m compelled to share them with you.