New West Network

My Page: Allen M. Jones

A Profile in Poetry

When he's in Montana, the poet and novelist Jim Harrison does most of his work in a shed behind his refurbished farmhouse. The house itself is tastefully done up in arts and crafts, arrangements of hardwoods and mirrors and original art; his writing space, however, could have come from impoverished Mexico, Argentina, the Balkans. Some mountain village still ten years away from electricity. There's a sleeping cot (quilts piled up in a wad) and a good-sized desk. A corkboard of photos and shelves full of personal totems. Little else. It's the room of a writer leery of all distraction save memory. [more]

Fiction's Fourth Estate

By and large, there are three sorts of writers: The misfortunates who have sacrificed everything for their art (the Lowrys of the world, the Sextons); the mean average (with their bitter stories about publicists); and the fortunate few for whom, when a deck of cards is tossed high, all the aces flop face up (Foer, Franzen).

But maybe there's a fourth category as well. I’m thinking now about those famous writers who have nevertheless not done as well as they perhaps deserve. Rilke never won a Nobel, for instance. Up here in Montana, you read Thomas McGuane and you can't help but feel a dose of indignation on the author's behalf. As successful as he is, it still feels like there should be more. Where are the major awards, for instance? His is a career that's been built on essays (An Outside Chance, Some Horses), a few screenplays (Rancho Deluxe, The Missouri Breaks, Tom Horn), and a portfolio of fictions that, taken together (Panama, Nobody's Angel, Nothing but Blue Sky), float him up into the most rarefied kind of literary air. Surely he's due another ace or two. There are so few American writers who can make you laugh even as they're breaking your heart.

Maybe it's time. His newest book, a collection of ten short stories called Gallatin Canyon, contains moments nearly as fine as anything he has written, and if there are soft spots, they serve only to emphasize the soundness of the larger whole.

Editor's Note: Click here to read Hal Herring's interview with McGuane. [more]

New West Book Review

They don't make writers like David James Duncan anymore. A novelist (The Brothers K, The River Why) and essayist / fly-fisherman (My Story as Told by Water), screenwriter (the documentary Trout Grass), academic lecturer and environmental activist, the guy's been all over the map, a regular road show of impassioned curiosity. Unsurprisingly, then, his newest book, the wonderful God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right (Triad, Books, $22.95), tends to resist comfortable categories. An important book, absolutely; a fierce and polarizing call to arms, you bet; a tender tribute to his cohorts in the fight, no question. But, really... what is it?

As published by The Triad Institute, if you had to boil out the common themes from God Laughs & Plays (essays, interviews, parables), you would tend to arrive at sensibilities rather than ideas. These writings are all about wonder and mysticism, pity and anger and love, they're about doing what you can -- doing anything -- in the face of impending environmental, political and spiritual catastrophe. [more]

Painting, Writing, Cooking...

Montana artist and publisher, Russell Chatham, upon the occasion of two new releases from his book house, Clark City Press (For All Time by Helen Claypool, and Mile High Mile Deep by Richard K. O'Malley), recently took the time to answer some questions from New West. [more]

Poetry and the Arts

Montana’s Governor Brian Schweitzer today announced his appointment of Sandra Alcosser as Montana’s first poet laureate. “The arts are an important part of Montana,� said Governor Schweitzer. “Our heritage, our lives and our unique way of life in this great state are often expressed through poetry. This is a unique opportunity to bring poetry to the people of Montana. Alcosser has a strong commitment to promoting poetry and writing around Montana. It is an honor to have Sandra Alcosser as Montana’s first poet laureate.� [more]

Western Publishing

It ain’t easy publishing a regional magazine. Unlike, say, the gossip rags (a new divorce every week) or sports magazines (always a fresh playoff series around the corner), for the regionals, there’s only so much material to go around. Here in Montana, for instance, how many fly-fishing photo essays on the Big Horn River do you really need? Or how about a road trip to the Bucking Horse Sale? Covered it twice already. Or we could always use something on grizzly bear safety. What the hell, grizzly bears sell. With more than half a dozen Montana themed magazines on the newsstand, each one tramping back and forth across the same tired territory, how do you come up with a new vision of things? A new angle?
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Book Store News

From our friend Barbara Theroux, we’ve learned that Montana author Jeanette Ingold will soon be visiting Barbara’s independent book store in Missoula, Fact & Fiction. A specialist in historical fiction aimed at the young adult market, Ingold’s books nevertheless have lessons for all ages.
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New West Book Reviews

Odds on, you already know about Russell Chatham. Painter, publisher, restaurateur, the guy’s everywhere. His lithographs and original oils (with their distinctive, Piazonni-influenced palettes) have informed an entire generation of Western artists and writers. A cottage industry unto himself, if he closed shop tomorrow half of Southern Montana would be going on relief. Genial and distracted, paint-spattered and graying, a generous nose tillered off twenty degrees to starboard, there’s little about the guy himself to suggest the wide tide of his influence. [more]

A New West Book Review

Mention the Yellowstone wolves in a certain kind of bar and it’s like turning on the propane, striking a match. A hot-button, emotionalized topic start to finish, it’s been the western equivalent of stem cell research, abortion rights. Everybody has an opinion, and everybody’s an expert. Stirred into this roiling stew of outfitters versus biologists, locals versus tourists, comes the newest bone, Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone. Co-authored by biologist Douglas W. Smith, current head of the Yellowstone Wolf Recovery Project, and award-winning nature writer Gary Ferguson, it is, more than anything else, a soothing, well-considered exercise in scientific moderation and vivid, narrative description [more]

A New West Review

Comes down to it, the literature of the West is a literature of landscape. Any regional book worth its boards and binding inevitably considers, on some level, a particular stretch of horizon. Topography as metaphor, deserts within and without, that sort of thing. Paleontologist Lowell Dingus’ heartfelt paean to the Missouri River Breaks, Hell Creek, Montana: America’s Key to the Prehistoric Past, is an unapologetic exercise in landscape-love, and finally a fine edition to Montana's literature of place. [more]