Western Publishing

Montana’s Newest Magazine

By Allen M. Jones, 7-09-05

It ain’t easy publishing a regional magazine. Unlike, say, the gossip rags (a new divorce every week) or sports magazines (always a playoff around the corner), for the regionals, there’s only so much acreage to go around. In Montana, for instance, how many 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?

Consider what’s already out there. On the sportsman’s side, there’s Montana Outdoors. Conveniently supported by state tax dollars and thus largely insulated from the demands of the marketplace, if you want to know about the latest on whirling disease, here's your go-to publication. (It always stuck in my craw – even as I was working my ass off on behalf of Big Sky Journal, trying to make it a viable business, my tax dollars were being spent in support of BSJ’s competition.) Next door, produced through the Montana Historical Society, there’s Montana: The Magazine of Western History. For more than fifty years, it’s been a staple resource for researchers, and always a feather in the hat of any academic in need of a beefier publishing vita. Commendably, it’s never aspired to more than it is – a readable (if vaguely textbookish) tribute to local history.

Further north and west, there’s Montana Living, a lifestyle magazine with occasional leanings toward current news (the current issue runs a profile of Philipsburg beside a piece on Amtrack budget cuts). In Kalispell, there’s Montana Woman, a publication devoted to (near as I can tell, and to paraphrase Truman Capote), not so much writing as typing. In Helena, of course, there’s Montana Magazine. Previously the project of backpacker Rick Graetz, since being bought up by Lee Newspapers it’s gone a little flashier, invested a little more money in art design, but it still retains an unfortunate, provincial bias toward big photos of wildflowers and portraits of “feature creatures� (bears, raccoons, whatever). In Bozeman, there’s Big Sky Journal, which in many ways sowed the seeds for the current boom.

But now, into this occasionally lamentable mix comes a bright spot, a new large format, perfect bound, coffee table lifestyle magazine called Montana Quarterly. Published by the same folks that produce the Bozeman Chronicle, this newest entry into the marketplace seems to aspire toward the same sensibility that originally fueled our efforts at BSJ. Aesthetic appreciation meets artistic interpretation. There’s all this remarkable talent in the state, and it’s such an aesthetically profound state, why isn’t anyone rubbing the two together? In the premier issue, Tom Groneberg (The Secret Life of Cowboys) comes up with a great little piece on the Yaak River Valley (vivid and original), while Scott McMillion (consistently, one of the finer writers in Montana), profiles the American Prairie Foundation as well as the revitalized M & M Bar in Butte. There’s a discussion of Billings painter Charles Fritz and an appropriately quirky expose on the nearly-famous pig racing outside of Red Lodge. A piece of fiction by Malcolm Brooks rounds out the issue, sending a clear message of commitment to a certain kind of art (anyone who publishes short stories these days needs to be given a medal).

It ain’t easy, what they’re trying to do. But as often as this state has been interpreted, and re-interpreted, photographed and sketched, lyrically disected in prose and poetry, it’s very seldom been done well. There’s always room at the top. If the first issue of Montana Quarterly is any indication, the rest of the pack is soon going to be playing catch up. Keep your fingers crossed.

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