New West Network

My Page: Allen M. Jones

Turning the Story over to the Characters

William Kittredge is the author of The Nature of Generosity, and with Annick Smith he edited The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology. He grew up in Oregon and now lives in Missoula, where for many years he taught at the University of Montana. Upon the occasion of his newest book, The Willow Field, he was kind enough to respond to a few questions from NewWest.

[more]

Books and Writers Review

William Kittredge is a figure unique in western letters. A career built on a selection of sharp-eyed, gentle-hearted essays, memoirs, and short stories, thirty-some years spent mentoring aspiring writers at the University of Montana (his influence in this regard is incalculable), he is almost without professional peer. But he hasn't written a novel. It's been the conspicuous absence within an enormous portfolio of accomplishments. Thus, and given the esteem with which he's held by the community, it seems only natural to have approached the reading of his new novel with some measure of trepidation. Would the book live up to its own possibilities? Yes, yes, indeed yes. I finished The Willow Field a couple nights ago, turned off the reading lamp and eased back, still smelling a little fresh hay, the saddle leather and horse sweat, and thinking, "Man, it's so good, it's really goddamned good."
[more]

The Arts in Montana

Ten years ago, feed me a couple glasses of wine, one of my favorite subjects was the lamentable state of publishing in Montana. For a region with such a wealth of writers and photographers, there were so few local outlets where they could legitimately take their work. After the magazine that was paying me a salary, Big Sky Journal (founded specifically to try and fill this void) there was only the lamentable Montana Magazine with its endless photos of wildflowers and nostril shots of goats, and the intrepid but mostly irrelevant University of Montana student literary journal, Cutbank.

Since then, consider the flourishing of Montana's literary arts. A couple new perfect-bound four-color magazines, Montana Quartery and Distinctly Montana (the former an artful interpretation of a region, the latter an advertising vehicle giveaway with some decent photographs), a redesign of Montana Magazine, the admirable counterculture news source Missoula Independent, and of course, our own New West, headquartered in Missoula. And now there's Drumlummon Views, an "online journal of Montana arts and culture" spearheaded by Helena poet and editor Rick Newby.
[more]

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]

A New West Book Review

Comes down to it, coffee table books make for awkward reading material. No matter the subject, the format rarely asks for more than distracted browsing. Square like file cabinets, heavy as car batteries, you can't really curl up in bed with one of these babies. They're meant for display, not study. Exhibits A and B always come from National Geographic and Barnes & Noble. Now and then, though, you find a volume that takes full advantage of all those low printing costs in China. Serious images on glossy paper paired with passages of artful, careful text. My favorite is a brief collection of black and white boxing photos by Kurt Markus, sprinkled through with excerpts from Fat City. Some bad ass sumbitch standing there with his gold tooth and inward sneer, then that famous paragraph, "All I need's a fight and a woman. Then I'm set. I get the fight I'll get the money. I get the money I'll get the woman. There's some women that love you for yourself, but that don't last long." The words accentuate the photos, and vice-versa.

The fine new book by photographer Monte Hartman, America's 100th Meridian: A Plains Journey (Texas Tech University Press, $39.95), with an essay by William Kittredge, is of a similar species. A photographer and a writer coming to a shared subject with divergent but complementary sensibilities. [more]

Stephen King to Don Delillo, Annie Proulx to Annie Dillard

There should be a word for that particular kind of stress associated with moving. Some -itis or -enia or -obia. Packing up cardboard boxes full of your random shit and displacing it across the state, one rental to another. The last few days, having U-Hauled myself from Livingston to Helena, I've been unpacking my books. Puzzled by the new surroundings, my dog can't stop shadowing me room to room, nosing at my hip as I sit alphabetizing titles. Now and then I'll show him a spine. "Dostoyevsky. That's a pretty good one." If moving is an illness, moving paperbacks must be a kind of cancer. Merck Manual symptomology includes sore lower back and melancholia, bleary-eyes and red wine hangovers. Patient complains of angst and anomie. The doctor behind his clipboard raises a surprised eyebrow. "So you're a reader?" Indeed, and brother, we're a dying breed. Another generation or two, me and thee will have gone the way of the dodo. They'll be putting us in museums.

What I'm concerned about now, however (two glasses into a bottle of seven dollar merlot) is, for god's sake, why? Why do I have all these goddamned books? Why does anybody? They're expensive, they weigh you down, they're cumbersome. Writing them, reading them, treasuring them. This day and age, it feels antiquated. Quaint. Especially now, with all the information in the world a click and a digital beep-boop-bop away, why all these ponderous rows of bound paper? What's the illness, and what's the cure? [more]

"I don't film dreams that lack narrative drive."

Jim Harrison's tenth book of verse, Saving Daylight (Copper Canyon Press, $22), has about it all the blue collar wisdom of a Philip Levine. The political conscience of a Carolyn Forché. The finger-shock mysticism of Hopkins. Maybe a rose garden whiff of classical Keats. There's the naturalism of a Mary Oliver, the family preoccupations of early Sharon Olds. Most of all, though, there's Harrison himself. The eccentric, walleyed assuredness of a personality utterly at home with itself, a curiosity equally as willing to peak into his own garbage ("...the food / thawed in the freezer I grieved / over the five pounds of melted squid,") as into a good ontological mystery or two ("None of us is the same person as yesterday. / We finally die from the exhaustion of becoming.")
[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]

The Literary Art of War

Delia Falconer’s, The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers (Soft Skull Press, $16.00), is a historical novel about Custer the way, say, Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase is about a nude descending a staircase. The General George is one of her characters, sure. The men are all a-horseback and carrying guns, you bet. But historical specificity is very much outside her area of real interest. Cannons and encampments serve only as backdrop. No, the author here is less curious about events 130 years old than she is about certain universals of human character. Her subject is men at war, and the friendships that grow from war, and the aimless, endless daydreamings of sex, regret, and childhood that occur during war; and perhaps most of all, what it’s like to grow old after war. “The urge to urinate is constant, the results always paltry.” Her method is meta and modernist, a conflation of Woolf and Faulkner, Barth and Brecht, but her subject predates language entirely: What becomes of boys when you send them off to kill and die?
[more]