My Page: Lynn Ingham

New West Series

I was a young and naïve adventurer when I first left Montana for the Big City years ago. I was afraid but I was much more curious, and it didn’t take much encouragement for one summer internship at San Francisco Magazine to turn into a professional life spending more than two decades away. During those years, I lived in two major cities (San Francisco, San Diego), a few storied towns/suburbs (Tiburon, Sausalito, Los Gatos, La Jolla), one house, many apartments and a cabin in the Santa Cruz mountains. I had a few roommates, male and female, and I finally found happiness living alone with cats. (Lots of city people find happiness living alone with cats: epic and/or epidemic, you be the judge.)

Through it all, I missed my Rocky Mountain people.

It was an undercurrent, and the missing of them took many guises (denial among them), but the truth is that I always felt a little bit way down deep that I had run away from home. To some wonderful places, places with some wonderful people, no question about that, but it was always quite clear to me that I was not at home. While I was happy to tell people that I mostly lived in San Francisco, because it truly is a fantastic place to live, I always added a note: But I am originally from Montana.

New West Series

When I first moved back home to Montana last year, people encouraged me to write about the experience. A year later, I finally understand why I couldn’t do that at the time.

It has taken a full year – a cycle through four very distinct seasons – to combat the writer’s block that paralyzed me from this simple task. It’s a strange thing, this connection to the land that drew me home. It informs everything I think, and it informs everything I do. It has such a hold on me that it required a year of penitence (for ever leaving in the first place) before it loosened its grip and my pen. What I finally realized is that, in order to leave in the first place, I had to shut off a part of my spirit to find the courage to go.

But it has worked on me, this year and this land, and now my finally-addressed heartbreak of the first leaving, the first loss, so many years ago, has begun to heal. I am not sorry I left and yet I now understand the full toll that the leave-taking exacted on my psyche and my spirit.

Publisher's Note

Calling all entrepreneurs! New West is offering a chance for you to bring your business or new business ideas to a newly scheduled “pitch practice session” at the New West Festival in May in Missoula. Trevor Loy, General Manager of Flywheel Ventures in New Mexico, has agreed to extend his speaking engagement to include a session for entrepreneurs and budding entrepreneurs who would like to hone their skills pitching to a major venture capital firm that is actively seeking new opportunities in the Rocky Mountain West.

While this is not a formal pitch session, if you are chosen to participate, you’ll get to experience the joy of selling the “elevator pitch” to the money guys, and you will get valuable feedback on your pitch, your ideas and your business plan that will help to prepare you for the more formal pitch opportunities in your future. 

A few days ago, a friend was describing to me her experience coming around a dark corner late one evening on a two-lane highway near Missoula.  As she rounded the corner, she had to screech to a halt to avoid hitting what she described as a large elk standing in the roadway and nearly unrecognizable against the black of the night.  She did halt without mishap, thankfully, and then her next words were so exquisite.  She said, “It was such a privilege to see that beautiful animal up so close.”

It was such a privilege.

That sentence resonated for days as I thought about how many other reactions many people I know may have had (some unprintable here).  But not people who live, like I do, in the mountains, overlooking the lakes or near the creeks of the rural Rockies.  Most of these hard-to-describe die-hard Rocky Mountain folks find the experience (even in a near-collision on a dark highway) of seeing one of the most beautiful animals on earth up close to be a privilege.

Publisher's Note

As the year draws to an end, we wish our New West readers and contributors a wonderful holiday season. We have many new things in the works for the site, which we’ll share in the upcoming months. Between now and then, we encourage you to use the new buttons at the top of the page to follow us on Facebook, on Twitter or via RSS feeds—your choice(s)!

A Note From The Publisher

As the year draws to a close, the New West team would like to wish you a very happy holiday season. It has been a challenging and exciting year for us here, and we suspect it has been the same for many of you. Congratulations on surviving and thriving, and for reading or contributing to our ongoing evolution and discussion of life in the Rocky Mountain states. And thank you for making New West a part of your day.

During the year, I have kept you posted on significant changes (new funding, new editor, new Snowblog section, upcoming redesign), but you may have missed some of the more subtle business- or technology-related additions to the site. As we at New West find ourselves in the midst of the changing journalistic landscape, and as we examine ways to make New West grow in audience size and to make it a more sustainable business, we are embracing new business partners and solutions that support our efforts.

Reporting From Butte

When I packed up to leave San Francisco this spring to finally, finally come home to Montana, I had to explain myself to friends, both personal and professional. It wasn’t that they couldn’t understand the draw to go home, and it wasn’t that anyone who knew anything about Montana would fail to understand why this gorgeous piece of country has such a hold on me, even after all the years away. Those things were clear enough.

The central question, then, was “Why now?”

The two days I spent this week in my hometown of Butte for the 2010 Economic Development Summit – shared, by the way, with leaders of the global business world, not just leaders of Montana business – demonstrated to me personally why the time is now.

Besides the fact that I found a wonderful opportunity to lead Missoula-based NewWest.Net into its second five years with a plan to make it economically sustaining, I also had this vision--now I know it’s shared-- that the Rocky Mountain West is ready for a new phase of growth and development that is exciting, interesting, stimulating and sometimes even fun and surprising.

The growth is not centered on any one aspect. Rather, it’s centered on myriad factors, including the difficulty of the economic climate locally, nationally, globally. In the midst of what we now know was a true recession, I began to wonder about the future. My future, your future, everyone’s future. What I know about my fellow Montanans is a truly old adage: When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

That was clear at this summit. Montana people are truly reflective of the Rocky Mountain Western spirit of rugged individualism. More than one from an impressive list of speakers noted that the summit’s tagline--Montana Solutions for Montana Jobs--said as much as the summit itself. This was not an audience looking for a handout. This was an audience truly engaged in doing business or supporting business in the region, a widely-varied and downright interesting audience looking for a reason to be optimistic. An audience determined to move the needle on business development, no matter what the odds.