Missoula News

SHARING THE RESPONSIBILITY

Two days ago on my morning trip down to the coffee shop to get a little wisdom at the ORG (Old Retired Guys) Table, a driver blasted right through a stop sign and almost made it my last day on a bicycle. So what did I do?

Two things. First, since I ended up about five feet from the driver’s window, I did not yell or make obscene gestures, not even any dagger eyes, Instead, I waved and smiled and tried to give him my best “no worries, we all make mistakes” look. Second, I decided to write this commentary--and the “other side” for next week.

I’ve already written several columns about the prickly relationship between cyclists and motorists sharing our public roadways, but today, I’m talking directly to cyclists, not motorists. 

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Western Book Roundup

Raise your hand if you’ve ever taken a creative writing class.  Keep your hand raised if you ever wrote a poem while in class that ended up being published in the New Yorker. Everyone’s hands should have gone down now except for that of one very talented University of Idaho MFA poetry student, Ciara Shuttleworth.

Robert Wrigley recently asked his MFA poetry students to study sestinas, which, according to Wikipedia, are “highly structured poem(s) consisting of six six-line stanzas followed by a tercet (called its envoy or tornada), for a total of thirty-nine lines.” Sounds complicated, but Ms. Shuttleworth and probably Eminem can do it.

Wrigley assigned his class to read a sestina by Lloyd Schwartz that consisted of only six words repeated in different patterns. After the class moved on to another poem, Shuttleworth wrote her own sestina, which also uses six words repeated seven times each.  She revised her poem, sent it into the New Yorker, and the editors accepted it for publication this fall. 

I am curious to read it, so I’ll look out for it and let everybody know when it turns up in the magazine.

• Benjamin Percy recently announced on Twitter that Iowa State’s MFA program in Creative Writing and the Environment just hired Rick Bass as affiliate faculty.  Percy, who also teaches at Iowa State, reported, “He’ll visit each year, serve as thesis advisor, and host students in Yaak.”

Also in the Roundup: The Tattered Cover in the news, how to read New West’s book page on your Kindle, and the new issue of Alaska Quarterly Review features some western writers.

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Special Report

Not a lot has changed in Montana’s rural Potomac Valley over the years. And that’s just fine for many of the multi-generational ranching families whose livelihoods are tied to this expanse of waving grass and trees drained by the lower Blackfoot River northeast of Missoula.

Today, just as it was nearly a century ago, the Potomac is a working landscape.

But faced with the possibility of large-scale changes sweeping across this broad valley and on to the low and rounded Garnet Range to the south, the valley’s ranchers did something that may surprise some. They got behind the transfer of tens of thousands of private acres in the Garnets—lands they’ve grazed their cattle on and cut timber from for decades—to the state of Montana.

The Potomac ranchers faced a stark set of choices. Either accept a future where their access to prime grazing lands is threatened by residential development or embrace an alternative that keeps the landscape whole.

So, in a place where politics generally fall on the conservative side of the spectrum, they backed the state’s purchase of most of the range’s north-facing slopes. The handwriting was on the wall, said Denny Iverson, a longtime rancher and logger from the Potomac. 

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New West Book Review

God, Seed:  Poetry & Art About the Natural World
By Rebecca Foust and Lorna Stevens
Tebot Bach Press, 85 pages, $20.00

God, Seed sings the delights of nature, from lovers in “the cricket-sung, grass-sweet dark” to “sunlight/churned by the bees,” and eating fruit, “where sun/has lain, juicy/with rain.” Rebecca Foust’s language is sensual and sound-rich—the words almost have texture in the mouth, like persimmons “with rich river pudding, plush and pulp/soft-slide swallow delight/and sweet, sweet.” Many of the poems are paired with Lorna Stevens’ images (twenty-nine, in a range of media). Like the poems, her images are vivid and precise.  They don’t so much illustrate the poems as complement them.

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Bob Wire Classic™

It’s summer in Montana (as it seems to be in most of the U.S.), so we go outside. I spend the winter huddled in front of the TV, watching NFL and Jeopardy. Then when the snow melts I take all that bottled up aggression and trivial knowledge into the Great Outdoors and get right with Old Man Mother Nature.

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MISSOURI RIVER WALLEYES--AND MORE

Now I know what I’ve been missing every time I sped through Loma, Montana, on my way to somewhere else. This sleepy little ranching and farming community, located 55 miles north of Great Falls on U.S. Highway 87, is a gateway to some fast-action fishing like you probably have never experienced--catching a variety of warm-water species on a free-flowing section of the Mighty Mo.

To call it “diverse” might an understatement. In our first hole, for example, we quickly caught five fish, all different species. At the same time, all around us, we could soak in the incredible diversity of flora and fauna and the unspoiled scenery of this still wild stretch of the Missouri River.

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