by barbara theroux
photo by kurt wilson

This fall, two organizations that honor and promote authors and literature of the West will present conferences in Missoula from Oct. 5-8: the Western Literature Association and the Humanities Montana Festival of the Book.

The Western Literature Association is a nonprofit, scholarly association that promotes the study of the diverse literature and cultures of the North American West, past and present.

This year’s recipient of the WLA Distinguished Achievement Award for an influential scholar in the field of western American literature (creative writer or critic) is Thomas McGuane.

For the 12th straight year, the Humanities Montana Festival of the Book will bring together the region’s finest writers to celebrate reading and writing in one of the Inland Northwest’s biggest cultural events. The participating authors and presenters list expands during the months of preparation to well over 75 names.

Here are some of authors to be feted at October’s event:

“Driving Home: An American Journey” 

by Jonathan Raban

For more than 30 years, Jonathan Raban has written with infectious fascination about people and places in transition or on the margins, about journeys undertaken and destinations never quite reached, and, as an Englishman transplanted in America, about what it means to belong, to feel rooted.
The essays in “Driving Home” span two decades as Raban charts a course through the Pacific Northwest, American history and current events. Stops en route include a Missoula bar, a tea party convention in Nashville hosted by Sarah Palin, the Mississippi River in full flood, a trip to Hawaii with his daughter, a steelhead river in the Cascades, and the hidden corners of his adopted hometown, Seattle.

He deftly explores public and personal spaces, poetry and politics, geography and catastrophe, art and economy, and the shifts in various arenas that define our society. Whether the topic is Robert Lowell or Barack Obama, or how various painters, explorers and homesteaders have engaged with our mythical and actual landscape, Raban has an outsider’s eye for the absurd, and his tone is intimate, never nostalgic, and always fresh.

“This Is Not the Ivy League” 

by Mary Clearman Blew

Mary Clearman Blew’s education began at home, on a remote cattle ranch in Montana. She graduated to a one-room rural school, then escaped, via scholarship, to the University of Montana, where, still in her teens, she met and married her first husband.

“This Is Not the Ivy League” is her account of what it was to be that girl, and then that woman-pressured by husband and parents to be the conventional wife of the 1950s, persisting in her pursuit of an education, trailed by a reluctant husband and small children through graduate school, and finally entering the job market with a doctorate in English only to find a whole new set of pressures and prejudices. This memoir is Blew’s behind-the-scenes account of pursuing a career at a time when a woman’s place in the world was supposed to have limits.

“West of Here”

by Jonathan Evison

On the westernmost edge of the American continent lies a rugged alpine wilderness of virgin timber and free-flowing rivers choked with endless runs of sockeye and steelhead. Since the dawn of recorded history, the Klallam Indians have thrived upon the bounty of the Elwha River.

In 1889, on the eve of Washington’s statehood, the Olympic Peninsula remains America’s last frontier. At the foot of the Elwha River, the crude and muddy outpost of Port Bonita is about to boom, unified only in their visions of a more prosperous future that impels the damming of the mighty Elwha to harness its power.

More than a century later, the great Thronburgh Dam is marked for demolition, having blocked the very lifeline that could have sustained the town. Evison has written a grand and playful odyssey, a multilayered saga of destiny and greed, adventure and passion.

The novel develops as a kind of conversation between two epochs, one rushing blindly toward the future and the other struggling to undo the damage of the past. “West of Here” chronicles the life of one small town, turning America’s history into myth, and myth into a nation’s shared experience.

“Driving Home: An American Journey” 

by Jonathan Raban

For more than 30 years, Jonathan Raban has written with infectious fascination about people and places in transition or on the margins, about journeys undertaken and destinations never quite reached, and, as an Englishman transplanted in America, about what it means to belong, to feel rooted.

The essays in “Driving Home” span two decades as Raban charts a course through the Pacific Northwest, American history and current events. Stops en route include a Missoula bar, a tea party convention in Nashville hosted by Sarah Palin, the Mississippi River in full flood, a trip to Hawaii with his daughter, a steelhead river in the Cascades, and the hidden corners of his adopted hometown, Seattle.

He deftly explores public and personal spaces, poetry and politics, geography and catastrophe, art and economy, and the shifts in various arenas that define our society. Whether the topic is Robert Lowell or Barack Obama, or how various painters, explorers and homesteaders have engaged with our mythical and actual landscape, Raban has an outsider’s eye for the absurd, and his tone is intimate, never nostalgic, and always fresh.

“The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times, and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon”

by William M. Adler

In 1914, Joe Hill was convicted of murder in Utah and sentenced to death by firing squad, igniting international controversy. Many believed Hill was innocent, condemned for his association with the Industrial Workers of the World-the radical Wobblies.

Hill’s gripping tale is set against a brief but electrifying moment in American history, between the century’s turn and World War I, when the call for industrial unionism struck a deep chord among disenfranchised workers; when class warfare raged and capitalism was on the run.

“The Man Who Never Died” does justice to Hill’s extraordinary life and its controversial end. Drawing on extensive new evidence, Adler deconstructs the case against his subject and argues convincingly for the guilt of another man. Reading like a murder mystery, and set against the background of the raw, turn-of-the-century West, this essential American story will make news and expose the roots of critical contemporary issues.

“Once Upon a River”

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Bonnie Jo Campbell has created an unforgettable heroine in 16-year-old Margo Crane, a beauty whose unflinching gaze and uncanny ability with a rifle have not made her life any easier. After the violent death of her father, in which she is complicit, Margo takes to the Stark River in her boat, with only a few supplies and a biography of Annie Oakley, in search of her vanished mother.

But the river, Margo’s childhood paradise, is a dangerous place for a young woman traveling alone, and she must be strong to survive, using her knowledge of the natural world and her ability to look unsparingly into the hearts of those around her. Her river odyssey through rural Michigan becomes a defining journey, one that leads her beyond self-preservation and to the decision of what price she is willing to pay for her choices.

“Real Common Sense”

by Brian Kahn

In “Real Common Sense,” Home Ground public radio host, Brian Kahn faces up to America’s critical problems-and then shows how the principles and values of America’s Founders can provide the moral compass we need to turn things around.

In easy-to-read, common sense language, he shows how we have gone off course as a country, emphasizing consumerism over citizenship, entertainment over education, “me” over “we.” It’s time to cut through the rhetoric, smoke, and spin, and get back to our core American values. By reconnecting with our founding American principles, he argues, we can create a future worthy of our grandchildren. By rediscovering the moral compass our Founders put into place, we can create a united America, and a future worthy of our grandchildren.

“West of 98: Living and Writing the New American West,”

edited by Lynn Stegner and Russell Rowland

What does it mean to be a Westerner? With all the mythology that has grown up about the American West, is it even possible to describe “how it was, how it is, here, in the West?”

Stegner and Rowland invited several dozen members of the Western literary tribe to write about living in the West and being a Western writer in particular.

“West of 98” gathers 66 literary testimonies, in essays and poetry, from a stellar collection of writers who represent every state west of the 98th parallel.

In “West of 98,” Western writers speak to the ways in which the West imprints itself on the people who live there, as well as how the people of the West create the personality of the region. The writers explore the Western landscape – how it has been revered and abused across centuries–and the inescapable limitations its aridity puts on all dreams of conquest and development.

They dismantle the boosterism of manifest destiny and the cowboy and mountain man ethos of every-man-for-himself, and show instead how we must create new narratives of cooperation if we are to survive in this spare and beautiful country.

“L.A. Mental”

by Neil McMahon

For psychologist Tom Crandall, the city of Los Angeles seems to be going insane, plagued by a series of strange events that extend to his own life as well. Not only did his drug-addled brother, Nick, nearly jump to his death over a Malibu cliff. He’s been blackmailing members of his wealthy family, including brother-in-law Paul, who is financing a movie by a mysterious company called Parallax Productions.

Determined to find the truth, Tom heads to the surreal film set in the valley, where he meets Parallax head Gunnar Kelso, a former physicist with odd theories about power and human behavior. Though everything seems normal, something isn’t right. The more Tom digs into Nick’s breakdown, the more he learns about Parallax and the enigmatic Kelso.

Parallax, it seems, has dark ambitions that extend beyond Hollywood, deep into the highest levels of government. Caught in a terrifying conspiracy that threatens his own sanity, Tom must find a way expose the truth before it’s too late.

“The Voice of the River”

by Melanie Rae Thon

Seventeen-year-old Kai Dionne and his dog Talia are missing. The search for these two spans a single day, from the time Kai leaps in a half-frozen river to save the dog to the hour he and Talia are recovered. Each person who comes to the river brings his or her secret needs and desires; each has known loss, and all are survivors: a homeless boy tries to find himself, his lost twin, his double; a childless mother grieves for her son and daughter; a man who shot his father recalls a tender, intimate night when the father was kind, not afraid or angry. Kai and Talia belong to, and are loved by, a whole community. As strangers work together toward a single cause, they become family-bound by love not only to the ones lost, but to all who gather.

“The Feast Day of Fools”

by James Lee Burke

Celebrated crime master and two-time Edgar Award winner James Lee Burke returns with his 30th novel, a gorgeously crafted, brutally resonant chronicle of violence along the Texas-Mexico border.

Sheriff Hackberry Holland patrols a small Southwest Texas border town, meting out punishment and delivering justice in his small square of this magnificent but lawless land. When an alcoholic ex-boxer named Danny Boy Lorca begs to be locked up after witnessing a man tortured to death by a group of bandits, Hack and his deputy, Pam Tibbs, slowly extract the Indian man’s gruesome tale.

It becomes clear that the desert contains a multitude of criminals, including serial murderer Preacher Jack Collins (whom The New York Times Book Review called “one of Burke’s most inspired villains”).

The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference of Middlebury College sponsors the Bakeless Literary Publication Prizes, an annual book series competition for new authors of literary works in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. The Bakeless Prizes, named for Middlebury College supporter Katharine Bakeless Nason, were established in order to support emerging writers.

Winners of the Bakeless Prizes will have their book-length manuscripts published by Graywolf Press. Two of the 2010 winners have Montana connections and both authors will be part of the Humanities Montana Festival of the Book.
They are:

“American Masculine: Stories"

by Shann Ray, winner of the 2010 Bakeless Prize for Fiction

The American West has long been a place where myth and legend have flourished. Where men stood tall and lived rough. But that West is no more.

In its place, Shann Ray finds washed-up basketball players, businessmen hiding addictions, and women fighting the inexplicable violence that wells up in these men. A son struggles to accept his father’s apologies after surviving a childhood of beatings. Two men seek empty basketball hoops on a snowy night, hoping to relive past glory. A bull rider skips town and rides herd on an unruly mob of passengers as he searches for a thief on a train threading through Montana’s Rocky Mountains.

Shann Ray Ferch grew up in Alaska and Montana, and lived on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in southeast Montana.

“Beautiful Unbroken: One Nurse’s Life”

by Mary Jane Nealon, winner of the 2010 Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction

As a child, Mary Jane Nealon dreamed of growing up to become a saint or, failing that, a nurse. She idolized Clara Barton, Kateri Tekakwitha and Molly Pitcher, whose biographies she read and reread. But by the time she follows her calling to nursing school, her beloved younger brother is diagnosed with cancer, which challenges her to bring hope and healing closer to home. His death leaves her shattered, and she flees into her work, and into poetry.

“Beautiful Unbroken” details Nealon’s life of caregiving, from her years as a flying nurse, untethered and free to follow friends and jobs from the Southwest to Savannah, to more somber years in New York City, treating men in a homeless shelter on the Bowery and working in the city’s first AIDS wards. In this compelling and revealing memoir, Nealon brings a poet’s sensitivity to bear on the hard truths of disease and recovery, life and death. She currently works at Partnership Health Center in Missoula.

Many volunteers and supporters help make the Humanities Montana Festival a success. I salute you all and encourage everyone to become involved. Fact & Fiction Downtown is one of four bookstores that have worked with the Festival Committee during the past 12 years. It is an honor to work with the booksellers from Shakespeare & Co, Barnes & Noble and Fact & Fiction On Campus.

Barbara Theroux is manager of Face & Fiction Downtown and a regular contributor to Missoula magazine and the Missoulian newspaper. Kurt Wilson is photography editor of the Missoulian.