"Blind Your Ponies" by Stanley Gordon West

Through this week of the New Orleans disaster, which I did not ignore, I was grateful to be reading “Blind Your Ponies” by Stanley Gordon West. Best sellers these days are often downers -- or else total escapist “bling romance.” But “Blind Your Ponies” is a warm, dramatic, pull-up-your-socks community story full of laughs. Happening in the real town of Willow Creek, which is a half-hour from Livingston (one of the major literary capitals in the state), this is a basketball story except that it’s not. The plot line is a basketball story about “going to state” with a tiny, motley team, but what’s important is what happens along the way -- typical of most pilgrimages. But this is not Canterbury Tales -- it’s safe to read to junior high school classes.

The “meta-story” about how the book came to be, in spite of all the contemporary obstacles to publishing, is also absorbing, though I know little about it so far. Stan West gave up on modern international publishing venues because they gave up on him. One of the important things he knows, as do all of us who fight uphill battles, is that when an organization gets so big and so focussed on share-holder profits, they become committed to a narrow track that makes them vulnerable in the end and leaves the field open to innovation. Someone said to me long ago, “if you see bars in your way, then look between the bars. The space is always there and the spaces belong to the free.” It’s like grass growing up in the cracks in the sidewalk. This is West’s message and method together. He has made self-publishing work, partly by the quality of the story and partly by energy and determination.

Experienced authors and observers say that it is pretty easy to physically make a book -- companies will do that well, even design an excellent cover. All you need is a bit of money. Companies will also do distribution: some publishers now contract with other publishers to sort and mail orders. Distribution companies might have specialties, for instance, watching for excellent books about Native Americans and keeping them on hand because they know customers will be interested. Of course, now Amazon and the many used book distributors online (Abebooks.com and Alibris.com) make distribution even easier.

The hardest part is getting people to know the book exists so they can ask for it, to aspire to read it and own it. How are all those basketball-nut kids going to find out about “Blind Your Ponies?” and where to get it? When Vine Deloria, Jr. was talking to his publisher about one of his fabulously popular books defending Indian space (the BEST space between the bars is in your head) he asked, off-hand, how many copies they would be sending to his homeland Sioux reservations. “None!” replied the surprised publisher. “We don’t send books to reservations. They have no bookstores. Maybe they don’t read.” It’s a circle: if there are no books there, they can’t read them.

When Dale Burk came up against this attitude in regard to the hunting and fishing books he publishes, he saw the spaces and went for them: tackle shops, sporting goods stores, gas stations near hunting and fishing locations. That’s where his books sell dependably.

I don’t really understand basketball jargon, “pick and roll” and all that, so I hardly knew what was going on during the game-thick tournament last chapters, but I understand people and by late in the book they had become so real that I’d have struggled through -- um, geometry equations? -- to find out how it would end. Now that I’ve had such a great time with this story, I’m wanting to promote it. It’s a people’s book and word of mouth will probably carry it to success. What am I worrying about? They’ve had to make a new printing every year! There aren’t even any cheap used copies floating around.

The hardships that freeze and separate the people of Willow Creek are quite real -- I recognized a couple from the Montana newspapers. Someone makes a small mistake and suddenly the Abyss of Despair and Self-Hatred yawns at their feet -- children die, women are maimed, men sink into alcoholism, and so on. West handles these things with dignity but he is firm about the necessity and the reality of hard work. “Jump for it!” he urges us, through his surrogates.

Another element to the meta-story is the way Stan learned his craft. He began as a Lutheran pastor, the same as I observed an apprenticeship as a Unitarian Universalist minister. When one learns to write by preaching, the audience is right there reacting. I have a book about how Thoreau wrote: he went for long walks (check), he carried scraps of paper and wrote down little phrases to remind him of what he saw (check), when he got home he sat up late and wrote them into a journal, expanding the brief phrases (oh -- well, I come back sleepy...), then later when he chose a topic he returned to his journals and went through to find all references that were relevant (sounds like work), then he wrote his early drafts (okay) and went on the lecture circuit to deliver them to a paying audience (omigosh). THEN he came home to carefully revise according to those faces in the audience and comments afterwards (what?). That’s what was published. It was damn good.

Someone wrote a reaction to West’s book saying that he should drop the “writer’s classes” series of similies. First of all, writer’s workshops are death on similies. The ones I’ve been to are still into minimalism -- maybe there’s been a change. But part of this book’s charm is that it’s just a little bit over the top in a self-aware way. One of the gooney-bird youngsters on the team never understands the metaphors of basketball play. Yell “take it to the bank!” and he looks around for the bank. (There’s also a tall Norsky who talks like Yoda, but he catches on.)

The funniest similies have to do with the love affair between the coach, Sam, and the biology teacher who’s a bit of a hippie and certainly “green.” She’s an “orchard.” She’s a... Well, stuff about sex always sounds silly out of context. But then it struck me that this was the Song of Solomon, all those great fruit and flower images. This is not an unconscious writer.

The parallel growing intimacy is between a grandmother and her grandson, whom she barely knows in the beginning. This time the fun is in the goofy practical jokes they play on each other. The grandmother seems like a hill-billy eccentric character until the reader finds out what her tragedies were and we find them out as she reveals herself, little by little, to her grandson. That’s how intimacy and trust grow.

You can’t keep a good story down and this is a peach, an orchard, that I hope will take Stan West to the bank.