GREAT FALLS FESTIVAL OF THE BOOK

The Great Falls Festival of the Book was May 3, 4, and 5. The first two events were evening readings and I don’t drive at night anymore, so I only attended Saturday and didn’t get up early enough to be there for the Student Authors, who I’m told were EXCELLENT, so I’m regretful.

The afternoon featured three groups of authors, the first being a group of two: Doug and Andrea Peacock, who talked, read from “The Essential Grizzly -- The Mingled Fates of Men and Bears,” and showed old footage of real grizzes Doug knew well enough to name. (I don’t know how he got away with the politically incorrect “MEN” in the title of the book.) Doug is irresistible in his passionate advocacy of grizzes and his footage, esp. the long sequences of Happy Bear sitting in half-frozen ponds and playing with broken ice or the riveting spots where bears came right up to him and he kept filming only so “my survivors would know which bear finally ate me.” But things don’t look good for the whole world and he says that he’s stopped telling high school audiences the truth about human and bear prospects. Too scary and they’re too young for despair. Andrea said that to keep peace in the home she and Doug divvied up the writing thus: he gets the bears and she gets the “men.” With a background in journalism (she was once the editor of the Missoula Independent), she’s a skillful researcher and interviewer. It works out very well.



Then came three authors from “Montana Women Writers -- A Geography of the Heart”. Caroline Patterson is an editor at Farcountry Press in Helena, a former Stegner Fellow, and has many other notches in her belt. She is the editor of this anthology.

Ruth McLaughlin recently completed her memoir “Bound Like Grass” and read from a chapter about her sister who was challenged in some way not mental and rather baffling (maybe Asperger’s?) that provoked cruelty from others. Ruth was only beginning this book when I first heard her read and the change in her now is amazing. She seems bold, confident and much younger!

Third was Deirdre McNamer, who has also changed since the first time I heard her read in Kalispell from “Rima in the Weeds” in 1991. I went with my mother’s cousin and her daughter and the reading was a bit risque. (My mother’s cousin was the least shocked -- she said that when she was a beautician in a small town, she did the hair of all the prostitutes and had already heard everything.) Deirdre has been on the New York scene a while and is now quite cosmopolitan, confident, but a little stooped. A new novel, her fourth, “Red Rover,” is on the way. Montanans might have seen an early excerpt in the online magazine “Drumlummon.”

The last set of readings (at no point were there panel discussions or other interaction -- few questions from the audience) was focussed on historical writing. Sam Phillips had gotten interested in hunters who died in the field by misadventure, murder, suicide and pure stupidity. There was so much material that he compiled it all into a book, “Dying to Hunt,” reflecting on the statistics as he is trained to do. You’ll be happy to know that there are far fewer deaths these days and most of them are due to heart attacks or drowning. Stupidity (liking pulling your gun out of the vehicle with the barrel pointed at your gut) is yielding somewhat to hunter safety courses. His new book is “Hanging Around Montana,” about the 240 plus documented instances which include seventy-some legal hangings and a lot of lynchings. His method is clearly dispassionate reflection on the macabre.

Sam Phillips read to us a mosaic from his case study of a very bad man who made trouble and headlines repeatedly until he finally hung himself in his prison cell to avoid an officially imposed demise. "Lone Wolf in the Promised Land." In the end we were left with a panorama of a time when only the scramblers survived -- though probably the ones who did it legally had more long-lasting success.

Lee Rostad, a Fullbright Scholar, a rancher, Chair Emeritus of the Board for the Montana Historical Society, was the final author to read and told us the story of her recovery of Grace Stone Coates from retirement oblivion as well as, along the way, Margaret Bell’s horrifying memoir. "An Alien Land." Through careful tracking and caring conversation with Coates herself, she quietly made discovery after discovery, opening a door into lost history.

As the readers came and went, so also did the audience. When Doug was reading, big hearty outdoor types leaned forward in their chairs. When we got to the women readers, they fled. But a new set of men, older and maybe bookish, filtered in for the hangings and robberies. A core of women remained throughout -- not young, not old, clearly dedicated readers -- the kind who show up at their book clubs having actually read the book. At one point several handsome thirtyish men arrived during the afternoon break -- including Pete Fromm who lives in Great Falls -- and stood around for a short while, then left. Maybe they went of have a beer together and make some REAL talk.

At one point I saw that one of these young men was frankly eavesdropping on my account of the vicissitudes of producing Bob’s biography and I ought to have invited him into the conversation, but didn’t. I was talking to Penny Briant-Hughes, a professor at the University of Great Falls who once evaluated my classes at Heart Butte and netted me an award from the National Council of Teachers of English -- though that didn’t save my job. Also in the conversation was Paul Stephens, a cranky leftist who knows me from my Unitarian circuit-riding days. A faithful non-conformist, Paul is so sharp-minded and independent that the insecure flee from him. Yet he never resorts to the kind of shameful tactics of our state representatives this year and his facts are always in order. Don Marble, another Unitaran sympathizer, was there, but we didn’t have a chance to talk. He came for the bears. (He’s the man who kept the old stone Unitarian church in Helena from becoming a nightclub and vigilantly guards the Sweetgrass Hills, a sacred locus of a different sort.)

It’s always a puzzle to me how these energetic, funny, contrarian people can be gathered for the Great Falls Festival and somehow be muted, grayed out. Partly it’s a matter of critical mass, since numbers are usually low. This year there were no refreshments which always help talk and loosening up. But there’s more somehow. The atmosphere is always one of politeness. I wonder if it’s because of the military presence, but no military people seem to attend. Maybe it’s High-Line north-European conformity, the feeling that nothing should get out of hand. (Garrison Keillor Lutherans.) If the same folks were in Missoula or esp. Bozeman, a ruckus would be almost guaranteed to break out.

The basement room, esp. on a bright warm day like this Saturday, has a kind of dampening effect, but the same forces seemed to be at work when a roughly similar set of people spoke once in the auditorium of the Historical Museum where big doors were thrown open to the outside and a summer breeze wandered through.

I have a hunch that it relates to the idea of “culture” as being walled-off, put under glass, “protected” from people smudging it up with their wet noses and dirty hands. I notice the effect at the Russell Auction among the Montanans, but not the carpetbaggers who come in from Texas and Virginia expecting booze and women in evening gowns. They aren’t afraid to be funky, aren’t worried about class or status or whether they’re spending too much money. My worry is that writing will become so much of a tea party occupation that it will just dwindle off and die. (Well, that’s when I look at the audience: the authors are quite a different story.)

But how is it that the handsome young men, who undoubtedly had their novels in their back pockets, were allowed to stand there alone with their fine profiles? Where were the nosy old ladies who asked them who they were and towed them over to meet a publisher? Where was the Darrell Kipp who always takes a moment to note the big shots in the room (however defined) and thank them for coming? Where were the intense, inky women who write incredible poems into their journals? We were all too damned polite. What are we scared of? “Shhhhh! This is a library?”

I did pick up a bit of library gossip. The librarian of a certain tribal college is going around bad-mouthing Adolf Hungry-Wolf’s “Blackfoot Papers.” He will be featured by the Great Falls library on the evening of May 17. (They have his title wrong on the flier, using the plural, which shows they haven’t even read the introduction to the four massive volumes which amount to “a museum in a box.”) But speaking of Indians, none were spoken of at this meeting and none were present either. Too bad.