From the call for papers of the Western History Association annual conference.
The 2015 Program Committee invites proposals that consider what has divided and connected the many peoples who have traversed, sojourned, and settled the North American West, and what might yet link their histories. A generation of new western histories has opened windows in the walls that separated histories of race, gender, class, sexuality and nation. New borderlands histories have mapped selectively porous borders: a fence at the U.S./Mexico border, a Peace Arch marking the Canada-U.S. boundary. Walls, both physical and metaphorical, have divided the spaces our histories have explored: domestic and public workspaces; sites of exclusion and containment like reservations and reserves, internment centers, labor camps, barrios and gated suburbs . . . Histories of community, environment, and culture, of national and social boundaries have brought us to the thresholds of new syntheses and narratives.
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http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/montana-writers-share-happens/ Scott McMillion, editor of the Montana Quarterly magazine, organized this festival in Livingston, MT [“How It Happens”] because, he said, he “wanted to make the writers and artists featured in the magazine leap off the page, come alive, interact with readers. For two days, the famous and the less famous talked about art, film, music, poetry, and literature.” The website said the event was “sold out,” but didn’t indicate how much the tickets had cost.
Scott McMillion
Strange. It was invisible to me even though my PBS radio station streams from Billings. I’m invisible to the literati of Montana. The cowboy art people know me as a pesky footnote from the Sixties. The UU networks know me as "some broad who used to roam the state preaching." When I commented about this review noted above to a friend, he said, “Funny, how writing and literature, as the university professor from Bozeman [Bridget Kevane] seems to understand it, is much like what art critics mean when they say "Art," i.e., gallery art/fine art. . . .I think we should hold our own conference, inviting all of our ilk, i.e., those not included in the "fine art" definition of writing, and have a rollicking time.”
One of Sid Gustafson's books. His dad, Rib, was our vet in the Sixties.
I note this friend doesn’t mention blogs though he reads mine every day. (I should say that Sid Gustafson is published in Montana Quarterly and he does qualify as a memoirist veterinarian.) But I know what my friend means. There are a whole lotta people out there writing that the ordinary people don’t even consider. Well . . . they think they're warts. Not famous, you see. Just little frogs in little puddles.
Part of our understanding of “how it happens” is dominated by the academics and part is commodified -- the two cross-breed. The prof and the editor. Access takes money. Marketing and experts are the sources of the valuation put on fancy stuff for the uneducated and not-that-wealthy-but-aspiring. Print is supported by ads. If you run ads, the stories and articles must compliment the ad worldview, often pretty luxurious and generally young. I stopped allowing ads on my blog because the algorithms for religion can’t tell bogus from genuine. I’d write some idealistic piece and it would be followed by an ad to “ordain” you for $40.
Curly Bear Wagner
In the grocery store I was talking to a tall, serious Blackfeet whose milieu is letters-to-the-editor. “Why don’t you make me famous?” he suggested. Gee, I think I left my magic wand with Harry Potter. I can’t even make myself famous. What IS famous? It’s pushing out there above the clamor of the crowd that writes everywhere, everything, all sorts. Not the same thing as writing well. A woman from somewhere else called to beg me to make people remember Curly Bear Wagner. An older man from the High Line knocked on the door to ask me to write a book about his friend, a fine artist, to make him more famous. A gallery owner suggested I write about her gallery. No one offered money.
Sales and experts are the sources of visibility, meaning fame. Offend them and you don’t exist. Somehow fail to attract their attention and you don’t exist. Belong to a category they know nothing about and you don’t exist. But when I sent the review of the Livingston event to some of my writing friends -- a few of them actually have had books published -- they said they preferred to be invisible. Being a “Montana writer” can be a quagmire of expectations. Partly it can be the “regional” put-down that stalks people like Ivan Doig, but also the politics, which are very much produced by the cross-entanglements of academics and commerce. Of course, Indians still get ridden down by that 19th century horseback guy with the eagle feathers in his streaming ebony hair.
He wrote "Three Cups of Tea" and was punished severely for it.
His co-writer committed suicide.
History gets into it, racism, ownership, what words can be said, how writing should be used to raise money for charities (“How many will there be for tea?”), entitlements (Can men write about women? Can whites write about Indians? Can Jewish handcart peddlers write about Chinese railroad labor? Will whites ever READ Indians? Should Puerto Ricans write about Montana?). And science comes in through environment issues, more passionate than almost anything else except pets and fav pop music.
We don’t like to read about horrifying murder mysteries written by authors with PTSD, or accounts of child abuse, either on the frontier or from the victims. Oh, we’ll gasp at the reviews. But we won’t put out money. Poor people don’t buy books -- maybe they didn’t learn to read (poor people=poor schools) -- so they don’t read books, they don’t know what books are out there, they don’t talk about books, books don't exist. It’s all film, dude. Video. Movies. Music. Go back to the review of “How It Happens.” That event is not about books: it’s about movies (the invasion of the Missoulians into the Hollywood valley of Livingston, Montana), music -- the stuff that moves freely through the air -- and writers who are “famous.”
I went to the library and checked out three issues of Montana Quarterly. (My only magazine subscriptions are to the National Sculpture Review and Vanity Fair.) I’ve never sent Montana Quarterly any writing. After the first few years back in Montana I stopped sending anything to anyone in Montana. I sold a book to the University of Calgary Press. I sent some short stories to the website called “Rope and Wire,” which is in Oregon. Then I settled into doing the narcissus thing: writing for myself. For family. For friends. For a few people I care very deeply about -- I could even say I love them and really mean it.
Too tough for Montana
Every day a post on prairiemary.blogspot.com. You won’t be able to tell who I’m writing for. I write about brain research, the embodiment philosophy of Lakoff and Johnson, comparative cognition (important work in Bozeman), a little bit of memoir, and a lot of liturgical design. I try to think what ideas would comfort lost boys everywhere. I take on local wartiness. I’m working on a post about how cannabinoids actually operate in the body, which they saturate with endogenous substances without any marijuana plants at all. They are part of the essential lipid molecular scene of flesh, esp. neurons. It’s organic chemistry -- I barely get it.
Writing is not publishing. Publishing takes as much or more time and energy as writing, because you have to pursue those "experts" and make lists of possible customers. It’s evangelizing. Pushing. Drumming. But for a writer the main thing is to be writing all the time. TIME. Not sitting around talking to other writers, getting a little tiddly and stealing ideas. Time alone at the keyboard, or flat on your back, figuring things out. Festivals are promotion, not for the reader or the writer -- but the publisher. They need to sell actual THINGS. Or people.
The trouble is that the process of writing is invisible. A mystery to non-writers. The way fame comes is the mystery to writers and artists. But the secret is obvious: MONEY. You've got to have product -- but after that all you need is money. So few writers have money that they keep thinking there's something else . . . but, NOT.
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