GIVE US BOOKS! LOTSA BOOKS!

Yesterday I was visited by the fortuitously named Hope Good, the publisher of “Treasure State Lifestyles Montana,” which is a complimentary magazine supported by advertising and intended for native Montanans. She has been asked to prepare an issue on Valier for the town’s hundredth anniversary and has only three weeks to “get ‘er done.” Anyone would be daunted, but Hope doesn’t sit around hoping: she’s a hustler in the better sense of the word.

She strongly states her position as a person who grew up near a small town (Moccasin) on a ranch and who represents the “mainstream culture” of the state. This turns out to be the same as the culture of the cowboy art crowd, though she left the Ad Club’s CM Russell Auction in favor of the “Western Heritage” group that runs parallel as a benefit for the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center, also in Great Falls. It is, in a word, commercial. These people intend to make a living.

Hope was roughly four hours late, suggesting she’d be by at 3PM and finally turning up at 7PM, not out of negligence but out of diligence since she was selling ads. I was grateful we weren’t meeting for lunch. But this didn’t improve my attitude and then I was horrified. First, because I slowly realized I was being interviewed for an article ABOUT me (and here I am, more or less hiding behind Bob Scriver) and then because I began to understand that this woman’s education had left her high and dry, confirming every prejudice I have about Montana high schools.

Hope Good aspires to be a “publisher,” even though she already is one. I gather she means, like, those Manhattan pipe smokers in tweed (recently replaced by monsters in spike heels). In other words, the prestige, the knowledge, the access to resources, the worldliness, the possibility of hitting the jackpot that Hollywood always reinforces. But when I asked her, as a self-described book-loving Montana ranch girl, which of the many book-writing Montana ranch girls she loved most, she hadn’t read any of them. When I suggested Mary Clearman Blew, she’d never heard of Blew, who is often bracketed with Ivan Doig. She HAD heard of Doig. She owned a copy of “The Last Best Place” but has not read it.

She didn’t know that publishing as the world has known it is now gone, the victim of a one-two punch, first corporation takeovers that demanded high returns, gutting the staffs to improve profits and insisting that only block-buster airport books were worth attention; then, the ePrint revolution that has wiped out the market for print on paper-- along with the booming used book on-line sales which overshadow new books.

She’d heard of Kindle but not Kindle 2, wasn’t aware of the tussle over copyright and payment, and said she could only find good Montana regional books at websites, even though she regularly delivers her magazine to Oasis Bookstore in Choteau, one of the very best -- and not online -- sources of books about the West and Montana. She didn’t know that regional literature has joined the dodo march except for a few stubborn people fixated on Cormac McCarthy or maybe Annie Proulx.

Of course I’m exaggerating and being totally unfair to Hope Good, but she’s one tough and determined lady and will not be hurt by this encounter, though she may rather regret it. And she truly IS representative of Montana small town mainstream culture. The biggest lack is a total absence of context outside of the commercial world. As an example of her major nonconformity, she told me she didn’t really approve of Custer, without any hint of awareness about the storms of opinion and research surrounding the whole clearing of the plains, much less how it fits into the major world genocides on this planet.

The upshot of this realization -- once she gets her head around it, which will take a little time -- will be the dizzy feeling of Oz’s curtain dropping, revealing the world behind the world. Then she’ll have to convey some of this to her staff and keep up the confidence that makes her a successful sales person. She can do it. It’s a major opportunity to connect with some of the writers who have been locked out, overlooked, ignored in this state.

Increasingly I’m aware of a whole “layer” of men who are mature, consistent producers, not academic, and from Montana. I’m thinking of Allen Tooley, Lance Foster, Gary J. Cook, Sid Gustafson, Robey Clark, Darrell Kipp. There must be others. Some of them have pretty good contacts and get their work out to a kind of niche audience, but they are not generally recognized as “Montana writers.” Their names don’t come up among the gatekeepers of the category, who are largely academic.

Ironically, the Montana Festival of the Book, which sort of has the category by the throat, in spite of being organized as “academic,” is transparently commercial, promoting writers published in the old-fashioned paper way by publishers that at least pretend they are saluting quality as they define it. That is, whether it fits the “brand.” With great grudgingness, the Festival has begun to allow self-published books, most of them meant to make a little money for people writing their life stories. They will not address blogs or ebooks or anything else that happens online, including the Western Writers of America or the website maintained by the Western Literature Association.

People have been quietly grumbling and wondering about a kind of failure of energy in the genre categories of Western writing and Native American Lit. Maybe even the Western History Association. The tsunami of theory that washed over us debilitated the innocent joy of reading about landscapes and animals and people we know and live among. If people like Hope Good can be pulled into the field with her high energy and focused determination, maybe that will put the match to some accumulated kindling so that we could have conferences where people shout and pound the table instead of being shushed and compelled to attend workshops on civility meant to reassure newcomers. And all about BOOKS! BOOKS about RIGHT HERE! Who cares how we get access or whether they are paper! STORIES! Give us STORIES! On mp3, on Kindle, on paper, on radio, around a firepit. And the REAL stuff, not sentimental same-old, same-old.

NOT AS MUCH ABOUT PENELOPE REEDY AS I'D INTENDED

This blog was supposed to be about Penelope Reedy, the founder, owner, chief writer, and impassioned believer in the “Redneck Review of Literature,” dedicated to the idea that Western lit mattered, published from 1975-1995. But Penelope herself keeps chiming in from her place in Idaho where she’s a college professor these days and reports that this morning it’s bitter cold. Archived at Boise State University’s Idaho Writer’s Archive, the Review is accompanied by “myriad letters showing just how crazy I was/am during all those years and years of ranching, divorce, returning to university, raising 4 kids, hauling my printing press all around the west and Milwaukee while I was at Marquette U.”

I’m quoting an email from 2004 but she says virtually the same thing on this morning’s post to West Lit, the listserv. “I always thought of literature as holy work, sacred words. I guess because it was something I could always participate in whether as writer, reader or publisher, and possible as long as paper and ink survive.”

She adds: “When I was hauling my press around, spending hours typing manuscripts and making plates, collating, stapling, addressing, etc. I felt involved in a holy tradition, almost sacrificial in profundity. I was connecting with virginia and leonard woolf [Aquarian-style, Penelope doesn’t always cap.] and their early projects with the basement letter presses and harry crosby and Idaho’s cantankerous ezra pound and wyndham lewis. I was engaging in tradition, a tradition of exposing/introducing my beloved land and people to the world.”

The world didn’t pay attention. It was a “neighborhood” enterprise to them. But Penelope says, “It’s really computers that killed the review.” . . . “this technology wasn’t the one I/we expected would cause the demise of a literary dream, especially when it was heralded as making it all easier to produce, and that’s precisely what killed it.” Today you can add that the post office has piled on, plus the cost of paper, but the spread of the Internet would make it possible to run “The Redneck Review of Western Literature” economically as an eZine. There are plenty of them out there: many disguised as blogs.

What would the Woolf’s do with a blog? I have no idea, but I think Gertrude Stein would fall upon the idea with glee. The difference might be in the willingness to step outside the grand traditions of British literature that are so fortified by academia and historical publishing. There are still nodes of genius everywhere, many among quite young people in the West, but they carry laptops under their arms and they are as likely to work with images -- including the moving images of video -- and sound as much as print.

Check out a venue like “Querencia,” Stephen Bodio’s blog at http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com/ It is clearly land-based, organized around hunting with sight hounds and hawks, so mostly about high prairie grasslands and, because there are similar ecologies elsewhere, it is global. We hear about the “istans” (Afghanistan, Turkistan, et al) where this hawk/hound synergy is millennia old. That means there is a time dimension to the discussion, emphasized by the blogger Reid Farmer, who is an archeologist. In fact, my first contact with this blog was talking to him about the historical range of condors. The third dimension, I would say, is fine writing. The newest member of the group, Cat Urbigkit, absolutely blows me away -- not just with writing: her photos are excellent. Her world is ranching, with a strong scientific background. Matt Mullenix is in the South rather than the West; he's also a fine writer, and the blog’s tech-head. They do indeed feel they are pursuing a sacred trust, a holy work, and their incomes suffer the same as always for such work.

For a book collaboration with Tim Barrus, I’m working with materials about Gay San Francisco and the fate of “Drummer” which was a focused publication for “leathermen,” which are defined by being hypermasculine. (For them, wearing motorcycle leathers was de rigeur.) I’m struck by how “Western” their assumptions are, though they migrated in from all over America, only to be dispersed by HIV in a few decades. But I hesitate to even MENTION this to the West Lit bunch. Brits don’t discuss poofters in front of ladies! Heavens! Not even the Woolfs! Ernest Hemingway, surely, but not Gertrude Stein!

Leaving out some intense nodes of creation like Querencia (and Bodio is also a legit Montana writer due to his novel, “Querencia,” published by Russ Chatham in Livingston) and “Drummer” as well as the counter-mythic “Redneck Review of Literature,” reduces the category of Western Literature to the same old names, the same old tropes, and dwindling influence. I believe it also gives way too much power to academia’s interest in respectability and wealth.

In the end it is the passionately obsessed people working at the margins-- people like Reedy and her heroes as well as Norman Maclean, A.B. Guthrie, Jr., Tom Savage, Jack Fritscher, Tim Barrus, the Querencia bloggers -- the rule-breakers and double-uppers who could save West Lit from the lifestyle packaging of slick magazines. Oh, man [sic], are they going to town! But they DO buy fine writing about the West and they do get into the pockets of the fabulously rich.

Western small-world publishers aren’t in touch with each other -- even if they’re in the same country, they don’t live in the same part of town. I’m not sure they’d like each other or would be helped by awareness of each other’s work, much less sharing a listserv. I’m not sure that the magazine stand won’t follow the bookstore out of existence. An intelligent and “literate” truck driver told me that he doesn’t even subscribe to Sirius, the single-interest satellite-based radio network. As he drives, he streams radio stations from across North America through his onboard computer or listens to novels on his iPod. They tell me to forget CD’s. (No, no, no! Not my fav CD’s!!) They tell me Netflix-by-mail will wink out as soon as enough people have broadband so they can stream their movies. They tell me that an extra-strong sun flare or an unusually vindictive high-tech country could wipe out the satellite system that supports all this streaming. Kindle is most likely to be done in by software changes or battery frustration.

Then we’ll be back to Penelope Reedy’s way: ink on paper, the way Benjamin Franklin taught his Native American helpers to compose print on a typestick. Then all the chess men will be on the floor. To continue that metaphor, I think we’re at “check” but not at “check mate.” Don’t despair, Penelope! The game goes on!

Feel free to chime in via the comments.