Ivan Doig, author of 'The Bartender's Tale'

In Ivan Doig's eleventh novel, he writes a minor character who appeared in three of his previous novels into a stoic, but devoted, main character.

The Bartender's Tale is the story of a father and son left on their own in a shifting world — a tale in itself as old as kinship, but ever new in the way "the bachelor saloon keeper with a streak of frost in his black pompadour and the inquisitive 11-year-old boy who had been an accident between the sheets" go about life in the small Montana town of Gros Ventre in 1960.

Tom Harry, the nonpariel bartender and proprietor of the "nearly holy oasis," the Medicine Lodge, has a past he won't talk about and a habit of sudden disappearances for a few days, which plagues his impressionable son, Rusty, as does the unexplained absence of his mother ever since he was born. In their otherwise companionable bachelor life together, Rusty has free run of the saloon's fantastic back room. And in the momentous summer that is the heart of the novel, he shares this secret aperture into the often mystifying world of grownups with Zoe, the new girl down the street whose imagination outdoes even his own amid the wonders of the back of the saloon.

History, as it tends to do, arrives to these prime characters with gale force, first in the person of enthusiastic young oral historian Del Robertson and then in the shapely form of Proxy, an unforgettable taxi dancer in Tom's earlier fabled saloon in a Fort Peck dam boomtown. Proxy comes bearing life-changing news, of the sort that leaves Rusty and Zoe marveling at what grownups get themselves into. 

The tale unfolds in Rusty's richly reminiscent voice, leading to the climax where a catastrophe delivers them all trials of conscience. In sum, this is a warmhearted yet consequential family saga in the spirited storytelling tradition of William Faulkner's The Reivers and Isak Dinesen's Winter's Tales

Find out more about Ivan Doig and his books, and listen to the program, on the radio or online.

• Thursday, November 1 at 7:30 p.m. on Montana Public Radio
• Thursday, November 1 at 6:30 p.m. on Yellowstone Public Radio
• Online, anytime at MTPR.org
• Via the MTPR podcast

Monday Poem: "Deer Skull" -- by Susan Griffin

1

I keep placing my hands over

my face, the fingertips just

resting on the place where I feel

my eyebrows and the fine end

of a bone. My eyes are covered

with the blood of my hands, my

palms hold

my jaws. I do this at dinner.

My daughter asks

Are you all right?

and by a common miracle

when I smile

she knows I am.

             2

I ask her what she will do

after we eat. Sleep she

tells me. But I will clean

the deer skull, wash it.

             3

You gave me this skull in the woods

told me to bring it clean

and tell the story I had told you

before, about how the deer had

come to me, and I said I would.

             4

And I put this skull on an old

newspaper, pulled the lower part

of the jaws free, touched it first

carefully, as if it would fall apart

in my hands, the bone paper-

thin, and then I saw I could

scrub, so brushed the surface with

steel and my fingers and more

and more this surface became

familiar to me.

             5

I wanted to see the lines of it

what it would be if it had been

polished by the wind, the water,

and my hands, these agents making

the skull more itself.

Slowly I was not afraid at all

and my fingers went into the deepest

holes of this thing, not afraid

for myself or it, feeling

suddenly as if cleaning this

small fragment of earth away

from the crevices inside was

like loving.

            6

But it was when I touched the place

where the eyes were that I knew

this was the shell of the deer that had

lived here, this was this deer

and not this deer, her home and

now empty of her, but not

empty of her, I knew also, not

empty of her, as my hands

trembled.

            7

And in that instant remembered you

had been in that body of

that deer dying, what

does it feel like to be a deer

dying, the death consumes

you like birth, you are

nowhere else but in the center.

            8

Remembering those gentle deer

that watched me as I wept,

or the deer that leapt as if

out of my mind, when I saw

speaking there in that green place

the authority of the heart

and the deer of the woods where

my feet stood, stared at me until

I whispered to her and cried

at her presence.

            9

And when I cleaned the skull

I washed myself and sat

my body half out of the water

and put my hands again over

my face, my fingers edging the

bone over my eyes, and I thought

how good this feels and this

is a gesture you make.

            10

Tell this story of the deer's skull

you asked quietly and so I

came in my own time to put

these words carefully here

slowly listing each motion

on this thin paper

as fragile and as tough

as knowledge.

*     *     *     *     *

Susan Griffin is an eco-feminist poet, playwright, essayist and screenwriter. Her work includes the extended prose poem Women and Nature and A Chorus of Stones, a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Award. 

Most recently, she served as editor of Transforming Terror: Remembering the Soul of the World, which includes selections from visionaries such as Desmond Tutu, Jack Kornfield and Terry Tempest Williams. The above poem is found in her poetry collection Bending Home (1998). 

Griffin lives and teaches in Berkley, California.

Ellaraine Lockie

Wild as in Familiar is Ellaraine Lockie's ninth chapbook of poetry. She has also published two nonfiction books and contributed sections and essays to other books.

"Ellaraine Lockie's chapbook, Wild as in Familiar, takes us on a journey that is in itself, both wild and familiar: Stephen King, Cananova, earthworms, rose bushes, butterflies, crows, hummingbirds, childhood spiders, frong rain, prairie fire, Africa, Taos, Sonoran desert, Mexico, Montana. These are wide-ranging poems, but poems grouned in seriousness and imagination, grouned in thought and reflection. Readers who are familiar with Ms. Lockie's poetry will want to place this book on the shelf with her other works. Those who are new to her words will want to make sure there's a little room on the shelf next to this one."

-- Michael Czarnecki, poet, oral memoirist and founder of FootHills Publishing

Lockie is active in public poetry readings and travels the world, appearing at events as a writer and professional papermaker.

Find out more about Ellaraine Lockie and listen to the program, on the radio or online.

• Thursday, October 25 at 7:30 p.m. on Montana Public Radio
• Thursday, October 25 at 6:30 p.m. on Yellowstone Public Radio
• Online, anytime at MTPR.org
• Via the MTPR podcast

Monday Poems: "Sustenance" -- by Chris Dombrowski

I tracked it through the one mind of  the woods.

Its hoofprints pressed in snow were smallish hearts.

Buck fawn: he let me come so near, take aim.

Crouched against a fir, I was anything.

Bush, stump, doe in estrus he could rut.

Not his maimer, though, not his final thought.

He stared me down until I shot him: low.

Then the forest forgot he’d ever been.

Nascent, there were signs: bonechip, spoor, frail hair.

But no memory, wounded, wants to die.

He hid in the dark timber, twice crossed the creek.

Finally he lay heaving out last breaths.

Dusk-cast shadow, he died where he was made.

A bite of  heart sustains but is not him.

*     *     *     *     *

Chris Dombrowski received his MFA from the University of Montana, where he also taught. He has won the Associated Writing Programs Intro Award and Alligator Juniper’s National Poetry Prize. His collection By Cold Water was published in 2009.

William J. Cobb, author of 'The Bird Saviors'

When a dust storm engulfs her Colorado town and pink snow blankets the streets, a heartbreaking decision faces Ruby Cole, a girl who counts birds: She must abandon her baby or give in to her father, whom she nicknames Lord God, and marry a man more than twice her age who already has two wives. She chooses to run, which sets in motion an interlocking series of actions and reactions, upending the lives of an equestrian police officer, pawnshop riffraff, a disabled war vet, Nuisance Animal destroyers, and a grieving ornithologist--a field biologist studies the decline of bird populations. All the while, a growing criminal enterprise moves from cattle rustling to kidnapping to hijacking fuel tankers and murder as events spin out of control,.

Set in a time of economic turmoil, virus fears, climate change, fundamentalist cults and illegal immigrant hardship, The Bird Saviors is a visionary story of defiance, anger, and compassion, in which a young woman ultimately struggles to free herself from her domineering father, to raise her daughter in the chaos of the New West, and to become something greater herself.

Find out more about William J. Cobb and listen to the program, on the radio or online.

• Thursday, October 18 at 7:30 p.m. on Montana Public Radio
• Thursday, October 18 at 6:30 p.m. on Yellowstone Public Radio
• Online, anytime at MTPR.org
• Via the MTPR podcast

Monday Poems: "October" -- by Bill Berkson

I

It’s odd to have a separate month. It

escapes the year, it is not only cold, it is warm

and loving like a death grip on a willing knee. The

Indians have a name for it, they call it:

“Summer!” The tepees shake in the blast like roosters

at dawn. Everything is special to them,

the colorful ones.

II

Somehow the housewife does not seem gentle.

Is she angry because her husband likes October?

Is it snow bleeds softly from her shoes?

The nest eggs have captured her,

but April rises from her bed.

III

“The beggars are upon us!” cried Chester.

Three strangers appeared at the door, demanding ribbons.

The October wind . . . nests

IV

Why do I think October is beautiful?

It is not, is not beautiful.

                                                  But then

what is there to hold one’s interest

between the various drifts of a day’s

work, but to search out the differences

                                          the window and grate—

but it is not, is not

beautiful.

V

I think your face is beautiful, the way it is

close to my face, and I think you are the real

October with your transparence and the stone

of your words as they pass, as I do not hear them.

*    *     *     *     *

Poet and teacher Bill Berkson is professor emeritus at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he taught art history, art writing and poetry. He is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, including Our Friends Will Pass Among You Silently (2007), Goods and Services (2008) and Portrait and Dream: New & Selected Poems (2009), in which the above poem appears. 

He has won numerous prizes, including the 2008 Goldie for Literature from the San Francisco Bay Guardian and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, the Poets Foundation. Portrait and Dream won the 2010 Balcones Prize for Best Book of Poetry.