Reading List from the West, plus Toni Morrison

A few new books from regional writers to add to your summer reading list:

James Lee Burke: Swan Peak
Alexandra Fuller: The Legend of Colton H. Bryant
Greg Lemon: Blue Man in a Red State
Neil McMahon: Dead Silver
Deborah Richie Oberbillig: Bird Feats

Toni Morrison is not from the Western United States, but every reader needs variety. My summer list includes Sula, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature, and Love.

Read Toni Morrison's letter to Barack Obama, published in the New York Observer.

An E Interview With Maile Meloy

During a rare lull in her busy schedule, award-winning author Maile Meloy graciously responded to our questions about writers who have influenced her work, twisty plots, unfinished stories, and the weather in Montana.


TWQ: You grew up in Helena, Montana. What Montana writers influenced you and why?

The poet Richard Hugo, who wrote some of the most beautiful Montana descriptions I know. Wallace Stegner, who staked out the real, everyday west as a subject for fiction. And Mary MacLane, who wrote brilliantly in 1901 about living at home in Butte with no prospects, driven crazy by the sight of her family’s toothbrushes by the sink. Also my aunt Ellen Meloy, who lived in Montana when I was growing up, and who made me think that it was possible to make a life and a living as a writer.

TWQ: Which non-Montana writers do you most admire and why?

So many: Cheever, Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Joseph Conrad. I loved David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Right now I’m re-reading Evelyn Waugh. I get so much pleasure and also instruction from reading him. It might be because his style is so unlike the laconic western style I sometimes feel steeped in: it’s all about sentences and excess and performance and wit. And his books are beautifully structured. The structure of Decline and Fall really helped me with Liars and Saints, though they’re nothing alike.

TWQ: What attracted you to California?

I felt like I had to go somewhere, and I had a friend from Helena who was moving to Los Angeles to be an actor, and I knew we could be roommates. Also I had a vague idea about working in development for movies -- I liked movies. I had no idea what I was doing. I moved with my clothes and ten books and a table lamp in the back of my station wagon, and no job. I was braver then.

TWQ: What spawned the idea to intertwine the plots of Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter?

I had started another novel, after finishing Liars and Saints, and I had about forty pages when it ground to a halt. So after Liars and Saints came out, I was looking around for something else I knew about, and it seemed interesting to me, in a way it never had before (although I loved Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, and books like that), to have a character who was a writer. Then it seemed interesting to have one of the secret-keeping family from Liars and Saints write a novel, and at first I thought it could be their somewhat lost son, Jamie. But a character who had died in the novel was the better candidate. So I thought, well, I can bring her back to life. Why not? And that was exciting and freeing. And then the idea developed of a book that would exist parallel to Liars and Saints, that would seem to be the real-life source material from which Liars and Saints was distilled.

TWQ: Did you write Liars and Saints with the intention to commit metafiction with A Family Daughter?

No. It was only supposed to be the one novel. A Family Daughter does have metafictional aspects if you read it alongside Liars and Saints, and it was interesting to me to have elements in each that are recognizable but transformed in the other. But I also wanted it to stand alone as a realistic novel, with a different plot, that you could read if you’d never read Liars and Saints.

TWQ: Many of your short stories revolve around severe Western weather. What’s the most memorable Montana-bad-weather event that ever happened to you?

My uncle Mark and my aunt Ellen took my brother and me to the movie E.T. in Helena during the 1982 hailstorm that produced golf-ball and grapefruit-sized hail. We covered our heads with our hands, running across the street from the car to the theater, and during the quiet scenes in the movie we could hear the giant hailstones thumping on the roof. I learned what a ball-peen hammer was, because after the storm, my dad said that’s what it looked like someone had taken to all the cars. It sounded so great: a ball-peen hammer.

TWQ: What characteristics of Montana landscape and lifestyle continue to influence your writing?

So many. I guess, as you said, the fact that weather is important, that it’s not just an idle topic of conversation. And I think my style has been influenced by growing up in a place where people are suspicious of wordiness, and a there’s tendency toward the laconic. I’m happy with it, but it’s not really a choice. I’d be just as happy to be witty and English.

I also think it’s a trait of people who live in less populated places like Montana, where their great-grandparents were likely to have been homesteaders, to go ahead and do things they haven’t done before -- plumb a toilet, fix a roof, re-wire a light -- because who else is going to do it? And how hard could it be? I think I approached novel-writing the same way: blindly assuming that I’d be able to figure it out. If the first draft was roughly built, at least I had a first draft.

TWQ: What advice do you have for writers with lots of ideas who have trouble focusing on one long enough to create a whole story?

Set aside time to write, even if it’s only an hour or two a day, and think of the time as the requirement. So you just have to be there, and it doesn’t matter what you finish. It takes the pressure off the individual story, and you’ll end up working on the ideas that seem most promising. I start many, many stories and abandon most of them, but eventually some pay off. It’s like wildcatting for oil. You dig a lot of holes and eventually one has something valuable in it.

TWQ: What are you working on now?

A collection of short stories, many of which are set in Montana. I’m almost finished and it will be published in the summer of 2009.

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Maile Meloy was born in Helena, Montana, in 1972. A Family Daughter is her third book. Her short stories have been published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. Her first story collection, Half in Love, received the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters , the John C. Zacharis Award from Ploughshares, and the PEN/Malamud Award. Her first novel, Liars and Saints, was shortlisted for England’s 2005 Orange Prize. Both books were New York Times Notable Books. She has also received The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in California. (This information is from the author page of Maile Meloy's Web site).

One Reader's Definition of Montana Literature

Montana stories migrated from oral traditions into print shortly after the good old Rugged Individualists found their way into the Montana Territory. Immigrants had to be sturdy if they wanted to stay around here. The weak ones died or moved on to a more forgiving environment. From pioneer journals to 21st-century novels, Montana literature is permeated with themes pulled from this challenging and splendid landscape.

Montana literature is rural. Even in stories where people live in towns (Perma Red and A River Runs Through It) most of the action happens outside. The literature and poetry of Montana is populated with people who are forced to deal with their problems without a lot of props. They have to use what's here: blizzards; animals, birds, and plants; lakes, rivers, and creeks; wildfires; and vast landscapes and skies.

Nature is a dominant character in Native American stories by James Welch, M. L. Smoker, Joe McGeshick, Debra Magpie Earling, and others. Judy Blunt and Elise Lavender* may view the landscape from opposite ends of the social spectrum, but their relationships to it define them. Rivers flow in and out of the lives of Louise White Elk and Paul Maclean, saturating their stories with unique meaning and symbolism. Severe Western weather challenges characters in Maile Meloy's short stories.

Although new immigrants, following the same old dreams of freedom and independence, continue to arrive, and the writers among them inject Montana literature and poetry with urban themes, nature still dominates: Melissa Kwasny ponders geese while thinking of Novalis; Casey Charles explores gay issues as he watches aspens shuffle in Pony; Karen Volkman brings the sea to Montana with a sonnet…

Ultimately, Montana literature mirrors the landscapes that give it life. It is sturdy, beautiful, thrilling, and heartbreaking in ways that take a master wordsmith to describe.

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* Elise Lavender is a character in Deirdre McNamer's short story, "Virgin Everything." ( The New Montana Story: An Anthology, compiled and edited by Rick Newby)

Graduation Remarks from UM Professor and English Department Chair Casey Charles

"Go then into this mythical real world and in the inimitable way of the English major, be valuable."

The Quality of English

For many professors, like me, graduation is both a happy and sad event, one we look on with both an “auspicious and dropping eye” as Claudius puts it, “in equal scale, weighing delight and dole,” largely because we are parting with such sweet sorrow from students we have taught and learned from over the years, students we have grown attached to, students who now must venture into the so-called “real world”—out into a place that has come to be defined in opposition to the academy—that institution which over the years has assumed an adjectival capacity as an experience “not expected to produce a practical result.” It strikes me as worthwhile to think for a minute about why the unreal city of academia and more particularly the supposedly impractical English major continues to command the attention of students in spite of the warnings of burger-flipping futures from parents and counselors, in spite of the university’s attempt to transform itself into a training ground for software companies and weapons laboratories, in spite of the prevailing media messages that happiness is measured by the definition of our screens, by the quantity of our pixels and megabytes, by the venture of our capital, our argosies on the high seas, and the ducats we have amassed. Why then does the English major at UM continue to grow—why do nearly 600 students continue to study the reasons why a pound of flesh is worth more than thrice three thousand ducats in The Merchant of Venice rather than learn econometric models or the principles of accounting?

What is the value of this English major any way, I know many of you are asking, having borrowed those ducats to put your kids through school or received them from student loan sources that are now drying up? What price Shakespeare, Joyce, the composition of a sestina, a lesson plan to present at middle school where starting salaries for teachers are less than that of bank tellers? Is it easier to read “The Clerk’s Tale” and “Bartleby the Scrivener” than memorize anatomy, perhaps? Easier to write essays and villanelles than identify strata or apply the law of physics? Hardly. We cannot call these graduates slackers; English is not the ready and easy way in spite of what received opinion may suggest. No one walks away from Medieval Studies or Theories of Pedagogy with an easy A.

No, my sense is that the success of our department and English Studies in general resides elsewhere, in a persistent force within our social consciousness that understands how, as Jean Howard has stated, literature is an agent in shaping a society’s sense of itself—how the fiction and nonfictions we create and study do not simply comment on some posited authentic world of W2s and mortgage payments, but instead actually help to produce our notions of what the real world is and what is important in it. While I admit a B.A. in English is not necessarily the easiest entrée into the board rooms and sky boxes of America, I want to argue this afternoon, for the value of that non-transferability. If your parents are anything like my Dad, who grew up over a grocery store in the Haight Ashbery during the Depression, they are probably wanting to know what the hell you’re going to do with a degree in English. How you are going to support yourself by writing short stories, what can you possibly say about Much Ado About Nothing that hasn’t already been said a thousand times—for Pete’s sake? I can hear him now, quizzing me while I leaned into the push broom, sweeping the yard for the fourth time in a month during another one of our Saturday “joy through work” sessions.

I would like to take just a minute this afternoon to reverse this perennial question parents ask of non-utilitarian English majors like you and me. Just for a second let’s not ask what good an English Major is in the real world, but ponder, instead, just for fun, what good a real world is without English majors? Indulge me for a moment to think what it would be like if we did cave into the prevailing rhetoric and reduce the English major to a degree in technical writing with subspecialties in advertising copy and business letters. Imagine, if you can, a world without literature, without creative writing, without Mrs. Hinton, your eighth-grade English teacher, asking you to think about man’s inhumanity to man and the treatment of Atticus in To Kill a Mockingbird in between her lessons about the mechanics of semicolons.

Think of this world, just for a second,—one devoid of Robert Frost beside John Kennedy on a cold January day in 1963, a world without Nikki Giovanni after Virginia Tech, a world without Upton Sinclair writing about oil men or Cormac McCarthy borrowing from Yeats to title his novel No Country for Old Men. What if we had no Beowulf, what if the Miller had not told his tale or Hamlet not seen his father in his mind’s eye. What if a bookish student from Christchurch had not decided to justify the ways of god to man, if Gulliver had not traveled or Mr. Darcy not been in possession of a good fortune and in search of a an unconventional and book-living wife like Elizabeth Barrett? Imagine a world, if you can, devoid of white whales, quoting ravens, red wheelbarrows glistening in the rain. Think of what a dooryard would be like without lilacs blooming, without a little women named Harriet penning another episode of a book that would start the Great War of Emancipation. I wonder what our world would be like if a poet had not compared thee to a summer’s day or counted the ways of love, if Prufrock had not been etherized on a table, if Amanda Wingfield had not waited for a gentleman caller, if Annie Proulx had not put Jack and Ennis on Brokeback Mountain. What would life be like in Montana if a poet from Seattle had not walked into the only bar in Dixon, if the sky had not been gray on that day in Philipsburg. What if a house wife on the High Line had never broken clean or more importantly not decided to write down her memories with the help of her creative writing professors?

Maybe a world without literature, its study and creation, a world without Leslie Fiedler and Edward Said and Jacques Derrida, would not have a very distinctive character, would not in the end be a very interesting or valuable place at all. Maybe we need to rethink what we mean by the quality of value in our world. It strikes me that these students before us today have learned not just to perpetuate the arts and entertainment channel, but to think deeply and critically about the role of culture and its representation in our world. Some will create, some will critique—all will be able to write, think, and question where and who we are in the twenty-first century. We have enough statistics to prove that in spite of my father’s questions the English major teaches the broad reading and writing skills that employers are clamoring for in an increasingly over-specialized world; we have enough data to show that most of you here today will land on your feet economically and will make a good living. Whether you end up in fly shops or on book flaps, whether you find yourself in a classroom helping students discover exactly what Pip’s great expectations really were, whether you develop closing arguments or open green businesses—most you will do well, but not because you had your heart set on the gold casket, I think, but rather because you have learned to understand the way books and films and language provide us with a deeper understanding of what really enriches us as a community. Go then into this mythical real world and in the inimitable way of the English major, be valuable.

Casey Charles, Chair
Department of English
University of Montana
Missoula, MT 59812
Graduation Remarks — 5/10/08

Leif Enger's New Book

Leif Enger, the author of the New York Times best seller, Peace Like A River, has written a second novel. So Brave, Young, and Handsome is a lively picaresque tale that begins in the Midwest and migrates across the West to a California orange grove.

In the opening scene, Monte Becket, a Minnesota writer, sits on his front porch slogging away at his seventh unfinished novel in five years. Then he spies "Glendon Hale rowing upstream through the ropy mists of the Cannon River." Naturally, Becket's life becomes instantly more interesting. And it soon becomes downright thrilling as he and Hale travel toward Mexico by train, car, horse, and foot power to find Blue, the wife Hale deserted more than thirty years ago.

True to the form, adventures, bad guys, heroes, and horses populate this book. The self-deprecating and stoic narrator, a writer in way over his head, delivers the tale with confidence.

Enger's prose is crisp and clean, sprinkled with just the right amount of delight:
"She could squeeze a conversation to its rind..."
"...an upstart wind whipped the grasses into confusion."
...his face was chaos"
"she gave the old cloud an insouciant sneer"
"the wallpaper slumped"

Amazon.com has awarded So Brave, Young, and Handsome 4.5 stars, based on thirty-eight customer reviews.

Mary Clearman Blew at Fact & Fiction

Mary Clearman Blew will read from her new book, Jackalope Dreams, at Fact & Fiction Bookstore in downtown Missoula on Thursday, April 24, at 7 p.m.

Here's a synopsis of Jackalope Dreams from the Fact & Fiction Web site:
"The departed men in her life still have plenty to say to Corey. Her father, a legendary rodeo cowboy who punctuated his lifelong pronouncements with a bullet to his head, may be the loudest. But in this story of Montana--a story in which the old West meets the new and tradition has its way with just about everyone--it is Corey's voice we listen to. In this tour-de-force of voices big and small, sure and faltering, hers comes across resonant and clear, directing us to the heart of the matter. Played out against the mythology of the Old West -- a powerful amalgam of ranching history, Marlboro Men, and train robbery reenactments -- the story of the newly orphaned, spinsterish Corey is a sometimes comical, sometimes poignant tale of coming-of-age a little late. As she tries to recapture an old dream of becoming a painter -- of preserving some modicum of true art amid the virtual reality of modern Montana -- Corey finds herself figuring in other dramas as well, other, younger lives already at least as lost as her own."

Meet Mary Clearman Blew and get your book signed at Fact & Fiction at 7 p.m.

Greg Patent's Book Nominated For A James Beard Award

A Baker’s Odyssey (John Wiley & Sons, 2007; hardback), Greg Patent's newest book, has been nominated for a James Beard Award.

A Baker's Odyssey is a celebration of America’s rich immigrant heritage. It is about preserving heritage and tradition through cooking and baking. Patent worked with women (and a few men) from thirty-two different nationalities in their home kitchens to learn their special techniques and to gather the recipes in this collection. The book comes with a companion DVD. Color inserts illustrate more than three dozen recipes.

"Deemed 'the Oscars of the food world,' by Time magazine, The James Beard Foundation Awards are the country’s most coveted honor for chefs; food and beverage professionals; broadcast media, journalists, and authors working on food; and restaurant architects and designers." (quote from JamesBeard.org)

Baking in America (Houghton Mifflin, 2002; hardback) was a finalist in the 2003 International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) Cookbook Awards. It won the 2003 James Beard Foundation Award for best baking book of the year and the World Gourmand Cookbook Awards for best baking book in the English language.

Read more about Greg Patent, find recipes, and get information about his books and articles at GregPatent.com.