Writing Montana: Literature under the Big Sky (1996)

Edited by Rick Newby and Suzanne Hunger; cover painting by Dale Livezey

Published by the Montana Center for the Book, a program of the Montana Committee for the Humanities

348 pp., 6" x 9"

Paper, ISBN 1-56044-417-7, $19.95

To order, click here (bedrockbooks.com)

From Book News

“A secret among writers is that Montana is one of the places to be. Forget New York and San Francisco, the ‘big sky’ offers room for the imagination. This collection of 17 essays written by the state's poets, novelists, and scholars attests to the unruly originality of the place, pondering cowboy poetry, contemporary women fiction writers, nature writers, Native American history, and the works of Frieda Fligelman and Mary MacLane. The essays are rich in a variety of subject and style, further animated by a lively sense of humor and refreshing skepticism toward all things literati.”

From a letter to the editors by James Grady, author of Three Days of the Condor and Catch the Wind

“Growing up in Shelby in the 1950s meant denying many things, most of all that I would without blinking kill to write books and movies as the work of my life. Such denial was logical, for even among the families who read in that place and that time (of whom there were surprisingly many), knowledge of writers as actual people was the stuff of novels . . . and fantasies. . . .

“Of course there were rumors of someone named Guthrie and a woman who wrote The Hanging Tree, but clearly, they were gypsies of fate, and not really Montanans like us.

“If nothing else, the mere existence of Writing Montana and before it, The Last Best Place, create the chance of realistic hope being delivered at a tender age to some other dreamer living in Harlem or Belt or Sunburst. . . .”