A review of ‘Into the Valley’ by Ruth Galm.
Charles Finn
Posted inMay 11, 2015: The Wetland Wars
A lost classic made new
Review of “The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies: As Rediscovered by Terry Tempest Williams and Brooke Williams.”
Posted inArticles
At ease by a creek in the wilderness
I am on my way to Kootenai Creek, a neighbor and laughing friend who spends all day, all year, all everything, tumbling down the western side of the Bitterroot Mountains in southwestern Montana. This is the edge of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, over a million acres of forest that stretches between Montana and Idaho. Kootenai Creek […]
Posted inWotr
Don’t call the desert empty
In the spareness of a desert hike, you become a Beckett character, faced with big space and big time” — Laurie Stone. I write for a living, or what amounts to it, and because I’m a dreamer and a fool and one of the luckiest people I know, I also edit a literary magazine dedicated […]
Posted inWotr
On being away from my primal landscape
It was no secret I didn’t want to leave the West.
Posted inMay 27, 2013: Haywired
Sippings of memory: a review of “100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do”
100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother DisappearedKim Stafford202 pages, softcover: $16.95.Trinity University Press, 2012. One of the happy consequences of reading Kim Stafford is that he makes you want to become a better person. The Portland-based author of 12 books of poetry and prose writes with a quiet gentleness, intimacy and kindness. […]
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Winter: an encore edition
On April 21, a surprise snowstorm blew into western Montana. Small by any standards, it was one of those peaceful, quiet snows, without any wind, as if Mother Nature was feeling nostalgic and had ordered it up out of a Robert Frost poem. I say “surprise” because I was working inside that day; at 3:00 […]
Posted inWotr
The beauty of the wood pile
The six-and-a-half pound maul making its way around my head travels through the October sunshine: dull gray, blunt, serious as an elk in rut. It windmills beneath the yellow larch needles and outstretched arms of evergreens, their fall odors incensing an already heady mix of dried grass, wood smoke, and sun-warmed bark. A wedge of […]
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Taking my chances in grizzly country
When I travel in grizzly bear country (admittedly less often than I used to and far less frequently than I would like), I leave the bear spray at home. In fact, I’ve never even owned a canister of it. Never wanted to. My basic rationale, if you can call it that, is that I would […]
Posted inFebruary 20, 2012: How Arizona's culture helped shape the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords
Bucking the stereotypes: A review of West of 98
West of 98: Living and Writing the New American WestEdited by Lynn Stegner and Russell Rowland380 pages, softcover: $21.95.University of Texas Press, 2011. Any anthology is a collage, a series of snapshots imperfectly melded into one composition. That’s why we read them: They allow us to look at a topic from a variety of angles, […]
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West to East, and a world away
A few months ago, after 20 years, I moved from the West to the East, reluctantly, carting a truckload of artifacts and memories, literal stones and actual stories, each one a product of the forests, mountains or deserts of Bend, Ore., Missoula, Mont., Argenta, British Columbia, Canada, and beyond. My little 4-cylinder truck labored under […]
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Wolf on a picnic table
I once saw a wolf, or what I was told was one. It stood on a picnic table in Montana in the late evening sunshine, and 30 or so onlookers gathered around. The wolf was named Kaori. Clipped to a leash attached to her handler’s harness, she was part of an educational program and accustomed […]
Posted inSeptember 19, 2011: Redemption
Stories like a bale unrolling: a review of Conjugations of the Verb To Be
Conjugations of the Verb To BeGlen Chamberlain193 pages, softcover: $11.95.Delphinium Press, September. The fictional ranching town of Buckle in eastern Montana is the setting for Bozeman writer Glen Chamberlain’s short-story collection Conjugations of the Verb To Be. The stories, though independent, are skillfully intertwined; the lives of the characters overlap and intermingle in the many […]
Posted inOctober 25, 2010: Lynch-Mob Politics
A house like a buffalo
A carpenter muses on dismantling and recycling tumbledown buildings
Posted inWotr
Whatever I do, it’s probably wrong
I try to do my best, I really do, but it seems harder than it should be. I’m in the grocery store, where the shiny plastic packaging stretches as far as the eye can see, and parents and kids seem larger than life – in fact, some seem the size of NFL linemen. With my […]
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Gone geese
For the better part of a week, I’ve been driving around with the carcass of a Canada goose in the bed of my pickup. It lies there with the spare tire, the snow, the blue plastic box of emergency clothes, and an assortment of crushed pop and beer cans from last summer. Because of the […]
Posted inWotr
In the presence of stones
The stones were assembled in a loose circle of five, each as huge as a beach house, verdant layers of moss covering them like furs draped from kings’ shoulders. I’d come through the forest quickly, following the meandering logic of a deer trail. When I rounded the a sharp corner, rising from the dry gully […]
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They don’t have to shoot horses
The idea that you can keep a blind horse safely, that it can be pastured, ridden, that it can lead a happy, even productive life, flies in the face of conventional thinking. Conventional thinking, however, is not Alayne Marker’s strong point. She and her husband, Steve Smith, operate Rolling Dog Ranch Animal Sanctuary in Montana, […]
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Watching with wonder a parliament of snowyowls
One by one as the afternoon shadows stretched across the winter fields a few miles north of Pablo, in the Flathead Valley of western Montana, the parliament of snowy owls began to fly up to sit on the neighboring fence posts. Along the dirt roads circling the fields, cars were already pulling over and spotting […]
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When hungry bears drop in for lunch
It was a few falls ago when I came home one late afternoon, only to find the floor covered in broken glass and pieces of pottery. It looked like a serious and not untalented artist had been at work. The pieces lay arranged in grotesque fashion, jutting up like mountaintops above a valley floor of […]