News
Reflections on writing: McGuane sees much to recommend being writer in Montana. Montana nourishes its literary practitioners.
Its vast and changing landscape attracts writers of all styles. But the best connect with the larger world, going beyond "region" to maneuver the mountains and rivers toward universal truths.
Story By CHRISTENE MEYERS
Photos By LARRY MAYER
Of The Gazette Staff
One of our best nationally known writers is Tom McGuane, who attests that region and sense of place are important to his spirit. But McGuane, like many of his characters, lives in many worlds.
The writer, whose most recent novel is "The Cadence of Grass," recalls advice from the late Wallace Stegner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Stegner became McGuane’s mentor during a fellowship at Stanford University.
Stegner, too, loved Montana and was a frequent visitor. Among his many nuggets of wisdom shared with McGuane, Stegner believed "that our biggest challenge is to quit looking backward."
Emerging Montana writers are looking ahead, says McGuane, a Boulder-area rancher, fly fisherman and horseman. McGuane sees a slow but steady shift in Montana literature, from "the need to write only about the past, to address and interpret our vigorous and interesting present."
Like his mentor, McGuane believes in the importance of wilderness – "that there are a dozen different reasons for wilderness, all of them good."
McGuane has cut his own nature trails through Big Sky Country, traversing the rivers and moving up the mountain trails since basing himself there 30 years ago.
Since then, in novels, essays and major magazine interviews, he has become known for his wit, wisdom, deftly honed situations, droll conversation and flamboyant characters.
A one-time Montana cutting-horse champion and a finalist in the 1986 national cutting-horse competition in Houston, McGuane is still "deeply involved in the world of horses."
While he doesn’t backpack as often as he once did, he fusses over his critters, taking his horses himself to the Bozeman veterinarian. He loves them all, from pampered colts to retired equine deans and dowagers, including his favorite cutting horse, aged 31.
"I can’t seem to downsize," he says, about his diverse passions. "My problem is controlling all these enthusiasms."
But juggle them he does, with time included for reading new authors and returning to revered classical works.
Reared in a small Michigan town, "about the size of Big Timber," McGuane enjoyed as a youth the pleasant counterpoint of the natural world and the stories he heard toward dusk from his family.
"They were Irish Catholic laborers from Boston," he says.
His grandfathers were a loom mechanic and a stationmaster on the Boston & Maine Railroad. The family prized reading, McGuane recalls.
Both grandmothers were "Gaelic grannies," he says, "and one was a real hero to me."
image
"She was orphaned at 13 in the slums of south Boston and raised five younger siblings, who went on to college and careers and good lives," he says.
The mix of backgrounds in Montana, he says, "makes for an interesting storytelling group."
"The railroad history, the mining, the ranching make us unique," he says. "Look at the mix, the ethnicity in Roundup, Red Lodge, Butte. There’s nothing quite like that in Wyoming or Idaho."
A conversation with McGuane is relaxed, lively and enlightening. He invokes the muse of his uncle Bill, who said, "Never leave a room or social situation without a story or a joke."
McGuane likes "drollery," and his recent New Yorker story had that in spades – a tale of a couple disenchanted with one another, taking a long car journey through the Gallatin Valley and into West Yellowstone, the Targhee Pass and Idaho. They attempt a crooked business deal and return, witnessing the decline of their relationship in the lonely drive.
The story’s punctuation mark is an eerie encounter with road rage.
Like many of his fellow Montana authors, McGuane has a vast knowledge of the geography and terrain.
"Many of our writers are also able amateur historians," he says. "But, if we’re going to have serious literature, we have to have good writing. Period," he says.
It can’t just be a story about the aggrieved ranch woman or the broken-down rancher. It has to have a larger life, "not just agricultural melancholy," he insists.
An omnivorous reader, McGuane says he has "four or five books going all the time."
"I’m constantly immersed in an ocean of reading," he says.
That ocean will take him on a 25-city, 27-day book tour this fall. Such tours, he says, are "grossly disorienting."
On a book tour last year with fellow New Yorker writer, Caribbean-born Jamaica Kincaid, McGuane says, "I tipped my hat to her. On the second stop, in Minneapolis, she said, ‘This isn’t good for me,’ and she left."
McGuane is known for his artful use of language and was asked whether he subscribes to the plot-driven or exposition school.
He paused then said, "Well I suppose I may err on the side of ‘wordsmithery.’ But I believe in a good tale, of course. You don’t want too much of the non-sequitor, too much enigmatic prose so you finish and say, ‘Huh?’ "
McGuane is proud that writers from all parts of Montana are now getting their just due in good reviews and mainstream consideration, where once, he says, the conception was that most serious writers had Missoula ties.
The upcoming High Plains Bookfest in Billings, he says, "is doing much to show how the ballast is shifting."
If you go
Tom McGuane will be featured in the gala reading at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Alberta Bair Theater in a highlight of the High Plains BookFest.
Also on the bill are Pete Fromm and Judy Blunt. Call Writer’s Voice at 248-1685 for more on the Friday-Sunday celebration of the written word.
"I’m pleased about the workshops and the readings and the company I’ll be keeping," he says, naming Rick Bass, Pete Fromm, Judy Blunt and others who will join the citywide celebration on Friday-Sunday.
He says Montana has always been on the cutting edge of the writing scene.
At the University of Montana years ago, he recalls, "Leslie Fiedler paid William Faulkner $200 to read excerpts of ‘As I Lay Dying’ to his writing class."
McGuane prefers the phrase "writers in Montana" rather than "Montana writers."
Not surprisingly, he points to several early influences, including famed Jewish writers and Southern women: Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Eudora Welty, Willa Cather and Flannery O’Connor.
McGuane is also a devotee of the short stories of Russia’s Gogol, J.P. Donlevy, John Updike and W.S. Merwin, whose "Spanish Ballads" McGuane is now enjoying. And he doesn’t necessarily believe in the inevitable decline of the aging writer.
"Not if your life is interesting and you keep your health," he says. "Look at Saul Bellow. At age 86, he has a new baby and a new book out."
Happily married, McGuane promises not to follow that act.
He and his wife, both previously married, are enjoying their four grown children – Tom Jr., Heather, Maggie and Anne – and their families.
Maggie and Walter Kern have produced the McGuanes a much-loved grandchild, Mazie, who, McGuane says, inherited the family’s Irish inspired gift of blarney.
"She comes in the room, and she makes you laugh," he says.
Christene Meyers may be reached at 657-1243 or at [email protected].
MATR Supporters (view all)
Sorry, we couldn't find any posts. Please try a different search.