John Clayton's Blog

How Facebook is like a small town

2009-10-26T09:02:00.000-06:00

I, for one, like Facebook's return to the Live Feed. To me, Twitter is a mere advertising platform, where Facebook is a network (something far more valuable). I like watching the network at work. Friends who don't post many status changes, because they don't like to advertise themselves, can nevertheless be active on the site. I see them befriending people, even people I don't know, and I smile to think they exist.

Indeed, these "network effects" were a big part of an essay I wrote last winter, before Facebook moved us all to the News Feed. Because to me the Facebook network, with its rippling circles of acquaintance and interaction, is just like a small town. Social networkers may prefer to think they're up to something totally new, but I think they're mimicking some of our oldest (and most cherished) social patterns.

Unfortunately, by the time the essay was published in July, the switch to the News Feed had made it seem a bit dated. Even more odd, from my perspective, was that many editors reversed the title. They must have feared that urbanites today are Internet-savvy but unfamiliar with small-town life. And so, instead of comparing this new phenomenon to an old social pattern, it was called "How a small town resembles Facebook."

Somebody quick find an English/Math double major, who can discuss the transitive property of metaphor.

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The Lockhart contemporaries reunion tour

2009-09-11T09:17:00.003-06:00

You know the feeling you have about old classmates, or compatriots in some ancient but intense experience? That's how I feel about many of the people in Caroline Lockhart's life: I wonder whatever happened to them, and I hope it was generally positive.

The feeling played out effectively for me on Wednesday night, when I spoke to the Yellowstone Corral of Westerners, a group of Billings-area folks interested in Western history. We were talking about Lockhart's efforts to set up her ranch on the Dryhead (the climactic section of The Cowboy Girl). I showed a picture of one of Lockhart's boyfriends, Lou Ericson, the fellow who had signed his name to the ranch purchase in 1926.

"We knew Lou Ericson," said a voice from the audience. It came from Shirley Steele, speaking on behalf of herself and her husband, the esteemed artist Ben Steele. Ericson had been a friend of Ben's father, and the younger Steeles visited him shortly after their wedding, at the Spear Ranch southeast of Hardin. Ericson told them of his days as a jockey, but not of his association with the notorious novelist/rancher.

A year or two after they purchased the ranch, Lockhart and Ericson split up. (There was a gunfight involved.) She banished him from the L Slash Heart. I was never able to find out what had happened to him, how he felt about Lockhart and his time on the Dryhead. But I was gratified to hear the Steeles report that he lived to a ripe old age, and seemed at that age to be quite happy.

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Horses that Buck

2009-06-04T11:06:00.001-06:00

RED LODGE, Mont. -- When Bearcreek native Bill Smith first gained national attention for his rodeo skills, he recalled in a program last Thursday, a reporter approached him. Shy and nervous ("a lot less windy than I am now"), the young Smith responded to the reporter that what he liked about rodeos was "horses that buck."

The phrase became something of a slogan for Smith's career, as he went on to become a three-time world champion saddle bronc rider. It also became the title of a 2008 book chronicling his life. Margot Kahn, author of Horses that Buck: The Story of Champion Bronc Rider Bill Smith, joined Smith for a lively discussion in front of a capacity crowd at the Carbon County Historical Society Museum on May 28.

When Kahn, who now lives in Seattle, first met Smith, she had never been to a rodeo. "I did not know how many miles he traveled for a chance to ride a horse that bucked," she said, reading from the book's preface, "or what it felt like, or how the road could make you feel free." But after seven years of interviews and research, as well as rewrites as she pursued a Master of Fine Arts in Nonfiction at Columbia University in New York, Horses that Buck was published by the University of Oklahoma Press. It is now in its third printing.

"It's her book," Smith said with typical humility Thursday, "I just helped. I didn't realize the talent this girl had—and she didn't either. Everybody I talk to tells me what an easy read this book is, a page-turner."

Smith now lives in Thermopolis, Wyoming, where he raises and sells horses at the WYO Quarter Horse Ranch. But the crowd Thursday was filled with relatives and old friends from the Red Lodge area, including the family of Bill's nephew Jack Wipplinger.

The intimacy of the crowd led to both tender reminiscences and teasing."My first girlfriend is here," Smith announced, claiming their sixth-grade relationship faltered when she accused him of liking his horse more than her. After Kahn read an excerpt describing Smith competing in a rodeo in Filer, Idaho, on a broken leg in the early 1960s, Smith claimed that the other competitors had exaggerated his toughness: "I get a hangnail, it hurts."

Since retiring from rodeo in 1979, Smith has built a nationwide reputation for his handling of horses. (The musician Lyle Lovett, in his Billings concert the previous week, called Smith "a role model, not just for cowboys but for anyone.") Kahn said she was attracted to his story because it had ups and downs, with rodeo success followed by a period of struggle and a change in mindset, then "ending on a high note" with the current successes of his horsemanship career.

That career leads him all over the country. Smith came to the Red Lodge event direct from Minneapolis, where he'd been looking at horses. "Good horses are hard to find," he said, noting that he had to look for not only what he liked in a horse, but also what his customers would like. "I couldn't stay in business selling horses for what they're worth," he said. "Nobody needs a horse any more. They're a luxury item, a plaything."

But he expressed satisfaction with his career, noting that he truly loved horses, especially those that buck.

As the program made clear, Smith also makes a great subject for a book because of his incredible storytelling. In a give-and-take with friends in the audience, he kept the crowd laughing with stories including his worst accident, an avalanche in the Thorofare, the best bucking horse he'd ever seen, and cowboy pranks involving the overtipping of occupied Porta-Potties.

"My life has been filled with luck," he said. "I've kept on trying to screw it up, and always come out smelling like a rose."

Kahn said it was the first book event she'd done together with Smith, and the first with an audience that knew so much about Smith and rodeo in general. The two had an easy rapport on stage, and mingled with the crowd at a reception and signing before and after the talk.

Autographed copies of the book, which was announced this week as a finalist for a High Plains Book Award, are available at the museum and Red Lodge Books.

(cross-posted from the Carbon County News)
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Dumpster Diving to Save the Planet

2009-04-28T17:31:00.001-06:00

Today's mail brought my contributor's copies of Going Green: True Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Divers, the anthology just published by the University of Oklahoma Press. Its arrival meant I got to take an hour or two off to start reading it.

In editor Laura Pritchett's effective introduction, she discusses how her family tradition of Dumpster-diving eventually led to her thinking about "the ways our culture does -- or does not -- reuse its resources." And how those thoughts eventually led to a book. Along the way, they led her through my essay on garage sales, here titled "Good Circulation."

Pritchett's concept of the book has long centered on the word "gleaning." Her notion is that activities such as dumpster-diving represent a healthy (re)use of resources particularly valuable in times of environmental crisis. Unfortunately, for me personally, the word "glean" grates on my ears. Nevertheless, as they were casting about for a title, I remembered a friend who works for a Kentucky newspaper called the Gleaner, and how he one day signed off an email with "well, I have to go write something for the greater glory of the Gleaner." So, figuring that if you're going to use a word like "glean" you might as well take full advantage of it, I proposed that the title of this volume be The Greater Glory of Gleaning.

In instead choosing "Going Green," the publishers cemented my reputation for proposing book titles that are just a little bit too much for anyone to take seriously.

By the way, if you want to learn more or commune with like-minded readers, the book has an associated Facebook group.

I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com

Facebook vs. narrative vs. newspapers

2009-04-06T18:05:00.003-06:00

I suspect that social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn may pose threats to newspapers -- but not to narrative journalism. Here's why.

I use Facebook to keep up with friends. It's like a more efficient version of walking down to the watercooler or coffeeshop for brief, diverting social interaction. But it's not meaningless -- it's helping me remind myself of my role in a wider social ecosystem. My place in the world -- that's also a big part of why I read newspapers, to learn about events that are happening around me, to understand community dynamics and my relation to them. The more I can fulfill that same purpose in a personalized way on Facebook, the less important newspapers are to my day-to-day habits.

At the same time there's something missing from my Facebook interactions: narrative. I'm enjoying my friend Stephen's posts from Dubai, but I don't really understand how or why he got there. Likewise, I'm fascinated by the number of Sutton's friends who comment on his place-oriented posts, "Hey, when did you move to Montana?" (It was two years ago.) But the medium doesn't include many opportunities to provide backstory.

Then again, neither do newspapers. Thanks to the influence of 24-hour cable news (and newspapers' need to compete with it), much of today's "news" is the latest tidbit in an ongoing saga. And in the rush to publish there's little evaluation of the tidbit's importance. These days, I prefer to get my political and economic news from magazines or books, which have the luxury of time to grasp the narrative thread.

In other words, I believe we all still hunger for narrative. And we hunger for narratives that make sense, that are well-constructed by the people with the talent or experience to do so. I have no idea whether in five years we will get those narratives via a rejuvenated form of newspapering, via web magazines, or via some yet-to-be-invented format. But in the big picture, those are just delivery vehicles. What matters to me as a writer of narrative is not so much the vehicle as the relationship I use it to have with a reader.

(cross-posted from WriterL)

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In the March/April Montana Magazine

2009-03-15T16:37:00.000-06:00

For 19 years I've been walking through a library door under the word "Carnegie." At some recent point I realized that 16 other Montana communities have Carnegie libraries, and I wondered what they were like.

Butch Larcombe, my editor at Montana Magazine, encouraged me to dig around, and my survey revealed diversity: art museums, office buildings, and community gathering-places. More importantly, I got to further explore what I think is a key time period in Montana history: 1900-1925, as the state gained enough residents to move out of its frontier phase and build some sort of society. The choices those society-builders made have far-more-significant ramifications for life today than do the choices made by their predecessors, if only because those choices were often made in brick and stone. So the institutions those folks built, such as Carnegie Libraries, are often still in use today.

In the period since I began the investigation, economic hard times have in some places (not, to my knowledge, in Montana) curtailed public funding for libraries. I hope that my article (an excerpt is available here) can serve as a partial reminder of the tremendous good accomplished by these community treasures.

(For research geeks: Good sources on Carnegie Libraries include: George Bobinski's Carnegie Libraries: Their History and Impact on American Public Library Development; Molly Skeen's "How America's Carnegie Libraries Adapt to Survive"; Theodore Jones' Carnegie Libraries Across America: A Public Legacy; and the Montana state library directory at http://msl.state.mt.us/for_librarians/Library_Directory/Browse_Path/default.asp )

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Legends, factual and otherwise

2009-03-09T15:02:00.001-06:00

One of the most compelling, infuriating, fascinating books I've read in a long time is the recent nonfiction book about Wyoming, Alexandra Fuller's The Legend of Colton H. Bryant.

I saw Fuller speak at the Equality State Book Festival last fall and she was fantastic: funny, touching, sympathetic, smart, sure of herself, and willing to challenge her audience to lose their preconceptions. She's one of those authors who doesn't do a reading so much as a performance. If she's ever speaking near you, go see her.

After the talk I bought the book, and was pleased to see Fuller's personality also come through on the page. She's concerned about coal bed methane drilling, the new natural gas technology that's fueling a huge boom across Wyoming. So what she does in the book is to challenge herself, by becoming immersed in the life of a young man who worked and died on the rigs. Fuller's a great writer, and Bryant -- such a typical kid that he probably would not have been written about had he not come to an untimely end -- really catches fire in our minds.

A Wyoming friend criticized the book as yet another romanticization of the state, but that didn't bother me. In a world where we romanticize cops, spies, gamblers, and even investment bankers, I say it's about time somebody romanticized a rural high-school graduate working a dull blue-collar job. And in a world where Fuller's political position is often portrayed as elitist, I appreciated her genuine admiration for a lousy industry's employees.

The infuriating part was in the author's note at the end: "This is a work of nonfiction, but…" That "but" is a killer. Fuller has changed timelines, invented dialogue, and owned up only in the vaguest way to several other tactics that are not nonfiction. In the speech she admitted to having changed a few oaths to "frigging" and "crap" out of respect for the mother of a dead child. But the book is full of crap. That is, the word "crap" appears regularly, so much so that using "crap" instead of the harsher word seems to be one of the unique characteristics that makes up Colton's character. Except that maybe, once you get the full explanation from the author, it isn't.

The nonfiction writer's bond with the reader depends on the reader's faith in its nonfiction-ality. People who make stuff up willy-nilly lose that faith. Two easy solutions exist: An author can be up-front about it -- in excruciating detail -- or write it as fiction. But when he or she tries to straddle those lines, reader infuriation ensues.

I'm still glad I read "The Legend of Colton H. Bryant." It has an important message told well. I especially look forward to reading more of Fuller. But if I see another book, by any author, containing the phrase "This is a work of nonfiction, but…" -- that's probably the last phrase in that book I will read.

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Lockhart to be discussed on site

2009-03-01T08:44:00.001-07:00

Those in the Lovell, Wyoming, area have a rare opportunity this spring to delve fully into the life of Caroline Lockhart. The Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area is sponsoring a three-event book discussion group focusing on Lockhart.

Details are available here, but I particularly recommend the May 9 tour of the Lockhart ranch itself. Not only are Chris Finley and Christy Fleming incredibly knowledgeable about the site and Lockhart's life, but spring is a gorgeous time of year to visit. The greening grass and blooming cottonwoods of the L Slash Heart in early May were what first attracted me to Lockhart as a potential subject.

I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com

Caroline gets BUSTed

2009-01-29T18:48:00.001-07:00

The Febuary/March issue of BUST magazine ("for women with something to get off their chest") includes a great article by Terry Selucky. Titled "Home on the Range" (and teased on the cover as "Cowgirls gone wild"), it argues that cowgirls were among the first and best feminists. As evidence it cites, among others, the life of Caroline Lockhart.

Selucky and I had a far-ranging interview (set up in part by Margot Kahn). I agreed with her basic thesis, that women of the Old West (and New) had an independence, free spirit, and contentment that make them excellent models for young girls today. But Selucky had a problem that I wasn't able to help her with: most contemporary independent female ranch owners and horsewomen don't think of themselves as cowgirls.

In the article, Selucky argues that "the term ‘cowgirl' has been hijacked, so that we can't even recognize a real cowgirl when we see one." I think it's a little more complicated than that, because even in Lockhart's day the term ‘cowgirl' did not fit in with the proto-feminist agenda.

Cowgirls are generally women who love the West, the landscape, the lifestyle, the horses and cattle and men who work them -- and who are generally seen as part of a family unit: a daughter, wife, mother. Lockhart was too independent and ornery for such a family-centric role. In metaphorical terms, she wanted to ride off into the sunset alone, just like a cowboy does. And I'm not sure that option was (or maybe even still is) open to cowgirls.

That's why Lockhart self-identified not as a cowgirl but as the "cowboy girl." And that's why I selected that phrase as the title for the book.

I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com

Never judge a book by the cover (of its reprint)

2009-01-20T15:46:00.001-07:00

I often get asked whether Caroline Lockhart's novels are still in print. As of this year, boy are they ever! Did The Cowboy Girl play a role? Maybe, but technology played a bigger one.

If you need any proof of the way the "Long Tail" economy is growing exponentially, look no further than the explosion of recent republications of Lockhart's books, originally published in the 1910s. Most are from print-on-demand outfits. I imagine they're aided by the fact that Project Gutenberg has provided the text for these books. All the publisher has to do is grab the text from Web, insert into its printing software, add a cover, and wait for somebody to make an order through an outfit like bn.com.

But it turns out there's one step in that newfangled-publication process that turns out to be more difficult than it looks: adding a cover. Here are three Lockhart books from an outfit called Tutis publishing.

Is The Dude Wrangler about ancient Greece? Does The Fighting Shepherdess involve Indian maidens and Egyptian pottery? Is the Lady Doc a contemporary medical thriller? Suffice it to say: no. In fact I'd have to say that these are some of the absolute worst covers I can imagine given the content of these novels. I picture some hapless Tutis executive, armed with a CD-full of stock images, required to assign them to titles at a rate of 20 or 30 an hour.

On the other hand, hey, anything to promote reading and books. And especially, anything to promote unjustly-forgotten novelists like Lockhart. But here's hoping this process of reprinting old novels improves a bit as it matures.

I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com

"Camp Senia in the Rockies"

2008-12-04T14:51:00.002-07:00

The Winter 2008 issue of the Montana Quarterly is hitting newsstands now with my article on Camp Senia. I have long known that the camp, located up the West Fork from Red Lodge, was a great example of Montana's dude ranching heritage. So when I was putting together "Images of America: Red Lodge," I asked descendants of Al and Senia (Pollari) Croonquist for some historic photos to include in the book.

Then this summer the Cascade wildfire burned portions of the camp, and although the news coverage was generally good, it struck me that it didn't fully cover some of the historical angles. (After all, that's the job of a magazine.) The 1920s were an odd and important time in Montana history, when the economic promise of the frontier was failing, even as its romantic promise grew.

I suggested to my editor that we take a closer look, and although the piece required more rewriting than some of mine, I was quite pleased with the end result.

If you're interested in more about the history of the camp and that era, I recommend: The Great Divide by Gary Ferguson; Dude Ranching: A Complete History by Lawrence Borne; and the files of the Carbon County Historical Society Museum.

The New West, redefined by Caroline Lockhart

2008-11-21T11:47:00.002-07:00

At one point in my research into Caroline Lockhart, I considered centering The Cowboy Girl on the "New West."

For 15 years I've heard people talking about the New West, often with vague or changing ideas of what the phrase means. Because Lockhart loved the Old West but arrived in the region in 1904, after the frontier had "closed," she struck me as an interesting lens through which to offer some radical perspectives on the alleged newness of the New West. (It helped that "Old West - And New" was the title of one of her novels -- published in 1933.)

In the end I rejected that approach for the book. I thought Lockhart's story had a lot to say on its own terms, and did not need to be filtered through a contemporary New West discussion.

But I'm very pleased to be able to present some of my Lockhart/New West arguments in an article, "When Cowboys Became Capitalists and the West Became New" (link is a pdf), published in the current issue of Drumlummon Views.

I'm also delighted to be part of Drumlummon Views, the Montana-based online-only literary magazine. Browsing through this issue is like catching up with friends old and new in the Montana cultural scene. There are contributions from Russell Rowland, Rick Newby, and Ken Egan, and I was particularly drawn to Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs' piece on Bert Hansen, whom I had written about before.

I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com

Studs on technique

2008-11-05T16:03:00.002-07:00

Of all the reminiscences of Studs Terkel, my favorite is Mike Lenahan's Chicago Reader piece that gets the great interviewer talking about the technique of quoting somebody.

You want that language. I wouldn't change goin' to going, or ain't to aren't. But "confluence," if you make it clear, without embarrassing the person, that it is "influence," or "coincidence"—I think I would change it in many cases. For clarity. He meant "coincidence," I would make it coincidence.

I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com

Montana Festival of the Book preview

2008-10-20T10:52:00.001-06:00

I'm looking forward to this coming weekend's Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula. It's always a great gathering of writers and readers.

This year I'll again be hosting the "One Book Montana Discussion," where I conduct a dialogue with the author of the book selected for group reading across the state. That author is Kirby Larson, and her book is Hattie Big Sky. Kirby and I were on a panel together at the bookfest in 2006, when Hattie was just being released, and she's an intelligent and enthusiastic conversationalist.

I'll also be doing a slideshow of historic photographs of Red Lodge, Montana, based on my new book Images of America: Red Lodge.

These events are at 11:00 a.m. and 2:30 p.m., both at the Holiday Inn downtown, but I'm also looking forward to attending several of the other events -- you can view the entire schedule here. If you're attending, please stop me and say hi!

I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com

Where's Sitka?

2008-10-16T15:28:00.000-06:00

Like many reviewers, I loved the imagination in Michael Chabon's novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Chabon is a great writer, with active plots, vivid characters, and big themes. But I kept wondering about the book's relationship to place.

If you haven't read it, here's some background on the book's premise: It takes place in an alternative-reality Sitka, Alaska, which is peopled by over two million Jews. They poured in after the U.S. in 1941 opened a district to accept European Jews fleeing the Nazis, and more arrived after the Israeli state "failed" before 1950. But the district's authorization is about to run out, and their status is up in the air.

Chabon's Sitka is, necessarily, a messy urban place. Its inhabitants have brought numerous European traditions. Although they occasionally interact with the native Tlingit, they have of course built their own society there. This is one of the themes that Chabon is exploring, the ways that the Jewish culture expresses itself in a variety of places, despite uprooting and persecution.

Yet there's an alternative literary thread that examines the role of place -- especially the incredible geography of the American West -- in shaping the communities that form there. Sixty years after Europeans arrived in Butte, or Seattle, or Santa Fe, or Gillette, those places looked far different than any European community. The degree of variance-from-birth-society was greater in the West than it was in other regions (say, the Midwest, or New England), because of the West's spectacular, aggressive surroundings.

Living in the West, I feel like the landscape has changed me and my community. From that perspective, I see it changing all sorts of other communities. And I have to wonder if it would have changed the Jews of Sitka, too. Maybe it wouldn't have (and I believe that's Chabon's point). But it does seem to me that tension would have been a driving factor in the history of alternative-Sitka, and I would love to read a novel that described it.

I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com

More on Wyo women

2008-09-24T09:40:00.002-06:00

A key question animating The Cowboy Girl is the role of women in the American West. One of our culture's leading figures in answering that question is the fiction writer Annie Proulx. Her views are controversial around here, but I must say I see a lot of truth to them. I was especially captivated by her recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, particularly the lines, "In a real sense women on ranches are secondary citizens, but many, if not most, would be furious if you said that out straight" and (regarding the message of Brokeback Mountain) "if you can't fix it you've got to stand it."

Thanks to Jenny Shank for the link.

When sportswriting is far more

2008-09-16T07:35:00.001-06:00

One of my favorite writers, Gary Smith of Sports Illustrated, gets a glowing profile on a national stage.

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Coxey's Army in Montana Quarterly

2008-09-07T09:53:00.001-06:00

I first heard about Coxey's Army from Caroline Lockhart's boyfriend. Andrew McKenzie, a Boston-area journalist recently graduated from college, made a name for himself by traveling with the "campaign of squalor" during the nation's first-ever March on Washington. This was in 1894 (needless to say, my knowledge was coming from archival research, not over a beer). I took a few minutes to learn what Coxey's Army was, and then wisely left it out of The Cowboy Girl.

But earlier this year, I saw a brief account of Coxey's Army in Billings, Montana. Montana? I had thought the story was about a march from Ohio to Washington DC. But as I dug, I found that the Montana story was actually far more dramatic than that McKenzie had followed in Ohio. I pitched it to my good friends at The Montana Quarterly, where it is running as the History column in the just-published Autumn issue.

With stolen trains, labor unrest, instantly-deputized marshals, and a surprising joke about Billings real estate agents, it turned into one of articles I have most enjoyed writing recently.

For more on Coxey's Army, I recommend the following sources:

Schwantes, Carlos A., Coxey's Army: An American Odyssey (1985).
Clinch, Thomas A., "Coxey's Army in Montana," Montana: The Magazine Of Western History, (Autumn, 1965).
Fritz, Harry, et al, Montana Legacy : Essays On History, People, And Place (2002)
"Coxey's Montana Navy," Pacific Northwest Quarterly, July 1982
Billings (Mont.) Times, 21 Aug 1924
Billings (Mont.) Times, 13 May 1926

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The (scholarly) reviews are in

2008-08-25T09:15:00.002-06:00

Although newspapers and magazines traditionally run book reviews only immediately upon publication, scholarly journals work at a slower pace. These reviews come out a year or two after the publication date, but because they are written by experts in the field, they tend to be quite thoughtful.

Thus the scholarly reviews are now coming in for The Cowboy Girl, my biography of Caroline Lockhart, and I am pleased that they are generally positive. For example, in the Journal of the West, Miles Lewis said that it "succeeded admirably" and that "Whether or not you like Lockhart's fidelity or character on a personal level, Clayton has crafted a strong, enlightening account of her life as a self-described Cowboy Girl."

I've been rather nervous about how scholars would receive the book. I myself have no graduate degrees, and so the research skills I brought to the project consisted primarily of my curiosity and the help that others would provide. At the same time, however, I am puzzled that scholars of Western history and literature have not given Lockhart more attention. But my fear has always been that the problem is not how that scholarship has evolved, but my failure to understand it.

Thus the reviews are gratifying. Several current scholars do agree that Lockhart deserves attention. Victoria Lamont's review in Western American Literature is everything I could hope for:

John Clayton's The Cowboy Girl is as meticulously researched as it is a bona fine page-turner… What sets The Cowboy Girl apart from standard woks of western Americana, aside from the inherently sensational life of its subject, is the way it weaves together details of both Lockhart's public and private life with insights about the historical, social, and cultural developments of which Lockhart was a part. The result is a fascinating read… a rare revelation of frontier mythology as lived experience.

Two features of this review particularly excited me. One is that I consider Lamont the world's leading expert on female writers of the Western frontier. In doing background research I had dug up her PhD thesis, and found it compelling. Her opinion matters. The other is that her discussion of "frontier mythmaking in its historical context" (too lengthy to quote in full here) brought me back to when I was deciding to write the book, and was fascinated with how our romantic views of the Old West came to be, and what the lives must have been like of the people who thought they were close enough in time to those views to actually live them. When it came to the actual writing of the book, I tried not to make this theme too overt, because I wanted to keep the narrative drive, but I was delighted that a critic was still able to see it.

I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com

This site is on FriendFeed

2008-08-06T10:33:00.002-06:00

When you live in a small Montana town, there's not much need for "tweeting" your presence, since you don't move around much. Nevertheless I'm very interested in social networking tools, most recently and especially FriendFeed. It's a new site recommended by Paul Boutin to collect a variety of social information in a single place, like an RSS feed.

So now you can follow my even more holistically via the John Clayton FriendFeed page. Right now it's got these posts plus my activities on BookTour, LinkedIn, and PlanetRedLodge, but it may grow as I play with the technology.

The value of FriendFeed, of course, is not so much that YOU can follow ME, but that I can follow YOU. So my point here is to ask for connections: who among my friends out there is on FriendFeed, and would you please let me know?

By the way, if you're thinking that neither the friendfeed nor the blog is as rich as some, I've noticed that as well. But I liked the comments of James Fallows on his Atlantic blog recently.

The best and liveliest "real" blogs link to, reinforce, argue with, amplify, disseminate, pay attention to, and in general live amid other material on the internet… But it's not what I'm interested in doing. … I am mainly trying to report on or react to things that are not on the internet -- things I see in my reporting or traveling life that I know are not suitable for an Atlantic article or a book. … My point: I realize this is not normal blog style. I'm doing it on purpose! I undertook this long ago mainly as a notebook for myself. That is still my fundamental motivation, though like everyone in the writing business I am of course grateful to anyone who pays attention.

Amen. Blogging has evolved from the name of a technology to the name of a certain type of online social ecosystem, and without taking away from the ecosystem's many merits, I do think the technology has multiple uses, several of which may yet prove to be useful in their own right.

I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com

The problem with book tours...

2008-07-31T13:30:00.001-06:00

From novelist Ann Patchett's essay on book-touring, in the Atlantic:

Most people who are capable of sitting alone day after day, year after year, typing into the void are probably constitutionally ill-suited to work a room like a politician

I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com

Policy proposals ahead of the curve

2008-07-17T08:02:00.002-06:00

Four and a half years ago, this blog made a proposal for economic development in Montana: legalize gay marriage. My tongue was slightly in cheek: I didn't really expect Montanans to endorse the proposal. I mainly hoped to use the issue to point out the fallacies of many state-sponsored economic development efforts, which... well, that's another story.

But today here comes the New York Times making the exact same point, minus the irony:

With the economy the way it is, becoming "the Las Vegas of same-sex marriages" began to sound like a good deal for states.

I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com

Celebrating a rare author payday

2008-06-30T16:12:00.003-06:00

Much of Rocky Mountain West is celebrating the success of one of its own authors, David Wroblewski of Boulder, Colorado.

I have not yet read "The Story of Edgar Sawtelle," but I too am looking forward to it, in part because the structure-junkie in me is very intrigued by the way Wroblewski in this interview compares a novel to a piece of software, and in this interview compares it to a machine:

I started the novel and realized I didn't know how they worked as drama machines, how you held a story that long together without having it slide apart,

Can you tell that he's been working for hi-tech companies to pay the bills while writing? (It's not such a bad life.)

But I'd also like to add a counterpoint to the Wroblewski celebration, in the form of a link to a less-happy author.

Another author came to visit and kindly explained to me what I sort of knew but had been steadily denying: "Bronze Inside and Out" will not make any money for me. Any. … I can no longer say to myself, "when the big check comes I'll get the pickup fixed" or "the shower fixed" or "my teeth fixed." I mean, when these things become intolerable, what WILL I do?

Mary Scriver's lament reminds me of another woman of a certain age who'd moved to rural Montana to write, and as times toughened hoped that her book would bring her enough money to afford some of the basic luxuries her neighbors took for granted. But in Caroline Lockhart's case, she really should have known better -- by the time she was pinning these hopes on "Old West - and New" she'd already published six less-than-lucrative novels.

By the way, that was in 1933 -- it's hard to argue that for authors, times were once easier.

I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com

The Montana Arts and Culture Magazine

2008-06-25T12:08:00.000-06:00

I am honored to be featured in the June/July issue of The Montana Arts and Culture Magazine, a celebration of the creative arts published in Billings and distributed free throughout the state.

The magazine's Writer's Corner this issue features an excerpt from The Cowboy Girl. I'm particularly gratified to see nonfiction celebrated as a "creative art," as well as being associated with the many talented people featured in the magazine.

To get a copy for yourself, email publisher Randy Vralsted at mtartsandculture [at] earthlink.net.

I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com

Great start for Red Lodge photo book

2008-06-22T10:14:00.002-06:00

The early life of the new book "Images of America: Red Lodge" continues to be happy. Last week's Billings Sunday Gazette included a remarkably positive review by Chris Rubich, highlighting the way the text seeks to "find interesting points behind many of the images."

Rubich says, "the real test of a historical photo book is how much it engages people with first-hand ties" and at that level this one succeeds. I've had the same sorts of reactions: I get nervous around older folks who lived through the times the book depicts. After all, they lived through it and I often did not. But they've generally been quite generous, and excited about the fact that these images are recording their history.

Such was the case at last week's "book release party" sponsored by the Carbon County Historical Society. Attendees numbered about 70 and included numerous old-timers who were able to fill in additional stories about some of the images portrayed in the slideshow.

I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com