John Clayton's Blog

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.

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

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

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

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

New programming to save earth

2008-06-02T13:57:00.001-06:00

"Planet Green, a new cable network[, is] due June 4." –USA Today

Could these be some of the programs we will expect?

American Idle—Our correspondents are out at long stoplights across the country, interviewing commuters. Today's question: Who is responsible for current high gas prices?

ReNew-lyweds: Al and Tipper—They renewed their vows to each other and the earth, now watch their crazy antics as Tipper cooks a tuna dinner and Al tries to learn French—all without harming the environment!

America's Next Top Coddle—Entrepreneurs compete for the chance to start their careers as favored recipients of huge government grants for allegedly-sustainable energy sources. This week: makeovers for nuclear and hydro power.

Dancing with the Stars and Planets—This show pairs celebrities with celestial bodies, who each week compete to avoid addressing the environmental consequences of their actions. This week, Marie Osmond and the dwarf planet Pluto dance around the issue of driving your SUV to the recycling center.

Survivor: Peoria—This week, contestants must design a citywide mandatory recycling program and pass pedestrian-friendly zoning regulations.

The Hills—Heidi and Spencer debate the possibility Lauren has recycled her sex tape, but decide that Lauren isn't capable of wanting to save the earth.

Battlestar: Gallatincounty—Highlights of debate on a new Bozeman, Montana, cluster-zoning ordinance.

Recycling with the Stars—This week, rocker Tommy Lee and rapper Ludacris try to give up bottled water.

The Great Books—Michael Pollan compares his growth as a writer to a tomato plant; Bill McKibben interviews a toadstool.

Curious George (children)—Curious George looks at a low-flush toilet.

Barney and Friends (children)—Come replace lightbulbs with compact fluorescents with me!

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood (children)—In the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, Prince Tuesday seeks to find an alternate fuel source for the train.

As the World Burns (drama)—Will news of the treacherous affair between Ashley (Minnie Driver) and Dirk (Matt Dillon) threaten the commitment Savannah (Daryl Hannah) to live a low-impact, eco-friendly, fully-carbon-offset vegan lifestyle?

Girl Talk with Salma Hayek—Biodegradable purses; also: lip glosses that look best under compact fluorescent light.

My Small Sustainable Geek Wedding—Dishes and flatware made from a mixture of cornstarch and manure; plus: a wedding dress made of wildflower seeds.

Ugly Bethesda—A full half-hour of rants against suburbia, with Daryl Hannah and her special guest James Howard Kunstler.

The Biggest Loser: Vegan—This week: oat bran!

Law & Order: SUV—Live coverage of the Berkeley, California, municipal task force on outlawing gas guzzlers.

Midday Matinee—"Born Free" (Virginia McKenna, Bill Travers, 1966). A couple in Kenya raise a lion cub but then must teach her to be free. (PG: Wild animal action.)

Midday Matinee panel— Adam Levine of Maroon 5 asks, Could it happen here? Maybe not with a lion, but a wolf or a bobcat or a very large nutria rat?

The Ecological Price is Right—The contestant who comes closest to guessing the proper carbon offset for a suburban office park wins a month of free public transportation.

Two and a Half Mentors—Tips for green living from Charlie Sheen, Richard Gere, and Verne Troyer. This week: Use an egg timer in the shower!

Destination: Mulchpile—Host Ed Begley, Jr ., presents a travelogue of amazing ecological wonders including springtails, sowbugs, and black soldier fly maggots. Incredibly, you can see these amazing natural creatures in your own backyard compost—no fossil-fuel burning transportation required!

CSI: Atmosphere—Forensic scientists make a thrilling study of planetary carbon dioxide levels.

Big Brother 10: Waste Stream—The houseguests must collaborate to reduce their output of waste—but Barry had bean burritos for dinner. As the cast debates when to flush, hilarity ensues.

PowerPoint! With Al Gore—More presentation slideshows.

Bedtime with Ed Begley, Jr.—The "Living with Ed" star reads from Brothers Grimm fairy tales updated to use more environmentally friendly options such as hemp-fleece riding hoods and birdseed instead of breadcrumbs.

Backwards reels the title

2008-05-23T08:43:00.001-06:00

So what exactly is the title of the new book? I’ve been referring to “Images of America: Red Lodge” as if Red Lodge is the subtitle. But if you’re asking for it in a bookstore you may need to reverse those.

Internally, Arcadia refers to it as “Red Lodge.” Makes sense: they’ve got dozens of Images of America titles yet only one about each place.

But in the book’s primary geographic market, the title is more problematic. It could refer to the city itself, a dozen business establishments, or a half-dozen other books with a similar subject. Adding the “Images” subtitle, as in “Red Lodge: Images of America” can help, but that sounds pretentious to me, as if it’s equating Red Lodge to America, which is not the book’s intent.

To get technical, I believe the Images of America is the “series title,” and so the best way to ask your local bookstore to order you a copy of the book is to call it “Red Lodge, in the Images of America series from Arcadia Publishing.” Or you can just follow a link.

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

Cheers for Arcadia

2008-05-14T09:54:00.001-06:00

Today is the official “ship-from” date for my new book Images of America: Red Lodge. That means the book is shipping from the warehouse today, and should be in stores by Monday.

For me personally, one of the joys of the book has been my relationship with the book’s publisher, Arcadia Publishing. It’s the best such relationship I’ve ever had -- even compared to larger and better-known commercial outfits.

One of the keys, I believe, is that Arcadia has a well-defined set of rules. The company publishes hundreds of books across the nation each focusing on historic photographs of a small community or neighborhood. To cut costs, they standardize the format of these books. They have very strict rules on what types of photos work, where they work, and how they need to be captioned. But -- and this is another key -- they explain those rules well. Perhaps because they often work with first-time authors, Arcadia provided reams of material explaining things I needed to do.

Many of those things were above-and-beyond normal author expectations. (For example, I had to do much of the layout on the book.) But they were well explained, in advance. Since I wasn’t surprised by these tasks, I didn’t resent them. Meanwhile, I knew that all of the tasks on Arcadia’s side were being performed effectively. (For example, I’ve been chatting this week with the publicist and salesperson on the best ways to market the book.)

One lesson that other publishers might take is the benefit of customer relationship software. Many of Arcadia’ emails to me were attached to a CRM number, implying (and I didn’t ask about details) that a software package had reminded an editor, marketer, or other individual of an upcoming deadline. Having software to organize and remember dates and rules frees the person up to be personable. And that was the final key: a set of friendly, responsive individuals.

Well, there’s one more final key: the royalty checks. Those won’t start arriving for some time, but given our experience so far, I’m optimistic.

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

Highway to the Sky

2008-05-07T07:30:00.002-06:00

My latest article for Montana Magazine, “Highway to the Sky,” has just hit the stands. When editor Butch Larcombe told me he was looking for something beyond the standard tourist pap on the Beartooth Highway, something that could bring the road and region to life the way I had done with the Bighorn Canyon, I grimaced. It was a tall order, especially in 1500 words.

But then I recalled the incredible pictures I’d been looking over at the Carbon County Historical Society Museum, during my research for Images of America: Red Lodge, depicting the highway’s construction and early years. And I recalled a surprisingly compelling narrative that went with it.

Many folks in the Red Lodge area have known that JCF Siegfriedt and OHP Shelley were the Fathers of the Beartooth Highway. Some have even recalled a previous effort by Siegfriedt to build a trail up the side of Mount Maurice. But an old article I dug up at the Parmly Billings Library pointed to a single meeting, just as the coal mines began closing in 1924, at which Siegfriedt convinced Shelley and five other men that getting the federal government to build the highway was the way to salvage the city of Red Lodge.

It was like King Arthur gathering knights at the round table to explain their romantic, honorable, and incredibly foolish quest. It’s fascinating in retrospect because despite all odds, the quest succeeded. And that’s the type of story a narrative nonfiction writer loves. The results of what I did with it are not available online, but you can subscribe by starting here or get the book with all the pictures starting here.

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

Images of America: Red Lodge

2008-05-01T13:55:00.002-06:00

I am pleased to announce the imminent publication of my latest book, “Red Lodge,” in Arcadia Publishing’s “Images of America” series. The book is a compilation of historic photographs of the small Montana town. I co-authored it with the Carbon County Historical Society, which owns most of the photos.

I selected, arranged, and captioned the photos, using the archives at the historical society museum. It was a wonderful challenge to try to cover the history of a town in a series of 70-word captions. It was also an interesting challenge to use pictures, rather than words, as the primary storytelling medium. I was relatively pleased with the results, but of course each of you will make your individual judgement.

Compared to The Cowboy Girl, this is much more of a niche book. Either you know Red Lodge and will enjoy photos of its history, or you don’t. The story of Caroline Lockhart had interesting implications for the history of the American West as a whole, and I wrote and marketed that book with those implications in mind. The story of Red Lodge is just the story of one town, and so I don’t expect to do much book touring beyond Carbon County.

My author’s-hot-off-the-press copy arrived last week, and I was quite impressed with the quality of the print job. However, the books won’t be widely available until the official publication date, Monday, May 19.

Before that date, Amazon is offering a pre-publication discount. But as I note on this page (which has much more information about the book), I’d like to encourage anyone who can do so to order the book through the Historical Society. This organization collected the photos in the book (and asked me to put them together), and it deserves to profit from them.

A great way to purchase the book and support the historical society is to come to the book’s official release party on Thursday, June 19. There’s more information in the events sidebar on the left.

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

“Yoke of human malevolence”

2008-04-30T13:40:00.000-06:00

The wonderful Yellowstone-area nature writer Gary Ferguson has an op-ed in today’s Los Angeles Times. The yoke he refers to is that worn by the no-longer-endangered wolf, but on the other hand he’s not too enthusiastic about yesterday’s lawsuit trying to stop the process…

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

OneBook Motnana: Hattie Big Sky

2008-04-26T13:55:00.002-06:00

The novel "Hattie Big Sky" has been chosen as this year’s OneBook Montana, and as a member of the Advisory Committee for the Montana Center for the Book, I again greatly enjoyed my participation in the selection, in part because it generated considerable discussion and thought.

I was not the one who originally suggested this book, but I quickly got on the bandwagon because I had read it -- and given it a big thumbs-up -- when it first came out.

A concern, however, was that "Hattie Big Sky" is a novel directed at teenaged girls. Its reading level is listed as “Young Adult,” it’s often shelved with childrens’ books, and reviews say things like “great for ages ten and up.” So should it really be our sole recommendation for Montanans to read, or should we pair it with an adult book?

I believe in the one-book (non-paired) approach for two basic reasons. First is the quality of "Hattie Big Sky" as literature. I had read it in preparation for a panel I was moderating featuring author Kirby Larson, and I had expected to read only a few chapters, to get the flavor of it. But I found Hattie such an engaging character, and her challenges so well depicted, that I ended up finishing the whole thing.

I was especially impressed that those challenges were tied to themes that are great to discuss, the same sorts of themes we look for in adult books. Like Clem Work’s Darkest Before Dawn, it looks at persecution of minorities in Motnana during World War I. Like Jonathan Raban’s Bad Land, it covers the issues of homesteading marginal land. And like Judy Blunt’s Breaking Clean, it looks at the role of women on those homesteads. It doesn’t go into as much detail as any of those books, but then again it’s covering all of those different issues, and doing so in a family-accessible way. A key component of OneBook Montana is the community discussions we hope will arise out of the reading, and I can imagine rich cross-generational discussions on this book.

My other argument was about the very notion of a OneBook program. If we start making multiple selections -- one for children, one for adults -- then we might also start making separate recommendations in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, etc. And pretty soon we would re-create the very marginalization that OneBook is supposed to combat. I think it’s really neat to tell adults that they will find value in a children’s book -- and if they do find that value, they’ll be more likely to heed our advice if we ever try to recommend, say, poetry.

A OneBook program selects one book that everyone in a region should read and talk about. It may vary in genre (fiction/nonfiction) or degree of difficulty (teen fiction/poetry), but the selectors are reassuring people that reading this strange type of book will have value.

Others on our committee had similar feelings, and we eventually decided on the OneBook rather than TwoBook approach. We may be wrong (and please let me know if you think we are), but it was a literary-community gamble I for one was willing to take.

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

A ranch of her own

2008-03-24T12:00:00.001-06:00

There's a piece of advice to freelance writers suggesting you re-sell every article you write to three different publications. I hate that advice.

The purpose, I'm sure, is to increase a writer's cash flow by generating multiple paychecks from a single piece of writing. The problems with the advice are twofold: 1) The writing is only a small portion of the work involved in selling an article; there's also the research and correspondence involved in selling it. 2) Obsessing about a single article, or even multiple spins on the same basic topic, is boring. If you're willing to be bored in order to make money, there are far more productive ways to go about it.

Thus when Montana Magazine asked me to write about Caroline Lockhart's ranch, I didn't want to simply provide an excerpt from "The Cowboy Girl," nor did I want to rehash some of that same territory. I wanted to do something fresh and new. And while touring the ranch with historic preservation specialist Chris Finley, I found it. Because I was familiar with Lockhart's life on the ranch, I was able to spend the tour thinking more about Finley's job, his character, and what a great match they make. Then when writing the article, I was able to talk about not only Lockhart's challenge in trying to establish an incredibly remote ranch, but Finley's challenge in trying to preserve it in a perpetual state of near-decay.

The result is "A Ranch of Her Own," running in Montana Magazine's current (March/April 08) issue. (The article is not available online, but a table of contents is here.)

The New Yorker makes a factual error

2008-03-09T10:04:00.002-06:00

The New Yorker magazine is known for the scrupulousness of its fact-checking. In the novel Bright Lights Big City, the hero’s incompetence at his fact-checking job is hilarious in part because his job tasks are so trivial as to be opaque to most readers. Calvin Trillin likes to tell stories about the way they even fact-check his jokes. New Yorker fact-checkers are so renowned that any hint of a grammatical error or alleged misquote generates a good deal of media noise.

So I was surprised to read the following in this week’s humorous essay by Ian Frazier, in which he pretends to be a rich person who has bought, and is remodeling, something even bigger than his contemporaries -- Wyoming:

Spare us the headaches, please! We’ve had plenty already, with the former occupants (thank heavens they’re gone) and all the junk they left behind—the old broken-down pickup trucks, houses, eyesore water towers, uranium mines, the University of Wyoming, Yellowtail Dam, Casper.

Problem: Yellowtail Dam is not in Wyoming.

Not a big deal: it’s a funny joke, and the phrase “Yellowtail Dam” enhances it in a way that “Buffalo Bill Dam” would not. Furthermore, Yellowtail Dam is very close to the Wyoming border. But as my articles have discussed, it is located in Montana. So when it comes to the media-favorite game of catching those league-leading New Yorker fact checkers with their pants down, there’s a certain pleasure for me in being the first to publicly catch them.

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

When was the last dam?

2008-03-08T08:07:00.001-07:00

Last Monday many newspapers carried a story about the potential for new dams across the West. It’s a newsworthy story because the urge to build new dams is coming at the same time to tear down old ones. It could be one of the more interesting environmental topics of the coming decade.

But one note in the article struck me as wrong:

the era of giant dams essentially ended with the Glen Canyon Dam, just upstream from the Grand Canyon on the Arizona-Utah state line, which galvanized the environmental movement because its Lake Powell inundated a huge swath of scenic land, archaeological sites and places important to native Americans.

It seems to me that the dam-building era did not end in 1964 with Glen Canyon but a decade later with Idaho’s Teton Dam. What do others think?

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

Planet Red Lodge

2008-02-26T19:11:00.002-07:00

For five months now I’ve been meaning to blog about Chris Anderson's discussion of social networking. Anderson, the editor of Wired Magazine, co-founder of booktour.com, is a man whose Internet instincts I trust. He believes that social networking – the polite term for “Facebook, MySpace, and all those sites” – is actually useful, and even beneficial to society (though maybe not in current form):

social networking to me means the tracking of individual preferences and behavior and giving users the ability to draw upon implicit or explicit connections between them and other users to do something useful

and

I think focused sites that serve niche communities will extract the best lessons from Facebook and MySpace and offer better social networking tools to the communities they already have.

Actually for the first few months I was just thinking about Anderson’s ideas. For the last couple of months, I’ve been playing with them.

The results are here at “Planet Red Lodge,” the MySpace of a tiny Montana town. Can the small town use social-networking sites to improve the existing bonds of community? (Does it need to?) If so, how? The questions are open for the network to debate.

One thing I’ve learned is that on a social network, constant new activity begets more new activity. So I’ll make the suggestion here: if you’re curious about the town or the site, go visit, sign up, post a photo, start a blog... maybe you, too, will be discovering a new planet.

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

Are today's students dumb?

2008-02-19T07:40:00.003-07:00

Here we have yet another book proclaiming the alleged stupidity of Americans these days. As evidence, you might consider this quote:

The New York Times recently published the results of an American history test given to thousands of college freshmen throughout the United States. Among other amazing discoveries were these: that thirty percent of them did not know Woodrow Wilson was President during the first World War; that only six percent were able to name the first 13 colonies -- many even listed such states as Texas and Oregon; and a third of them did not know who was President during the Civil War.

Funny thing, though, the quote is from a memoir by Pearl S. Buck and was published in 1953.

So when exactly is the golden age when American were so smart?

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