John Clayton's Blog

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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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 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.

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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

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.

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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?

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One question I get a lot is why it takes so long for a publisher to come out with a book. Here's a great explanation. By the way, I especially love the way its conclusion equates the Harvard Business School with Mars.

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I grew up reading the delightful sports columns of Leigh Montville, so normally I would be heartened to hear that he's writing a biography of Evel Knievel... except for the way the book is described at publishersmarketplace:

...examining how a boy from a dusty western town became a legend who embodied Americana in the 1970s and beyond

Ummm, anyone involved in the book know anything about Butte? Or is this just one of those laws, that "Western town" must be preceded by "dusty" the way a baseball pitcher's "stuff" must be preceded by "filthy"?

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

Tomorrow (Sunday, February 10, at 11:45 am), Montana Public Radio will be rebroadcasting Cherie Newman's slickly-produced interview with me on "The Write Question." To celebrate, the station has also made the show available online, for those outside the listening area. To hear the broadcast, click here. For additional show background, click here.

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

Montana has a reputation as a writers' idyll. Numerous literary types congregate around Missoula, many of them sustained by the fine creative writing program at the University. Another literary community has sprung up around Livingston, nurtured by veteran freelancers such as Tim Cahill, Richard Wheeler, and Diane Smith. And certainly there are many of us scattered around other parts of the state.

But in the late 1920s, the situation was far different. I believe there were only three Montana residents then nationally known for their writing skill. Charlie Russell, who had started penning stories to go with his paintings, lived in Great Falls. (What can you say about the Great Falls literary scene today? Well, I can picture a latter-day JFK at a Missoula writers' dinner saying, "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of literary talent that has ever been gathered together at a Montana dinner party -- with the possible exception of when Pete Fromm dines alone.")

The other two lived in the Pryor Mountains.

The Pryors today are hardly a literary hotspot. There's darned few people of any occupations living there. But in the 1920s both Caroline Lockhart and Will James invested the revenues from their bestselling Western novels in Pryor Mountain ranches.

I have never been able to find any evidence that they met. Running a ranch was time-consuming, and neither figure was exactly gregarious. But these days both are gaining a little more attention. During my research into Lockhart's life, I wanted to find James' ranch and writing studio, just to do a comparison. But all I could learn was that it was privately held. With yesterday's donation, as chronicled in another great article by Lorna Thackeray, it will become far easier.

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Perhaps the key line to my latest Writers on the Range essay (running here in the Missoula Independent) is, "Now that it's the distant future and the remodel is totally finished…"

The essay covers some experiences from the house remodel we completed 20 months ago. And I needed a bit of distance from a dizzying time period in order to write effectively about it.

The delay is also because I struggled with the ending of the essay. I had a great opening (I wrote that probably 8 to 12 months ago). I had several jokes that amused me. But the greatest essays turn a corner in the last 100 words (or, for longer pieces, in the last 15%). The jokes, anecdotes, and experiences suddenly build to a perhaps-surprising conclusion. And the essay as a whole doesn't work until you know where you're going at the end.

Which is another reason the "distant future…" line is so important. Structurally, it marks the turning of the corner. It may not be one of the most profound corners I've turned. But it is genuine, and after the expenditure of all the money and energy, it even feels earned.

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Great discussion happening (as usual) over on the Books page at www.newwest.net: Where is the literature of the urban West? Jenny Shank starts by looking for great narrative nonfiction -- and then expands her search to fiction as well -- in which an urban environment of the Western United States plays a major role. The question goes far deeper than literature.

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

One of my fellow contributors to The Montana Quarterly magazine is David Crisp, editor of the alternative weekly newspaper in Billings, the Billings Outpost. I've always admired the way David reprints his magazine pieces in the newspaper. The magazine gets a first, three-month exclusive, then one week David gets to take a break from article-writing, while giving those who don't subscribe to the magazine a chance to see his stuff. (Despite the three-month wait, it's usually surprisingly current.)

So a few weeks ago, knowing that the holidays always represent an especially difficult time for a newspaper publisher, I offered him the same deal with my Montana Quarterly piece on the Bighorn Canyon. I cautioned that one of the best features of the magazine's piece was Thomas Lee's photography, but I did say that my wife had taken a few pictures on the same trip. (Later I dug them up, and found they looked great.)

The result is yesterday's cover story in the Outpost. And the good news for Web readers is that it's now available online.

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

I was honored to learn that The Cowboy Girl has been named one of the top books of the year by the website www.newwest.net. Books editor Jenny Shank wrote:

Clayton’s biography captures this woman who was often difficult to love but always larger-than-life, and The Cowboy Girl is a striking portrait of a Western woman who lived on her own terms throughout her long, extraordinary life.

I remember back in 2005 when newwest.net first started, I wrote, "I've long longed for a regional equivalent to the Atlantic Monthly, and this is the closest I've seen in years. Daily newspapers too often lack the longer perspective, and High Country News can't cover it all." And indeed, the notion of making a "Best books of the year" list to cover this vibrant and meaningful region of the country is precisely the sort of thing that would fascinate me in any year. Bravo!

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

Over the weekend The Cowboy Girl received another favorable review that highlighted the way Caroline Lockhart had so many insecurities despite her successes. (Reviews are collected here.) I was delighted that the reviewer liked the book, and pleased that I had rendered Lockhart's inner life effectively enough for him to comment on it.

But I was surprised that he was surprised.

Much of what we know about Lockhart in the years 1919-46 comes from her diaries. Throughout her life, her love of expressing herself through the written word grew, and as her publishing career faltered, it seems she devoted more of her writing energy to her diaries. (I say "seems" because the pre-1919 diaries were lost -- some say they were destroyed because they were so scandalous -- so we can't judge for sure their volume or quality.)

As I read through the diaries -- especially the abridged version published in the book Caroline Lockhart: Liberated Lady -- I too found a lot of doubt, petulance, and self-pity. But I wasn't surprised. After all, when I kept a diary myself many years ago, it painted an equally unattractive portrait of the diarist.

In a sense that's the point of a diary, and it's brought home very effectively by Louis Menand in this week's New Yorker. He asks both why some people keep diaries and why some (other, more numerous) people read them. It's odd, he says, because they aren't really that revealing:

Inside, everyone sounds, more or less eloquently, like the same broken record of anxiety and resentment. It’s the outside, the way people look and the things they say, that makes them distinct.

In depicting Lockhart's inner life, I had hoped to capture that universality. Indeed, Lockhart's humor and writing skill made these depictions of inner insecurities more effective than most diaries (read: mine). I guess reviewers are surprised to see them revealed in a biography, which typically involves chronicling accomplishments. But my goal in writing the book wasn't merely to draw attention to Lockhart's career. It was to craft a work that, in its depiction of life's inner and outer struggles, sought to approach literature.

By the way, Menand's article is wonderful for another of its counterintuitive conclusions: Commenting on Arthur Schlesinger's regret that he hadn't produced more books, Menand says:

Anyone who reads [Schlesinger's] “Journals,” though, will feel that he had nothing to be sorry for. Life is only once, and Schlesinger had the good fortune to enjoy his in company that gave him pleasure. The world has plenty of books.

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I picked up a book at a bookstore the other day. I'd heard the book had won an award, so I wondered if I wanted to read it. The first sentence I found rather well-written. The second started scoping out a question the book would answer, and it was a passably intriguing question. The third sentence started to pull me further into that web, and then a little symbol broke the spell.

It was a superscripted number. An endnote reference. Seeing it, I paused. Should I flip back to the endnotes to learn more? The note would presumably document some fact in that sentence: what had that potentially controversial fact been? Should I reread the sentence to look for it? Why hadn't it seemed controversial to me? All of these questions flitted through my mind, and in the end I answered none of them. I just closed the book and set it back on the shelf.

Not everyone will have those reactions. Some people can delightfully ignore each little endnote-number. Others probably emit a sound a glee and run immediately to the back of the book to find the real dirt. But I believe that a large portion of the reading public has (perhaps subconsciously) at least some of the same types of reactions that I do. Uncertainty: What does the author want me to do?

When we pick up a book, we're looking for both entertainment and expertise. We want an author with a confident voice to take us on a tour of ideas, characters, and/or events. We want to know that these things are true, but we would prefer to not have to validate such truths ourselves, taking detours from the tour to study how it was put together. We would prefer to trust.

The endnote is the foundation backing up that trust. If our trust starts wavering, we can turn to the endnotes to buttress it. But we'd rather not.

Several years ago, when Mark Bowden's book Black Hawk Down came out, I read the first couple of chapters and became thoroughly hooked. This story was more exciting than most thrillers I'd read. It was only after a couple of chapters that I thought, "Wait a minute, this is supposed to be completely true -- so how'd he find that out?" I flipped to the back of the book and discovered his unmarked endnotes. From the endnote, it was easy to go back to the page number and text reference to find the potentially controversial fact -- and then the note explained how he'd acquired it. My point is that Bowden and his publishers knew that flow works best in one direction. There was no need to highlight that fact with an endnote-number in the text. Thanks to Bowden's narrative gifts, most readers would never even know it was controversial.

By contrast, an author who annotates every sentence doth protest too much. "Look, I'm legit! See, I found this fact here! And this one over here! Watch me synthesize!" Synthesis is a worthy skill, especially valuable in academic settings. But most nonfiction readers cruising through a book are looking for ideas, characters, and events -- not evidence of synthesizing skill.

From my very first conception of The Cowboy Girl, I wanted unmarked endnotes, in the style of Bowden and numerous other acclaimed authors (including Erik Larson, Donald Worster, and J. Anthony Lukas). That decision caught a lot of flak. Academic reviewers vetting my book proposal opposed it. My production manager, warning that I would bear the time-consuming burden of manually inserting the page numbers in the notes, opposed it. At least one reviewer has opposed it as well.

I'm a stubborn chap, so to each such objection I have offered arguments like this. But if anyone would like to continue the discussion I'm happy to throw open these comment threads. What do you think: Do unmarked endnotes work?

If you missed it last night (as I did), you may want to check out the "Home Ground" radio program with Brian Kahn. Brian turned his wonderful interviewing talents on me and Caroline Lockhart, and the result is probably the best recorded summary of the many issues that surround Lockhart's life. The show will be archived at that site for several weeks (though not forever).

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

An early review of The Cowboy Girl pointed out Caroline Lockhart's lack of public recognition in a curious but insightful way: she has no wikipedia entry. Likewise, she'd probably never served as the inspiration for a Halloween costume... until this year.

(Update: Becky provides a better picture mimicking the book's cover.)

Way to go, Becky Hill! I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com

I've been following Steven Johnson since I came across his wonderful essay on narrative structure in TV at the time that I was thinking a lot about the narrative structure of The Cowboy Girl. This weekend I'm finally getting around to reading the full text of the book that arose out of that essay, Everything Bad is Good for You. It's a wonderful book, in the tradition of very smart people making formerly-counterintuitive arguments. But it also puts an old story that's long puzzled me into interesting light.

When the TV show Survivor first came out, a major network started a conversation with the nature writer Gary Ferguson about going on the air as a Survivor analyst. The opportunity never panned out, in large part because, as Gary shared with some of his friends, he couldn't figure out what he could possibly say about Survivor. "It has nothing to do with nature at all," he said. "Being out in nature is about appreciation and teamwork. But the show is made-up world full of invented threats and invented competitions."

In retrospect, Johnson's appreciation of reality TV also validates Ferguson's perspective. Reality shows, Johnson says, are not about the setting, but the social dynamics. The success of Survivor is not its depiction of people surviving in a natural environment, but people adapting to new, complex social environments. The setting is just a vaguely-familiar hook, in the same way that many game shows have a setting similar to a high-school quiz. It's silly to analyze the setting: Survivor analysis doesn't need a nature writer any more than Jeopardy analysis needs a social studies teacher.

At the time we couldn't appreciate the distinction (Johnson fears that many of us still can't). But I still wish Ferguson and the network had gone ahead with their plans to highlight it.

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As I've frequently mentioned, I first encountered Caroline Lockhart when I stumbled across her old ranch on the east slopes of the Pryor Mountains. It's now part of the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, and at my first encounter was in a semi-abandoned state, a romantic decay that allowed me to picture Lockhart living there.

The Park Service -- mainly in the person of Chris Finley -- has been working to restore and preserve the buildings while maintaining their romantic allure. He's done a great job, and I was excited to be included in a huge feature in Sunday's Billings Gazette lauding it.

PS The Gazette paired the article with a generous review of The Cowboy Girl. Links to many other reviews are available here.

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

Up around 10,000 feet on the Beartooth Highway, you come across a sign pointing out the Bear's tooth. In the panorama of high peaks, it's not as dramatic as in this cropped photo, and it's rather far away, but you do get the sense that it could belong in the mouth of a giant carnivore.

Recently, however, I've found some 1930s promotional materials that put the Bear's Tooth in a very different place. In this picture, we see Beartooth Butte, one of the iconic images of the highway and a frequent stopping place. According to this view, the namesake tooth is directly under the middle Northern Pacific logo. Tough to see from this angle, but from other angles it too could qualify as resembling a tooth.



I've been driving the highway for 20 years now, and had never heard of this second tooth. But it does make sense: closer to the highway and easier to see. What has never entirely made sense to me, however, is how the entire Beartooth mountain range could have been named for either of these remote peaks. Before the Beartooth Highway was constructed in the early 1930s, how would anyone have seen such peaks in order to name the range after them?

Anyone with expertise, I'd be delighted to hear from you.

The autumn issue of The Montana Quarterly magazine has hit the stands, and as usual Thomas Lee's photography is gorgeous. This quarter my words are a particular beneficiary, as Lee's art graces my exploration of the Bighorn Canyon.

I had first proposed a history column covering Edward Gillette's early descent of the canyon. But the editors, seeing more broadly than I, came back with the idea of a full-fledged feature. A couple of background notes: I'm indebted to Dr. Marv Kauffman for improving my understanding of the area's geology. Marv also got me to use the phrase "fault plane" instead of "fault line," which makes me sound much more geologically sophisticated than I deserve to.

Also, though the adjective didn't make it into the article, Greg Shanks should probably be known as a semiprofessional walleye fisherman.

The article is not available online, but to subscribe to the magazine (and get a free copy in the process), you can start here.

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

The annual Montana Festival of the Book is always a highlight of the year for me, and this year was no exception. It was particularly exciting for me to be at the bookfest with a new book on the shelves.

But I had a busy weekend, participating in four different panels or readings. The unquestioned highlight was the surprise among them: I substituted for Mark Sherouse in a Conversation with Guy Vanderhaeghe. Guy (whose last name is pronounced "van-der-haig") is the author of "The Last Crossing," selected as this year's One Book Montana. He's also a brilliant and highly articulate conversationalist. Many bookfest programs are recorded for future public-radio broadcast, and I hope our audio equipment worked well enough to pull that off, because even I would love to hear him speak again about why Potts is not one of the novel's multiple narrators, or about the significance of the title.

My conversation with Richard Wheeler drew a large and appreciative crowd. Richard even earned a spontaneous ovation, for his comments about the futility of the divide between "literary" and "commercial" fiction. I was delighted to be part of a reading with Kim Todd and Jeff Hull, and Kim and I were on an entertaining panel about biography that also included Martin Kidston, Paul Wylie, and Christy Leskovar.

One of the interesting things about publishing a book in a relatively small community such as the state of Montana is that you get to hang out with a lot of the same people at a lot of different events. I'd met Wylie at the delightfully laid-back Meagher County Book Festival this summer (and I loved the slogan printed every week in the newspaper: "The only county in Montana with a castle"). And I'll be appearing with Leskovar at the High Plains Bookfest in October, where she is also up for an award.

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

I am delighted and honored to learn that The Cowboy Girl has been named a finalist for the first-ever High Plains Book Award. There are four finalists for the award, which honors a book that "examines or reflects life on the High Plains of the United States and Canada." We'll learn the winner on Friday, October 19.

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

One of my favorite annual events is the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula, and this year's edition -- September 14-15 -- is shaping up to be particularly exciting.

I'll be reading from The Cowboy Girl on Saturday at 1:00 pm, along with science writer Kim Todd and essayist Jeff Hull. (The full schedule is in this pdf file; times and lineups subject to change.) I'll also be on a panel discussing nonfiction writing on Friday afternoon at 2:30. These panels can be the best or worst types of events, with writers of differing backgrounds occasionally meshing brilliantly.

But I'm particularly excited about the event earlier Friday afternoon (at 1:00 pm), when I'll be interviewing Richard Wheeler. Wheeler is one of the leading contemporary practitioners of fiction set in the American West. Like Caroline Lockhart, he's often overlooked as a mere writer of pulp Westerns, when in fact his work has a depth of characterization that sets it apart from some of his less talented contemporaries. Our conversation will be based on Wheeler's new memoir, An Accidental Novelist.

I'll look forward to seeing lots of new and old friends there!

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

If you're in the wide listening area of Montana Public Radio this Sunday (August 26), you might tune in to "The Write Question," the new literary program airing at 11:45 a.m. each week. This week will feature Cherie Newman's interview with yours truly.

Newman's insightful questions were one of the highlights of my book tour. But they don't show in the finished product, which is edited to broadcast only my voice. As producer/interviewer, Newman's role is much like what I aspired to in researching and writing the biography: know the subject well, ask great questions, and then get out of the way so your subject's voice can shine.

Listeners can decide for themselves whether my voice shines. But if it does, credit is due the person behind the scenes.

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

In a previous post I mentioned that the traditional biography format covers a person's entire life and thus must end with a death. That's proved a somewhat controversial statement. Can't an author structure a biography to avoid it?

Well, in a word, I say: no. You can -- and probably should -- start a biography with a dramatic episode from the middle of your subject's life. You can foreshadow the death. But I believe the appeal of biography rests in large part on the strict narrative structure it imposes on the writer. We all undertake quests in our lives. Though the impacts of our actions may resonate through epilogues, the drama of any one person's actions must end with his or her death.

I hadn't really thought this through when I started writing The Cowboy Girl. I took on the project in large part because Caroline Lockhart's life struck me as a story that fit the narrative structure I was looking for. Then I ran into a complication: in narrative structure, the story needs to end with resolution -- but a biography requires it end with her death.

What attracted me to Lockhart was the way she always wanted to be a cowboy. From childhood fibs about being born on a Kansas ranch, to her move to Buffalo Bill's hometown in Wyoming, to her bestselling Western novels, she (like many to follow) was in love with a semi-mythical Old West.

But Lockhart took the quest to extremes: She bought and ran a newspaper so as to preserve (and even fabricate) her town's Old West character, and when the political struggles surrounding that battle wore her down, she quit so as to homestead a ranch. She wanted an incredibly remote place where she could create and control her very own Old West that could not fall victim to Progress.

So how did I solve my own complication? (Warning: the following structural discussion may put some non-writers to sleep.) I had a scene that depicted Lockhart's resolution of her quest. I put it at the end of the final chapter. The first half of the epilogue then discussed her death. Then here's where a faithfulness to timelines actually came to my rescue: One of my best sources for Lockhart's later years was an oral history from a man who had worked for her. But an oral history is, after all, an event of its own. He was talking to the historians in 1990. With some research I was able to build that into a scene to go at the end of the epilogue, concluding with his view of how she had achieved her goals.

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

I am pleased to be included in the inaugural edition of a new book, The Writer's Handbook 2007: A Practical Anthology of Best Advice for Your Craft and Career. The anthology is a new annual collection of articles to refresh and upgrade any writer's skills, with advice on craft and career development. It offers an eclectic mix of expert how-tos, short pieces on creativity, marketing, and professional issues, and other insights on being a successful writer today.

My contribution is the essay "The Origin of Names," which is one of my favorite amusing views of small-town life. What's it doing in a book of writing advice? Editor Philip Martin said, "This anthology is very eclectic, touching on aspects of craft and career, sometimes in practical how-to articles, but sometimes in pieces just trying to get writers to think more about their work. I liked how, in this piece, you address in a fun way that question of identifying yourself as a writer, that it's a real occupation. While a major theme of my anthology is serious -- writing to change the world -- I also think that innate seriousness of writers is essentially funny, too, so I've found a few of humorous pieces as a counterpoint."

The Writer's Handbook is a handsome, well-produced volume with a variety of interesting perspectives. But the real thrill for me is that its concluding "Literary Insights" section sandwiches my work between that of much-heralded authors Barry Lopez and Katha Pollitt. I had read Pollitt's "Thank You for Hating My Book" when it first came out in the New York Times, and of course Barry Lopez is something of a dean of environmental literature. And mixed in with them: John the Writer! How cool!

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