M. Mark Miller, Author

Category: Montana Book Award

  • News: Montana Book Awards Presentations Were Fun

    Ruth McLaughlin, Don Flores, Barbara Theroux (MBA organizer), Susan Resnick

    It’s good to be home after an intense few days of Montana Book Awards events in Billings at the combined Montana Library Association/Mountain Plains Library Association meeting. I had a great time.

    On Wednesday evening I “opened out of town” with my talk on the MBA Book Awards at Hastings Book Store in Billings. I’m sure the warm up will help me do a better job when reprise the talk at the Bozeman’s Country Bookshelf on Tuesday at 7 p.m. Here’s the announcement of the Bozeman event.

    More important, I got to meet three of the winning authors at the MBA presentation ceremony on Thursday. It’s always fun to compare notes with fellow writers.

    I had a long chat with Ruth McLaughlin, who won the 2010 award for her marvelous book, Bound Like Grass. We compared notes on growing up on Montana ranches, she on the east side of our vast state, I on the west side. Our biographies have some interesting parallels in addition to growing up rural in the 50s and 60s. We both used the University of Montana as our escape route to the larger world; we knew some of the same professors, and—most important—we met our spouses there.  My wife, Tam, and her husband, Mike, were classmates at Great Falls High School and they seemed to enjoy reminiscing.

    I also discovered a small connection with Dan Flores, who wrote the MBA Honor Book, Visions of the Big Sky. It’s a beautiful book with 140 plates representing art portraying the Northern Rockies.  All the MBA judges reported the same reaction when they first saw it: “Oh no! Now I’ve got to read a coffee table book.”  But they hastened to add that when they began to read it they got hooked on Dan’s erudite and expansive essays.

    I asked Dan how he happened to write it. He told me that he used to write a column for The Big Sky Journal called “Images of the West” and the book is largely a compilation of those pieces.  Dan stopped being a regular columnist for the magazine, but the editor decided to retain the column title.  I wrote an article under the label entitled “Entrepreneurs on the Edges of Yellowstone.”

    Susan Kushner Resnick came to Billings all the way from Boston to accept an Honor Book designation for Goodbye Wifes and Daughters, a marvelous account of the mine disaster that killed nearly 80 men at Bear Creek, Montana, in 1943.  I wish I had found more time to talk to her about weaving together disparate strands of research into a compelling narrative. I’m sure she could have offered me some good tips on how to approach my next book, Encounters in Yellowstone.

    I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to meet Kevin Canty, who won an Honor Book designation for Everything: A Novel.  Kevin’s car broke down in Bozeman and he didn’t make it to the ceremony.  I would have loved to talk to him about how he makes writing about running water and jumping fish come to life.

    We also didn’t hear from Nathaniel Philbrick, who won an Honor Book designation for his book The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull and the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  I’m sure he’s hunkered down somewhere working through piles of books and papers doing research for his next book.

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    — Photo by Mike McLaughlin

  • An Event: Presenting The Best Montana Books of 2010 at Country Bookshelf

    I’ve been asked to discuss the 2010 Montana Book Award winner and this year’s honor books on Tuesday, April 12, at 7 p.m. at Country Bookshelf in Bozeman. I’m really excited to speak at this premier independent bookstore where so many great authors have done readings.

    The Montana Book Awards are a great bunch of books this year. As a member of the awards committee, I have read all the nominees. I know it was hard to choose just one winner from all the wonderful titles that were submitted this year. The rules limit the number of Honor Books to four so several really good nominees were left out.

    My talk will come right after the MBA award presentation ceremony at the Montana Library Association meeting in Billings. I’ll get a chance there to chat with the winning authors. Also, I’ll participate in a panel discussion of  the books at MLA. These things should deepen my appreciation of the books and improve my presentation.

    On this blog I’ve already

    I’ve also written the following reviews:

    I hope you’ll join me at Country Bookshelf for a discussion of some really great new Montana Books. Come early and spend some time perussing the great selection of new books and classics.

    And yes, I’d be happy to sign copies of my own book, Adventures in Yellowstone.

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  • Montana Book Award Honors The Last Stand by Nathaniel Philbrick

    On June 25, 1876, General George Armstrong Custer attacked a coalition of Sioux and Cheyenne near the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory. A day later Custer and 268 of his men lay dead after one of the most famous battles in history.

    More than 40 books have been written about that bloody day so it’s easy to question the need for another one. But new facts emerge all the time so every generation deserves a fresh synthesis and interpretation. That’s what Nathaniel Philbrick provides in his 2010 Montana Book Award honoree, The Last Stand.

    Philbrick builds a compelling narrative around two charismatic characters: George Armstrong Custer, who thought his success as a cavalry officer during the Civil and Indian wars might launch him into the U.S. presidency, and Sitting Bull, whose political savvy welded the Sioux and Cheyenne tribes into the largest Indian alliance in history. In addition to these two, Philbrick brings life a large cast of supporting characters. Readers get to know not only combatants—Indians, officers, soldiers and scouts—but also the officers’ wives, the steamboat men who ferried soldiers and supplies up the Yellowstone River, and the people who lined the shores to watch the boat bring survivors to safety.

    Based on his painstaking and comprehensive research, Philbrick braids together the strands of information that come from contemporary accounts of the battle, interviews conducted by participants on both sides, reminiscences, and new findings from archeologists. The result is a compelling narrative about one of the iconic events of American history.

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  • Montana Book Award Honors Visions of the Big Sky by Dan Flores

    Visions of the Big Sky: Painting the Northern Rocky Mountain West is a gorgeous book, but don’t be fooled into thinking is just a collection of 140 illustrations.  University of Montana history professor Dan Flores has provided erudite essays that elucidate the work of the greatest artists of the American West.

    Flores includes several artists who are famous for their work in other locations, but the bullseye of his target is smackdab in the middle of Montana. Inclusion of artists like Ansel Adams and Albert Bierstadt, who are famous for their work in other locations, shows that the western artists of the Big Sky are world class.

    Because of my interest in Yellowstone National Park, I paid particular attention to Flores’ chapters on William Henry Jackson and Thomas Moran, who accompanied the 1871 Hayden Expedition. Jackson’s photographs are credited with helping to convince the U.S. Congress to establish Yellowstone as the world’s first national park, and Moran’s painting of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone was hung in the U.S. Capital. I found Flores’ essays on these two artists accurate and enlightening. Doubtless his descriptions of artists I know less about are too.

    Of course, the book includes the icons of Montana art like Charles M. Russell and Evelyn Cameron. After all, it is part of the Charles M. Russell Series on Art and Photography of the American West from the University of Oklahoma Press.

    Visions of the Big Sky would be a great book to put on your coffee table for your guests to leaf through. But they shouldn’t skip the marvelous text. Neither should you.

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  • Montana Book Award Honors Goodbye Wifes and Daughters by Susan Kushner Resnick

    Goodbye Wifes and Daughters tells an archetypical story, one that Montanans know all too well. Some men cut corners to maximize profit; others willingly work in dangerous places to support their families, and many men die. It might have been hard rock miners in Butte or asbestos processors in Libby, but Susan Kushner Resnick chose to tell the story of coal miners in Bear Creek, Montana.

    On the morning of February 27, 1943, an explosion ripped through Smith Mine #3 killing 75 men  that day and the town of Bear Creek over the next decade. Resnick puts the story in context. She tells how the pressures of World War II make men feel it’s their patriotic duty face danger to keep up production. How owners exploit that patriotism to maximize profit. How methane builds and sparks ignite it.

    All that is important. But the power of the book lies in Resnick’s recreation of the life in a small town. Resnick has researched deeply and she uses the details she dug up to bring the people to life. She tells us not just that the the town took pride in its high school basketball team, she tells us how many points to the top scorer made, and who sat on the bench, and where they went with their girlfriends after the game. Such exquisite detail brings the people—both those who died and those who survived—to life.

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    — To find out more about my work with the Montana Book Award look under the “Categories Button” on the right.

  • Montana Book Award Honors Everything: A Novel by Kevin Canty

    The only fiction on this year’s list of Montana Book Award winners tells the intertwined stories of a fishing guide and his friends as they encounter challenges that life might throw at any of us. Missoula author Kevin Canty’s novel doesn’t quite live up to its title, Everything: A Novel, but it sure comes close. Among the issues Canty addresses are the death of a life partner, dealing with cancer, loving a child while watching her make bad decisions, falling in love with married partner, and selling a piece of real estate you love so you can live in comfort.

    Canty explores these universal themes in a specific setting, Missoula and the valleys and mountains that surround it. His clear prose  is equally adept at evoking the splash of a fish jumping in a mountain stream and the clatter of beer glasses in a student bar.

    The central character is a middle-aged fishing guide who calls himself “RL.”  The book opens with RL and his friend, June, drinking whiskey on the bank of the Clark Fork to commemorate her late husband. RL’s daughter, Leila, falls in love in love with one of his employees whose marriage is on the rock. And RL rekindles his affair with June, an old flame who’s in town for cancer treatments.

    There’s not a strong central plot that links together the several stories, but Canty proved he is a master of the short in his earlier books (Where the Money Went and A Stranger in This World: Stories) and the shared links to RL and the Missoula location are plenty to hold the book together.  It’s Canty’s characters and their problems that make the book stick in the reader’s memory like a well set fishhook.

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    — To find out more about my work with the Montana Book Award look under the “Categories Button” on the right.

  • News: Bound Like Grass: A Montana Memoir Masterpiece

    The Montana Book Award honors books that have a Montana setting or author, or —in the case of this year’s winner—both. Not only does Great Falls author Ruth McLaughlin live in Montana, she grew up here. In fact, her memoir about life in the northeast corner of the state is a quintessential Montana story.

    Bound Like Grass: A Memoir of the Western High Plains tells the story of McLaughlin’s idealistic grandparents’ pursuing their dreams by homesteading and her parents’ hardscrabble existence trying to hang onto the land.

    The book begins with McLaughlin finding the only remains of the house where she grew up are a blackened chimney and rubble—perfect symbols of the broken dreams caused by the Montana homestead era of the early twentieth century.

    Historians agree that big chunks of the three million acres of Montana land that were claimed under the Dessert Land Act of 1877 should never have been homesteaded. Promoters enticed homesteaders to try dry land farming with the slogan, “Rain Follows the Plow.” That was always a dubious statement and it proved to be false —if not an outright lie. Dry land farmers enjoyed some success in the relatively wet years in the 1900s and 1910s, but then drought set in launching an exodus on par with the dustbowl.

    While it helps to know the background, McLaughlin’s book isn’t a history lesson. It a story about the descendants of the rugged people who kept their land through the Great Depression and the  tough lives they led. In addition to their struggle to make the meager land yield enough to put food on the table, her parents contended with raising four children, including two disabled daughters. McLaughlin tells the heartbreaking stories of her sisters with loving candor.

    Even more heart rending is the story of her brother’s escape to California and his troubled relationship with their father. After his father gives up farming, the son asks for only one thing—a worn out tractor that could be restored into a valuable collector’s item. The old man sells the tractor for a few dollars—a searing symbol of toxic relationship.

    McLaughlin writes with the blazing clarity of prairie sun on a cloudless day. She uses writing techniques like a master novelist to turn what might seem the most ordinary of lives into a compelling story. Ruth McLauglin’s Bound Like Grass belongs on your bookshelf with Montana’s other masterpiece memoirs: Ivan Doig’s This House of Sky, Mary Clearman Blew’s All But the Waltz, and Judy Blunt’s Breaking Clean.

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    — To find out more about my work with the Montana Book Award look under the “Categories Button” on the right.

  • News: Memoir About Growing Up on High Plains Wins 2010 Montana Book Award

    The Montana Book Award winner and honors books are listed the the news release below. I will provide reviews of  them—and maybe some good books that didn’t win awards—over the next few days.

    You can read my post about the selection process here.

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    BOUND LIKE GRASS WINS 2010 MONTANA BOOK AWARD

    The 2010 Montana Book Award winner is Bound Like Grass by Ruth McLaughlin, published by University of Oklahoma Press. This annual award recognizes literary and/or artistic excellence in a book written or illustrated by someone who lives in Montana, is set in Montana, or deals with Montana themes or issues. Presentations and a reception with the winning authors will take place Thursday, April 7, during the Montana Library Association Conference in Billings.

    Bound Like Grass: A Memoir from the Western High Plains is an honest, beautifully written memoir of McLaughlin’s own and her family’s struggle to survive on their isolated wheat and cattle farm. With acute observation, she explores her roots as a descendant of Swedish American grandparents who settled in Montana at the turn of the twentieth century with high ambitions, and of parents who barely managed to eke out a living on their own neighboring farm.

    Four Honor Books Were Chosen:

    Everything by Kevin Canty, published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. Canty’s novel chronicles a year in the lives of five appealingly aimless Montanans. Layla, a bright college student, and her heavy-drinking father, RL, fall into parallel adulterous romances—she with Edgar, a promising young painter, he with Betsy, an exgirlfriend undergoing cancer treatment. Meanwhile, June, a friend of both father and daughter, struggles to put the death of her husband behind her. There is a lot of booze and heartbreak in the book, yet it is full of optimism and humanity.

    Goodbye Wifes and Daughters by Susan Resnick, published by University of Nebraska Press. One morning in 1943, close to eighty men descended into the Smith coal mine in Bearcreek, Montana. Only three came out alive. “Goodbye wifes and daughters . . .” wrote two of the miners as they died. The story of that tragic day and its aftermath unfolds in this book through the eyes of those wives and daughters—women who lost their husbands, fathers, and sons, livelihoods, neighbors, and homes, yet managed to fight back and persevere.

    The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick, published by Viking. In his tightly structured narrative, Nathaniel Philbrick brilliantly sketches the two larger-than-life antagonists: Sitting Bull, whose charisma and political savvy earned him the position of leader of the Plains Indians, and George Armstrong Custer, one of the Union’s greatest cavalry officers and a man with a reputation for fearless and often reckless courage. Philbrick reminds readers that the Battle of the Little Bighorn was also, even in victory, the last stand for the Sioux and Cheyenne Indian nations.

    Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photographing the Northern Rocky Mountain West by Dan Flores, published by University of Oklahoma Press. Dan Flores has assembled some of the most important and evocative artwork created in the region, depicting scenes from the Wind River Range of Wyoming to the Canadian border country. The accompanying essays are insightful and solidify Montana’s art history identity.

    The Montana Book Award was founded by the Friends of the Missoula Public Library in 2001 and winners are selected by a committee of individuals representing areas throughout Montana. Members of the 2010 Montana Book Award committee included Honore Bray, Missoula; Adam Kish, Twin Bridges; Mark Miller, Bozeman; Carole Ann Clark, Great Falls; Jill Munson, Fort Benton; Gordon Dean, Forsyth; and Samantha Pierson, Libby.

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    — To find out more about my work with the Montana Book Award look under the “Categories Button” on the right.

  • News: A Peak Experience — A Whole Day With Book Lovers and Great Books

    I spent the whole day on Saturday closeted with half a dozen book lovers from all over Montana. We got together at Chico Hot Springs to pick the 2010 Montana Book Award Winners. The process works like this:

    Publishers submit books for consideration. About all that’s required is that a book be about a Montana setting or by an author who lives in Montana. Except for technicalities defining the details of publication and residence, that’s it. Past winners have included fiction (The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford), non-fiction (Full Court Quest by Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith), and young adult (Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson.)

    After a book is submitted, it is distributed to readers who vote via email. As soon as two of them endorse the book, it is fully nominated so everyone reads it. If two people reject the book then it’s set aside. This means each judge reads about 25 book a year—about a dozen or so that get fully nominated and another dozen that get rejected.

    Because about half the submissions arrive in the last quarter of the year, readers have to scramble to get everything read. (My eyeballs literally ache sometimes.) But by the time the meeting at Chico rolls around, everybody has read all the nominated books. That makes for a marvelous experience—a full day of discussing a wide range of good books with avid readers who have thought about them carefully.

    The meetings start with one judge introducing a book. After a brief group discussion, another judge introduces a book for discussion, and the process proceeds until all the nominated books have been discussed. Finding one “best book” in a diverse set  may seem like an impossible task, but by the time all the nominees have been discussed, four or five books emerge as leaders.

    Then committee members cast secret ballots indicating their top four choices in rank order. We weight the votes (4 points for a first rank, 3 for second, etc) and tally them. The committee discusses the tally, eliminates the low scorers, and votes again. The process repeats until one book has five first-place rankings—and it’s the winner.

    The committee then uses similar procedures to decide if there should be Honor Books and if so how many. For the last couple of years, entries have been so strong that number of honor books has been set at four—the maximum allowed. The one regret: many good books don’t get awards.

    After the judging, there’s time left in the afternoon for a soak in hot springs waters and drinks in Chico’s cowboy bar.

    And in the evening—dinner in the wine cellar of Chico’s five-star restaurant. Great food and great conversation with avid readers who love books. It just doesn’t get any better!

    The Friends of the Missoula Public Library sponsor The Montana Book Award. Book lovers everywhere owe them a vote of thanks.

    I can’t announce the winners until they’ve been notified officially. When that happens, I’ll provide reviews on this blog. I look forward to telling you about some really great books.

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    — The Montana Book Award Logo is a woodcut by Claire Emory.

    — To find out more about my work with the Montana Book Award look under the “Categories Button” on the right.