Books, Music, Community
The Entire Sky has been out in the world just over two weeks. It's been plain wonderful.
I looked up from the signing line after the book release reading and conversation at the Western Heritage Center in Billings, Montana, to see an old rancher—boots, work-worn jeans, his checked shirt tucked in—step toward me, a copy of The Entire Sky in his hands. I rose and greeted him. He held the book out between us. “Somebody told me about you,” he said. “They said you wrote about the Bull Mountains. I’ve lived in the Bull Mountains for thirty years, I know everybody out there. I didn’t believe there was a writer from the Bulls. Now I do.”
I signed his copy, then thanked him and shook his hand. He held on a moment, pulled me toward him. He told me he’d lived the past many summers in a sheep-wagon out in the Bulls, that he loved that country with all his heart, loved raising sheep out there, loved raising his family out there. He said he’d been fighting the coal companies and what they were doing to the land, the mess they were making. For a long time, he said, he thought he had to save the land. He shook his head and chuckled. The land, he said, had saved him.
Over the past two weeks I’ve had the great good fortune to read from The Entire Sky to appreciative audiences in Billings, Livingston, McMinnville, Portland, Sisters, and La Grande; to be in conversation with the likes of Alexis Bonogofsky, Scott Nadelson, Ellen Waterston, and Eliot Treichel; and I’ve been graced with so many moments of kinship and community, which, in the end, is what stories do for us—bind us more closely to one another.
The land saved me too. Every story I tell begins there.
So Much Music
I can’t play an instrument, and my singing voice makes my kids (and pretty much everyone else) cringe, but from old cowboy classics to “All Apologies,” The Entire Sky is full of music, and it’s been such a joy to match my words with some live tunes on this book tour.
In my new hometown of McMinnville, Oregon, the boys of Bootleg Jam provided the bluegrass, and in La Grande, where I teach every summer, the amazing singer-songwriter Margo Cilker joined me and performed an astonishing, revelatory set. If you don’t know Margo’s music yet, you’re missing out! Buy the new album and give yourself the lovely excuse of a long drive to listen.
Not the Cowboy but the Shepherd
I’ve got an essay, about sheep ranching and my grandfather and new models of masculinity—an essay in deep conversation with The Entire Sky—up at Lithub:
Sheep ranching was economically savvy, and good for the land, and so my grandfather would be a sheepman. Something in him let him listen to his wife. Something in him let him turn away from all the mythological hoopla. He wouldn’t be a cowboy, he’d be a shepherd. And despite his own poverty-wracked upbringing, his own wayward, vagabond father and all the stories he’d been told, he’d learn over the years to take care, to be gentle—even more gentle yet—to hold the wonder of a newborn lamb in his hands. To hold, in time, the hand and trust and heart of his fragile-hearted grandson.
And Who Would You Eat Pancakes With?
I had loads of fun answering the Orion questionnaire. Orion has long been one of my favorite magazines—pick up most any issue and you’ll poems and stories and essays by the likes of Ross Gay, Amy Irvine, or Nickole Brown (yeah, they’re amazing)—and the folks at Orion were early supporters of my work.
So, now, let’s get down to it: if you could eat pancakes with anyone, living or dead, who would you eat pancakes with?
Such a good question! I’d like to eat pancakes with everyone I’ve ever loved, even just a little bit, but right now I’ll say my dad. He died when I was nine, and I have no idea what he thought, in particular, of pancakes, but he was a forest ranger in Glacier Park for a time and a farmer and an inveterate fisherman and someone who just by the look of him knew his way around a plate of pancakes. I’d love to roll out of the tent along some river and whip up a batch with him, maybe a couple of handfuls of huckleberries dotting the batter.
JD Vance? Let’s Get Real.
You want to know rural America? Skip Vance’s easy, cliched assertions and get down to the real stuff: Bonnie Jo Campbell, Kent Haruff, Louise Erdrich, Sarah Smarsh, and Jesmyn Ward. I wrote about them and my own attempts to understand over at Shepherd.com:
I grew up on the high plains of eastern Montana. Like most rural folks, we lived close to the bone, even in the best of times. Then, when I was nine, my father died—and things got even harder. We finally had to put our acres up for lease, and I made a goal to leave that hard place. Though I worked hard for this new life I find myself leading—I studied, won scholarships, earned an MFA, and became a professor—ever since I left Montana, I’ve been trying to understand the distance between there and where I find myself now. I’ve been trying to understand rural America.
I’ve got readings coming up in a whole bunch of good places. Hope you there!
The Entire Sky Book Tour: A Reading with Maxim Loskotuff at Powell's Books July 24, 2024 at 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm, Powell's City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St, Portland, OR
The Entire Sky Book Tour: Auntie's Books, in Conversation with Sharma Shields August 7, 2024 at 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm, Auntie’s Books, Spokane, WA
The Entire Sky Book Tour: A Celebration of Montana Literature with Joe Wilkins, Chandra Brown, Chris Dombrowski, Kim Barnes, Chris La Tray, and Maxim Loskotuff at Montgomery Distillery August 8, 2024 at 6:00 pm – 7:45 pm, Montgomery Distillery, 129 W Front St, Missoula, MT
The Entire Sky Book Tour: First Draft Reading Series in Pendleton August 15, 2024 at 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm
The Entire Sky Book Tour: Dallas Public Library August 16, 2024 at 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm Dallas Public Library, 950 Main St, Dallas, OR
2024 University of Idaho Creative Writing Alums Festival August 22, 2024 – August 25, 2024
UI MFA Anniversary Celebration: Keynote Reading with Kim Barnes, Joe Wilkins, Robert Wrigley, Courtney Kersten, Joy Passanante, CMarie Fuhrman, Daniel Orozco August 24, 2024 at 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
The Entire Sky Book Tour: A Reading with the Spring Creek Project September 20, 2024 at 6:30 pm – 7:30 pm Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts, Corvallis, OR
Wishing you all more stories, more music, and more community!
Your reading series is going well! Congrats!