All posts by Ann Stebner Steele

Picture of Red Desert, WY at sunset

Creativity & “Micro Art”

Author Update

Lately, I’ve found it challenging to get started on my writing each day. It isn’t that I don’t want to write; it is that there are so many other things taking up brain space that I find it hard to transition into creativity. It is a challenge to put aside my to-do list. I don’t love cleaning and making phone calls and answering email, but it usually feels urgent even if it isn’t. Besides, it feels really good to cross those items off that list.  I’m also working a side job doing yard-work, and the progress on weeding and landscaping projects is immediately evident and therefore rewarding. Add in the rest of life (raising a 6 year old, wanting to spend time with family and friends, looking for opportunities to have real conversations with my husband), and I sometimes feel like I can’t pull my mind into the focus required of creative work.

Things like meditation and breathing definitely help, but the technique I’ve found most helpful lately is practicing “micro art.” The idea came to me from life-coach Martha Beck. On her podcast, in Episode 120: Microdosing Joy, she discusses the ideas in a book called Your Brain on Art, which posits that taking 20 minutes per day to enjoy practicing your favorite art (even humming counts!) can change your brain patterns, reduce anxiety, and generally improve your overall well-being. 

To be honest, 20 minutes sounded like a lot to me. I usually set aside a precious hour and half to two hours daily to focus on my writing, and I’m always anxious to get started. So, I’ve been opening my writing sessions with just 5-10 minutes of micro art. I grab a sketchbook, a pencil, and some colored pencils or even a box of my son’s crayons, then work on a sketch while listening to a few favorite songs. Sometimes, I get in my micro art practice by drawing and coloring with my son, which double-dips on creative joy and meaningful time with him. And for the days when I’m not feeling particularly artistic, I just ordered an adult coloring book featuring horses. (I’ll admit, the coloring book feels like cheating, but it will make it easier to continue this practice even on “meh” days.) 

I’ve only been practicing micro art for about a month, but I’ve found that I feel calmer and more open after about ten minutes, and I’m far more ready to dive into my writing if I take the time to “prime the pump” in this way. It also takes the sting out of the blank page — by the time I open Word or Scrivener, I’ve already been filling white space with images and color. Sometimes, I start thinking, “You know, I really should sign up for a water color class or something.” Maybe I will, eventually. But right now, 10 minutes of micro art a day is working wonders on opening the door to creativity, and that brings me back to joy every time. Really, who could ask for more?

Sketch of a meadowlark.

My first micro art project was working on this color pencil sketch of a meadowlark. I based it on the cover photo from the June 2022 issue of the Wyoming Wildlife magazine published by the Wyoming Game and Fish. The photo was taken by Francis Bergquist near Saratoga, Wyoming, and I owe them a debt of gratitude for this beautiful photograph. Thank you, Francis, and thank you for permission to use the sketch on my website like this. Here’s a link to Francis and Janice’s website and the original image:https://francisandjanice-bergquist.pixels.com/featured/1-western-meadowlark-francis-and-janice-bergquist.html.
Picture of Red Desert, WY at sunset

Inspiring Artists: Joe Wilkins’ Fall Back Down When I Die

Inspiring Artists

I recently read Joe Wilkin’s 2019 novel Fall Back Down When I Die, and I was struck by his powerful and clear-eyed rendering of the American West. He is a fellow University of Idaho Creative Writing alum, and I first encountered his work through his first full-length poetry collection, Killing the Murnion Dogs. It was a pleasure to read his first novel, and I soon found myself lost in the story.

The novel is set in contemporary Montana and delves into the inner lives of Wendell Newman, a young ranch hand, and the seven-year-old boy he suddenly finds himself responsible for when his cousin is arrested for drug use and child neglect. With no other family to take in the boy, Wendell is charged with raising him, and the two soon form an unlikely bond. But with the state’s first legal wolf hunt in thirty years looming, long simmering political tensions in the small Western community threaten to unearth and revive a violent past that tangles the deaths of Wendell’s father and a local game warden.

Throughout, Wilkins’ training as a poet shines through in his prose, a precision of language that captures the beautiful, the violent, and the mundane in equal measures. I could taste and smell the Montana he renders, and though it is not the American West I would like to believe in, it is a vision of the West that feels true from the first word to the last as Wilkins’ explicates the complicated legacy of a culture predicated on the hollow promises and violence inherent in Westward Expansion.

He also withholds judgement, depicting all of his characters with compassion and an eye to detail akin to that of a skilled portrait painter. He allows the reader to make their own decisions about the moral and philosophical questions that shade the story. I found myself most compelled by Wendell’s struggle to make sense of his life (a recently dead mother, a pile of debt, an anemic ranch, a long absent father) and to decide what sort of man he wants to be as he shoulders responsibility for a child left mute and traumatized by the short-comings of the adults in this broken world.

Perhaps the aspect of Wilkins’ writing that most intrigues me is his ability to explore the darkness present in the rural West while also demonstrating a love for the landscape and the people who inhabit it. He meditates on the nature of masculinity in this place, an experience I, as a woman, have only ever been able to witness from the outside. Similarly, his unflinching examination of the costs of the poverty and violence bred by the complex history of the American West shows me a side of my place of belonging that I have rarely experienced first hand — though my grandfathers and maternal grandmother all grew up in abject poverty in this region, by the time I was born, my family was part of the educated, professional class in Wyoming, and that background shaped the lens through which I see the state and landscape. Therefore, I am grateful to writers and artists like Wilkins, who pull back the veil on my more idealized version of the American West. Without this perspective, my understanding of my choice to continue to live and love this place is incomplete.

In the end, that is the greatest achievement of Wilkins’ novel — it is a story that strives to provide a complete picture of a community and its history and explicate how those forces shape the people who inhabit it.

For more about Joe Wilkins and his work, visit his website: https://joewilkins.org/ 

I found these two interviews with The Write Question on Montana Public Radio to be particularly enlightening as I digested Fall Back Down When I Die: https://beta.prx.org/stories/96338-an-interview-with-joe-wilkins; https://beta.prx.org/stories/282384 

Simplicity Through Precision: Lessons from the Backcountry

Author Update

Every year as July burns away and August blazes in, as the low country begins to burnish to gold and brown, it is time to go to the mountains. And so, my husband, Rob, and I are gathering our gear and mulling over maps, set to carry on the tradition of an annual backpacking pilgrimage into the Wind Rivers that my parents started in the 1970s.

The trips are too hard and too far for young children, and so my brother and I didn’t join them until we were ten or so. But the cycle of preparation has been part of my life since I was born, the weeks of planning routes and dehydrating food and winnowing down clothing and cookware leading up to the trip. And this process has me thinking — one of the things I love about backpacking is the minimalism and utility it demands. 

Sometimes (frequently), I wish I could graft the simplicity of backpacking onto my daily life. But I’ve never really figured out the balance. We do need to return calls and emails and maintain our homes, and, in polite society, we should probably own more than two pairs of underwear and wash our clothes before the “truly filthy” stage. So, what hacks or tidbits of wisdom do translate beyond the backcountry? 

Maybe this: the simplicity of backpacking is earned through necessity.  When you carry everything you need on your back, you are forced to make some hard choices about what to take and what to leave. It is not as if I don’t make decisions about what to wear or what to eat or what cookware to take — it is that I make those choices once, in advance, and very deliberately. Therefore, if I want to incorporate some of the minimalism of backpacking into my daily life, I also need to incorporate the precision and foresight required of such an undertaking. This is of course easier said than done, but it is a practice I believe I’ll try. But before I clean out my closet or start making intentional meal plans at the beginning of each week, you’ll have to excuse me — I have to get to the mountains, where I’ll be extremely busy not being busy.

Descending to South Fork After the Burn 

Deep Map of Place

Wyoming, August 2012

Join me here on the trail, and let’s rest, press our hands against our knees to ease the straps of our packs until they feel young and limber enough to continue stepping down and down to South Fork’s meadows. Here, where green grass and timberline break to the burn’s mean edge, where heat split stone to sharp slabs, where the earth baked to dust and ash powdered fine, where trees twist in blackened fingers that claw for blue sky, and where the thick smell of smoke lingers. But also, do you hear within the char the stream’s sweet chime, see the slender shoots that will grow and green with time? Our big tree, halfway down the ridge’s breakneck slope, clings with roots half-singed to earth gone black and reaches with living, rising limbs towards clouds. Those flowers springing from dark soot echo sparks, their petals red, orange, vibrant now, after fire gorged and fled along the ridge until, rim-rocked, it turned back, consumed its own licking tongue, left blessed trees untouched to seed the flame-tilled ground for saplings yet to come.  

Nibbles and Strikes: A Meditation on Querying Literary Agents and Fishing

Author Update

I am excited to share that in the last two weeks, I’ve received several requests from agents for the full manuscript of my novel! 

This means these agents are genuinely interested in my work. For the initial query, most agents ask for a query letter, which is a little like a cover letter for a job application, and a few sample pages. Most request five to ten pages or a chapter or two, though some ask only for the query letter. If they like these preliminary materials, they will ask for a “full” (the complete manuscript) or a “partial” (a longer portion of the manuscript, but not the full thing) so that they can further assess whether the writer and project are a good fit for them.

For me, perhaps the most challenging part about querying is that you often don’t receive any response at all to your initial query — agents receive such a high volume of submissions that they simply can’t respond to every one. Therefore, if you don’t hear anything after a certain amount of time (I’ve heard everything from two to six weeks), you can generally assume that the “no response” is a rejection. 

In my limited experience, most agents seem to prefer email correspondence to snail mail. So, I’ve been spending a lot of time the last few months sending emails and then…just waiting. It is an odd feeling to send out submissions and hear nothing back — I can get too into my head and start thinking, What if it didn’t really go through? Are these messages actually landing in an inbox somewhere? Have I waited long enough to assume a rejection?

Thus, getting responses from agents — any response — is pretty exciting. And getting interested responses is even better. Like my husband said, the process is sort of like fishing. If you’re casting over and over again and not getting any strikes, you begin to feel like there might not be any fish in the water at all. And then you start to wonder why on earth you’re waving your line all over the place. But if you get a nibble, even if it is only a little bump, the whole endeavor becomes much more exhilarating — There are fish in here! I’ve got the right fly on my line after all! 

Which is where I’m at right now with querying — I haven’t landed anything yet, but I know my query letter and sample pages are working. And so I’ll keep casting away, waiting for the big strike. Until then, I’ll also try to enjoy where I am. Admittedly, it is harder to find joy in the process of sending emails than in the act of fishing, but I do enjoy researching agents, learning about who they are and what sort of books and clients they represent and why they got into the business to begin with. My “to read” list has grown exponentially as I’ve perused client lists and encountered titles that spark my interest. It is wonderful to be immersed in the literary world this way. 

Perhaps that is the most important thing I’m learning from this part of the journey — often, standing on the bank of a beautiful river or lake and watching how the light fractures off the water, being out in the world with the sun and wind on your face, is the best reason to go fishing.

Picture of Red Desert, WY at sunset

Grandpa’s Tent

Deep Map of Place

I hold stories in the weft and weave of sturdy canvas threads. Stories from your grandfather and his step-father, from your father and mother, stories from your own lips. Also, from others, family by blood and shared experience. Stories you might tell your children if you could only tease them out, separate the details from the laden fabric of history and receding memory.

I hold also the fading stains of antelope blood, the scent of stew meat simmered long over propane stoves, the light of spring, summer, and fall suns, the dusky smoke and glow of campfires. I have stood in gale force winds, sudden rains, and heavy snows. When I grew weary and thin, an oiled tarp and new canvas stitched me strong again. New layers laid down atop the old, obscuring some of what was, metamorphosis a necessity of perpetuity.

What you have seen, so have I, the generations of Wyoming kin shaped by sage and sky. I know the hills of Old Carbon and Hanna and of the Red Desert. Raise me up still in that country, straighten the splintery ridgepole, string the guy wires taut, set me to catch the wind and hold to earth.

High Plains Summer

Author Update

Summer has come to the high plains. Cool still, and rainy most afternoons here in Laramie for the last month. But it seems as if over night, the town has turned lush. The lawns are green and studded with yellow dandelions, the trees are laden with bright leaves and purple and white blossoms, and the mountains hang blue and snow-capped in the distance. The skies have been full drama, great mounds of white clouds shaded blue and gray across their bellies that darken to black in the afternoons and bring the smell of fresh rain, and, often, rain itself, sometimes rumbling thunder. The snow is just coming down from the high country, and already the rivers have lapped beyond their banks. The air is redolent with lilacs, mown grass, water on pavement and stone.

Of course, this turn to summer did not happen overnight. I’ve been watching for it for weeks, months. But no matter how closely I watch the buds on the trees and earliest spring flowers and the hints of green at the base of bunch grass, the wash of color that is spring and early summer always takes me off guard, feels like it arrives in a rush. I open my curtain one morning and catch my breath, step outside, feel the sun, hang my jacket back on a hook. 

I don’t want to miss one moment of the spring, hungry as I am for it after a long winter. Part of me wishes it would stay like this forever. I know it won’t. In the last few days, I’ve slapped my first mosquitoes. With all this wet, more will come. Like most of the American West, we’ve already experienced days of murky smoke, born down from massive Canadian wildfires. I know that wet springs can lead to more fires, especially if the rain burns away to a dry July and August. I know that even in mild summers, the high desert and prairie will burnish golden and brown as the days spin by. I know that I will wish for frost come September, when the land is going to seed and my allergies flare. 

But for now, I try to soak in all the green and blue and splashes of yellow, red, white, and purple I can. Out at the barn along the Little Laramie, the wild irises began blooming just last week. Their’s is a short season. Always in the first few weeks of June, always over by the end of the month. I wonder if I would tire of them if they stood year round. I don’t think so. But their brevity makes me more aware of them, of the changing seasons they herald. And I am glad, and grateful, every time I see them pushing up through wet spring grass.

Picture of Red Desert, WY at sunset

Inspiring Artists: The Turnpike Troubadours

Inspiring Artists

One of my favorite bands is the Turnpike Troubadours, a Red Dirt group from Tahlequah, Oklahoma. All members are talented – singer and guitarist Evan Felker, bassist R.C. Edwards, fiddler Kyle Nix, guitarist Ryan Engleman, drummer Gabe Pearson, and steel guitar and accordion player Hank Early. 

Their music blends distinct instrumentation with impressively descriptive lyrics. The music alone catches the ear and can speak to a certain mood even if you’re not following the lyrics. For example, “Gin, Smoke, Lies” is a favorite of mine to lift weights to or to crank out a hard swim set while “7 & 7” and “Down on Washington” make me tap my fingers against the steering wheel. 

But you’re missing out if you’re not paying attention to their lyrics, which bear the hallmark of what I consider great writing – they make me wish I’d written them myself. This line from “Whole Damn Town” makes me nod my head with appreciation (and a little envy) every time I hear it: “Well, the music pours out on the street/ Just as clean and cool as a cotton sheet.” I mean, THAT is a truly great simile based on clear yet fresh imagery. 

The combination of great music and outstanding lyrics creates songs that get stuck in my head in the best possible way. Right now, I’m humming “Leaving and Lonely,” like I do for at least a week every time I hear it.

They also do some interesting things in terms of story-telling – many of their songs tell stories that make me want the novelized version, but the Troubadours don’t stop there. Rather, they build a world across albums with reoccurring and distinct characters like the gritty Jimmy and the sexy Lori. 

And the stories they tell are often deep and moving. The song the “Bird Hunters” tells an entire story about love, loss, and how you both can and cannot come home again in a tight 5:10. Not many short stories could pull this tale and these themes off half as well. “The Housefire” accomplishes a similarly admirable task – the title gives you the main plotline, but don’t assume you know how it is going to go down. The song makes me want to sing along and appalls me with the truth of how fast our fortunes can turn and gives me hope all at the same once.

As I may have mentioned already elsewhere on my website, I create “character soundtracks” for my main characters and then listen to each one when I am working from that character’s point of view. I’ll just link to the Troubadours songs on my playlists below in in a bulleted list, but you should also know that there have been countless days where I just listen to their albums on a loop as I work. 

Perhaps the greatest compliment I can give to the Turnpike Troubadours is to say that they are artists who inspire me to continue my own creative pursuits. Their music makes me want to write and listening to it before or while I work helps me see my characters even more clearly as real, complicated people. In other words, I enjoy the Turnpike Troubadours work for its own sake while also believing that their music makes me a better writer. And because I believe that stories, no matter their format, tell us a little bit about what it means to be human and how to go about living in this wild world, that means their music makes me understand how to be a more nuanced and authentic human being.

So, I’m sending a big “thank you” their way and encouraging you to check them out: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1YSA4byX5AL1zoTsSTlB03?si=EYqGQWRXTLWkuRAdVzOWAQ.

List of Turnpike Troubadour Songs on my character soundtracks:

• Down on Washington

• Call a Spade a Spade

• 7 & 7

• The Funeral

• Whole Damn Town

• Every Girl

• Gin, Smoke, Lies

• Kansas City Southern

*I am not affiliated with the Turnpike Troubadours in any way and garner no monetary or other tangible benefit if you listen to or purchase their music.

Wyoming Arts Council Award Winner!

Author Update

I am very excited to share that I won this year’s Wyoming Arts Council Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award for an excerpt of my novel, Land Until the Sky Comes Down. One of many of the awards and fellowships the Wyoming Arts Council (WAC) offers to support the creative arts in the state, this award is given to the best the best poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or script written by a woman writer. You can read more about this award and other creative writing fellowships on the WAC website. (You may have to scroll down a bit for the profile on the Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award.)

I have applied for this award as well as the Neltje Blanchan Memorial Writing Award (for the best poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or script informed by a relationship with the natural world) multiple times in the past, and winning this year is a true honor. I know the caliber of applicants each year is high, and it pleases me to be part of a statewide community of artists and writers with such diverse and impressive talent. I greatly appreciate the work WAC does to cultivate and promote creativity in Wyoming.

The news that I had won the Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award came at a good time for me — as I continue to submit my manuscript to agents and wait to hear back, I needed the reminder that often it takes more than one go to be successful. Though this is a value my husband and I work to instill in our son, it is easy to take it for granted in my impatience and excitement to get my novel out into the world. 

In the meantime, I am stoking my creativity with as much time outside as possible now that we are getting some warmer spring weather. I’ve been riding my horse and taking the dogs for long walks at the Pilot Hill trail network east of Laramie. Here are a few pictures that provide tangible proof that spring is indeed coming to the high plains!

Drift Fence

Deep Map of Place

A twist of hair caught on a barb of wire, also a twist around the smooth barrel of the strand. Auburn shot through with white speaks of a roan hide. I pluck the coarse fibers free, feel with a fingertip the sharp point that snagged them, look out over ashen sage and a wash of bunchgrass to the rise of granite jagged ridges and the sweep of horizon climbing up the clouds to the sky above, squint beneath the bright sun and imagine but do not see the strong back, straight legs, and supple neck of the horse. My fingers work the tail hairs into a slim braid, perhaps with which to make a bracelet or necklace or a stampede strap but more likely just a magpie souvenir, like spent shell casings and wind smoothed stones, a thing without purpose but for its bright echoes. Probably this slender lock caught the wire whisking after a fly, but I like to imagine flight, the powerful action of hock and hoof across a broken land wide open for running. As I close the gate and walk back to the rumbling of my truck, I reflect on the new drift fence, the drift of time, that which shifts and that which does not in a place like this.