As a writer whose work is almost always inspired by place, I’ve read a lot of books set in the American West and am frequently asked for recommendations by family and friends. Giving such advice isn’t as easy as it seems it should be. For me, reading about Wyoming, and the American West at large, can be a tricky path to navigate—I want to read and connect to authors who love the land like I do, but I don’t want to wade into and perpetuate romanticized, simplified versions of Western places, Western values, and Western history. Likewise, I don’t enjoy spending hours with writing so focused on de-romanticizing the West that it strips away all the beauty, love, and hope I’ve found to be vital to my own experience here. The other problem is that my “b.s. barometer” runs on high when I’m reading about places and pursuits I am well familiar with, and if something rings false, feels exaggerated, or seems like it’s been elevated for purely literary purposes, I get distracted at best and want to throw the book at the wall at worst.
These three tripping points were on my mind as I scanned my shelves for books I feel are worth sharing here, but I forgot about all of that when I picked up the following two volumes. Both simply drew my hand, and lifting each, cracking open the pages, left me thinking only, “I love this book.”
I love James Galvin’s poetry, but I first discovered his writing when one one my graduate school professors pointed me to The Meadow, which meditates on the history and evolution of both the natural and built environments on a small ranch on the Wyoming-Colorado border. A reflection on how the titular meadow shifts with passing seasons, years, and generations, the book is both elegy and celebration, a deep reflection on the land and the people tied to it by family, labor, and love.
In it, Galvin blends techniques of fiction and non-fiction, and the Meadow reads like a memoir, a natural history, and a novel with the landscape as a central character. Galvin’s immense talent as a poet imbues every page with lyrical, piercing language that mimics the rhythm, beauty, and harshness of the seasons and country of Wyoming. The characters who people this landscape remind me of many Westerners I know while also standing out as completely and utterly unique (also like so many Westerners I know). Whenever I drive Highway 287 from Laramie to Fort Collins, I look out at the liminal land caught between high plains and high mountains and think about this book and what it means to belong to a place.
One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow, Olivia Hawker
When a sudden act of violence leaves Cora Bemis and Nettie Mae Webber to run their neighboring frontier farms without their husbands, they are forced to reckon with distrust, guilt, and blame and rely on each other to support their families. As the two women navigate the hardships of life on the high plains, Cora’s daughter Beulah and Nettie Mae’s son, Clyde, deepen their ties to the land, the work, and each other, further complicating the uneasy alliance their mother’s have formed.
While my interest in literature of the American West tends to run towards contemporary stories and settings, this novel, set in 1876, has stuck with me in a way many books don’t. At its core, the novel is a mediation on life and death and the deep lessons we can learn about this cycle if we listen closely to the land. Beulah experiences this connection to the natural world on an intuitive, lyrical level, and through her, the reader, like the other characters, comes to understand it, too. I think of her voice often when I’m walking the Red Desert and listening to the wind through the sage and grass.
