We’re halfway into January now, and we’ve been enjoying a bit of a heat wave in Laramie: Temperatures in have climbed into the thirties and even forties after long stretches of single digits. What have I learned, or re-learned, this winter?

1. January and February always feel like the longest months of winter for me. The snow’s been on the ground for quite sometime now, and much of it is drifted, crusted, or iced over. The holidays are behind us, and though some houses still sport Christmas lights, which bring me so much joy in December, those lights seem sad to me now, lingering past their season. However, the days are getting longer. It is no longer dark when I leave work, and the days of walking the dogs by streetlight are numbered.
2. Never leave your house totally unattended when temperatures drop below zero even before wind chill is factored in. Rob and I live in a small apartment building owned by my parents, and we manage the property. For the first time in living memory, the residents of all three units (including us) left town for the holidays. Of course, Laramie underwent a major cold snap right after Christmas, and our old, tired boiler failed. Thank goodness our good friends were checking on our cats – when they found the water dish frozen and the apartment ice cold, they called us at my parent’s house and then stayed to thaw pipes and get space heaters running until we were able to pack up and drive home. Thanks B&L! We were incredibly lucky. Our pipes did not freeze solid and therefore there was no damage once we got things defrosted. Because the boiler is older than I am, we had to wait for two days for a new part to be delivered before the plumbers could get the heat back on. Space heaters and long-underwear and stocking caps inside kept us warm. I grew up hearing horror stories about frozen pipes, but I had to experience it first hand before realizing how serious the situation can become so quickly. (P.S. Our cats are fine, though they camped out in front of the heaters once we got the boiler fixed and seemed reluctant to leave that beautiful warmth.)
3. Because of the above mentioned factors, January makes a good time to look at houses. Rob and I are starting a search for a home with property for Tucker and his future horse companions, and anything that looks good with the winter wind howling is going to look a lot better come spring. Contrarily, every property on the Laramie plains looks amazing and green in June. If we look now, we’ll know what to expect come next winter.

I was featured reading my essay, “Red Desert, Wyoming,” on Public Radio International’s Living on Earth last weekend. Check it out, along with the rest of their excellent programming, by clicking here.

Living on Earth collaborates with Orion to bring selected “Place Where You Live” essays from Orion’s website to the air.

I had a lot of fun working with the talented staff at Living on Earth to edit my piece for radio and to record my reading and the background sounds, and I would like to send my thanks their way.

Spud is my faithful riding companion, the family conscience, and our cat and puppy guardian. In her lifetime, she has helped raise five puppies (each belonging to a neighbor or close family member, and most recently our own puppy – I love dogs but can’t imagine having that large of a pack.) She adjusts her play to the size and scrappiness of the puppy in question, increasing her intensity from extreme gentleness to all-out rough-housing as the puppies get older, stronger, and more rambunctious.  When a new dog visits our house, Spud polices their interaction with our two cats, cutting the dog off and even growling if the stranger attempts to chase either of “her” cats.

Her black and tan coat shines, and her dark eyes seem to tell you she could talk — and probably out debate you — if she had the appropriate vocal apparatus. She is built to run and loves to do so, covering ground with grace and speed I envy. She has German Shepherd ears, but only one stands upright while the other lops over. Her ears characterize her personality: intense, alert, and strong but also loving, sensitive and gentle.

A pound special, she became part of my life when Rob adopted her while living for two months in Oregon with his sister. At the time, Rob and I weren’t married, but we were heading there, and he planned to move back in with me when he returned to Wyoming. His sister may be an even bigger animal lover than I am, and she encouraged Rob’s interest in getting a dog. Thus, Rob went to Oregon to help his sister’s family settle into their new home, and he returned with a five month old puppy that needed to settle into ours.

We don’t know Spud’s breeding. The pound billed her as a German Shepherd/Labrador cross. The Shepherd definitely shows, but she lacks the happy-go-luckiness, webbed toes, stocky build, and thick coat of a Labrador. I grew up with Labs, and while I will always have a soft spot for floppy ears and big, dopey grins, I’ve discovered through Spud the fun in hypothesizing about mystery breeding. She is nine years old now, and she still occasionally does something that surprises us and seems to indicate some blood we never guessed at before.

She was three years old before we learned that she knows how to work cattle. Rob, my brother, and I were at my family’s long-time camp in the Red Desert with Spud, my parent’s dog, Hank, and my brother’s Lab, Hadsell.  The land where we camp is multiple-use public land, and we know the family who owns the grazing lease on the parcel. We are accustomed to sharing the meadow with cattle. When a ranch hand rode into camp that day, he sat his horse and surveyed the cows grazing alongside our tents.

“You should put these lazy dogs to work,” he said. We demurred, explaining that we didn’t want to put our dogs to chasing someone else’s cows. Generally speaking, doing so is bad form and can lead to getting your dog shot. However, he wanted to see what the dogs would do, and since they had his blessing, we urged them to follow when he called them up and turned his horse to push the cows off the meadow and into the sagebrush.

Hadsell was simply puzzled and kept looking to my brother for explanation. Hank, a Border Collie/Aussie mutt of questionable background, huddled underneath the camp table, unwilling to take on the large beasts. Spud, to our surprise, trotted out with the rider. She tends to be suspicious of strangers, and Rob and I couldn’t believe she would go with this man she had just met. Then the real shocker of the day: Spud did not just chase the cows, picking one or two and sending them will-nilly into the brush. Rather, she really worked them, tracing back and forth behind them, bunching them together, circling back for strays, and even nipping at the heels of the more recalcitrant bovines.

Over the last six years, Spud has had several opportunities to work cattle, and she always comes back to us with a big dog-grin on her face. A few years ago, upon meeting Spud and hearing about her herding prowess, carpet cleaners working in our apartment suggested that she might be part Australian Kelpie. I have researched the breed and think this could be true. But I also am not prepared to put the mystery of her breeding to rest, because I know that she’s one of a kind, a dog who came to us by way of Oregon, bears the name of an outdoor movie theater in Idaho, and is now and forever our Wyoming Potato.

Fall in Wyoming has been unusually temperate this year. While the fact that flowers are still blooming and bushes are still green continues to tamper with my sense of the time of year, I cannot complain about the added opportunities to enjoy golden days horseback. Tucker and the antelope resident to the ranch where I board him eye each other with interest. The antelope cluster here on private land, away from the small state section across the road that garners a lot of hunting and shooting traffic. Tucker and I also avoid that parcel until hunting season is over, and I am content to have a truce with the antelope we encounter. In fact, I find myself somewhat relieved I don’t have any tags this year and instead am enjoying quiet days punctuated by the sounds of Tucker’s footsteps and the creak of my saddle instead of the crack of a rifle.

September 12th

September 20th

October 3rd

October 12th

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the link between music and writing. For me, the two are intertwined.  I almost always listen to music when writing, and, often, listening to music inspires me to write.  This is especially true when I am writing fiction, though I cannot listen to music when  I am working on poetry, especially if the song is lyric driven. But when it comes to fiction, I find it difficult to get into the rhythm of a story unless I have music playing, and the type of music matters.

When I was a child, I made up stories to go along with songs on the radio or on my Walkman when my family made long car trips. These stories were like movies, and the music was the soundtrack that guided the action in my imagination. Often, I would continue the same story through multiple songs. Sometimes, a single story could unwind for an entire three or four hour drive.

So, music has always been part of my creative process, even before I knew there was such a thing as creative process or that I had one. I was reminded of this fact when I first started getting serious about working on my novel, Land Until the Sky Comes Down. I had just finished graduate school and Rob and I had moved back to Laramie. I was working several part-time jobs and looking for a full-time gig to help pay the bills. My sister-in-law, who at that time was not dating my brother but was already a good friend of Rob’s and mine, bought tickets to Mumford and Sons when they played in Laramie. It was hands-down the best concert I have ever attended, and it felt particularly special because the venue was small and it occurred right before the band really hit mainstream success.  But what I remember the most is how moved I was by the music and by the dedication those young men had made to their art and living a creative life. They were doing what they loved, had devoted their lives to their craft, and they were not much older than I.

Shortly after attending that concert, I started really working on my novel instead of just tinkering with a few scenes. I began making Spotify playlists of songs that reminded me of each of the main characters. As much as writing character profiles, these playlists helped me understand who these people were and what was at stake for each of them. At first, I tried to arc each of the playlists so that the movement between songs would mimic the rising and falling tension each character experiences as the novel unfolds, but in the last year I abandoned that structure and simply continued to add songs that reminded me most powerfully of David, Earl, or Pam. Some songs are shared by two or all three of the characters because sometimes, a song simply captures multiple perspectives and the overall tone of the novel for me.

The last few mornings of working on my novel have been difficult, and I’ve relied on my character playlists to get into the story. I’d like to share these playlists with you via Spotify. You may need to sign up for a Spotify account in order to listen. (They offer both a free and premium version). I’m not sponsored in any way by Spotify, but I do highly recommend it. It is a great way to discover new music and listen to old favorites.

I hope you enjoy these character playlists, and that the stories in the music inspire you in their  own way.

David

Earl

Pam

After a brief hiatus from working on my novel (I got stuck on a major development arc for a main character and spent the last few months revising nonfiction instead), I am getting back into the story. Doing so has as much to do with “feel” as it does with motivation, plotting, technical prowess, etc. I was introduced to the idea of feel through horsemanship. Most horse people could give you a decent explanation of what they mean when they use this term.  David, one the main characters in my novel, talks about feel in an early chapter of the book:

“It’s a little like fly fishing,” he says. “Do you fish?”
“Sure.” She smiles at the surprise on his face. “My grandfather taught me. He even tied his own flies.”
“Well, so it’s like that. When you’re casting, you’ve got to get the right amount of line out in the water. If it’s too short, the fly doesn’t float right and a fish won’t go for it. Too much slack and you can’t feel a strike, and you sure can’t set the hook even if you feel the strike.
“With a horse, the reins keep you in touch with his mouth. You can’t be hanging on all the time with a tight rein. He can’t move if you’ve always got ahold of him, so you’ve got to give him enough slack to use his head, to balance and look around, to float. But you want to be able to make contact, to feel him coming back up the reins to you, too. Like feeling a strike. It’s about feel.”

Feel is developed in any pursuit on which we spend our time and attention.  Athletes often describe being in the zone, and this I think is similar to feel. You know exactly where you are in relation to everyone else on the field, understand how much to ask of your body and how close you are to maximum exertion, settle into a rhythm perfect to the moment. In a team sport, you are aware of where your partners or teammates are and where they are going to go, and you hold this awareness alongside the same grasp of your own position.

I am discovering feel in my writing, too. It comes to me like this: I may be stuck on something – a transition, scene, piece of dialogue, large-scale timeline – for a very long time. I work on the writing and tweak sentences and re-read scenes I’ve already written. I might start writing a scene for a chapter that comes much later in the book. Then I start to feel the story, to get a sense of the weight of the decisions characters are making and a sense of what those tensions are building to. I feel rather than plot the major movements of the entire story and hold them with gentle attention in my mind – when I try to pin them down, iron them out, they fold, break, slip away. But if I leave it at feeling that shape and weight, then I come to an understanding of how to proceed, can follow the feel right out of the stuck place and on into the story.

My essay “Red Desert, Wyoming” appears in this month’s issue of Orion.  Check out the journal and consider buying the Sept/Oct issue or subscribing via their website.

I just returned from a weekend in the Red Desert for antelope hunting season. Rob was the only one in our immediate family to draw a tag through the lottery system. But driving dirt roads and listening to Wyoming Cowboys football on the radio while seeking a good shot at an antelope is family tradition, and so my father, brother, sister-in-law, Rob and I all piled into our white Dodge pickup on Saturday. My mother stayed at our small cabin to begin winterizing – she has a vendetta against the mice that have found their way inside the walls, though she coos over how cute they are when we see them outside.

I grew up around hunting. Some of my earliest memories of the Red Desert are of bouncing down dirt roads in the family Suburban and waiting with baited-breath as my parents glassed bucks from the front seat. I also grew up eating wild game. I was six when we visited my father’s cousins’ ranch and sat down to a dinner of fresh beef-steaks. Not knowing that most people primarily eat beef, I asked, “This is good – what kind of meat is it?” I thought it was some exotic form of moose or big horn sheep I’d never had. I knew what elk, deer, and antelope tasted like. I knew what they looked like grazing in the distance, fresh-killed on the ground, hanging and skinned in the garage, ground into burger and cut into steaks, wrapped in white butcher’s paper and stacked in even rows in the freezer.

Which is what finally inspired me to shoulder a rifle myself and shoot my first antelope in the fall of 2010. Rob and I were leaving Wyoming for three years for me to attend graduate school, and I wanted to go hunting with my parents and brother before we did. I wanted to learn how to take an animal from field to table by myself, lest I no longer have others to provide meat for me. Rob grew up as a vegetarian and hunting was newer to him than to me. I felt that becoming a shooter rather than an observer would help me not only provide for us, but would help tie me back to Wyoming and my family traditions while I was gone.

I could have started hunting much earlier, when I turned twelve. My brother and most Wyoming youth did. But something held me back, a sensitivity that I hid and nursed like a weakness until my mid-twenties, after I graduated from college and got engaged. I blamed my lack of interest in pulling the trigger on my allergies to antelope and elk hides. I hid behind obligations to high school swimming, a fall sport, and then to sorority duties like recruitment. But the truth is that it hurt me too much to see an animal die. The truth is that, though I held my breath as one adult or another took aim and the rifle ripped open the sky, though I was initially excited to see an animal drop, I hated to walk up on the kill. The blood did not bother me, nor did helping to field dress the carcass. What I remembered always was watching large, brown eyes grow dim, feeling a warm body grow cold, feeling nimble limbs grow stiff beneath my hands.

As I have grown older, after killing three antelope myself and walking beside Rob on his own journey to becoming a hunter, I have learned to cherish that sensitivity. I would not numb this grief. Killing another being should hurt. It should be something we remember solemnly, even if we are proud of our shot or the meat we put on the table. Every fall, I ask myself again why I hunt, if I want to continue. I think that as long as I choose to eat meat, the answer must be yes. I must be responsible to the cost of my own choice, the cost of my existence. I must do that by look at those I eat, to remembering that the meat I stir into a pot on my stove in February was a living animal in September.

If you’re interested in an intricate exploration of whether or not eating meat is ethical, please read Michael Pollan’s essay “An Animal’s Place.” No easy answers here, but this essay helped me to better understand the complex feelings I experience regarding my family tradition of hunting.

My “Place Where You Live” piece, “Red Desert, Wyoming” on Orion’s website has been selected to appear in the September/October issue of the print edition!

There are three places I feel most at home in my own skin: in the Red Desert, in the Wind River Mountains, and on the back of a horse (anywhere). I inherited my love of horses from my aunt and uncle and from my good friend, Melissa, who taught me to ride.  Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I was born with horses in my blood and that these people have nurtured that initial attraction into full-blown passion.

I first met Tucker, my palomino gelding, when he was three years old and I was a newly-minted thirteen.  This year, I turned thirty and realized that my “colt” is older than the incoming college-freshman I work with. Tucker knew me before I learned to drive, lived alone, met my husband, wrote my first essay, or shot my first antelope. Suffice it to say, he has been my friend for a long time.

When I swing my leg over his back and settle my weight lightly against the bars of the stirrups, I feel the world shift. Though I actually think there is often truth at the bottom of cliches, I do not feel “the world lift from my shoulders.” Instead, I feel my own weight settle into the the earth, feel my own body as part of the world.

Everything around me takes on a new, sharp, rich focus. I breathe in the smell of mud and dirt and fresh-cut hay and clear, wild water and the warmth of Tucker’s large body, and I know, deep in my gut, who I am and  the nature of my place in this world. The colors of the landscape become more saturated, each leaf, blade of grass, and fence post more vivid. I know that I am alive, am tied to each moment through the sound of Tucker’s hooves clattering across gravel roads and smooth-pebbled streams, whispering through tall grass, ticking through sage brush. His steady, four-beat gait sets my whole body into rhythm, rocking me from the balls of my feet in the stirrups up through my hips to my shoulders and head and tying me back to earth through the clean, long lines of his legs. No matter if I am angry or stressed or overly excited by events at work or the traffic on the way to the barn, calm settles into my as I settle into my saddle.

Because life viewed from horse-back balances me, I want to share this perspective with you through the following photos.

Farm Country Near Pullman, WA, Fall 2011

High Plains Near Laramie, WY, May 2014

High Plains Near Laramie, WY, July 20, 2014

High Plains Near Laramie, WY, September, 2014

High Plains Near Laramie, WY, November 2014

Hay Meadow Near Laramie, WY, May 2, 2015

High Plains Near Laramie, WY, May 3, 2015

High Plains Near Laramie, WY, May 12, 2015

High Plains Near Laramie, WY, May 15, 2015

Hay Meadow Near Laramie, WY, June 2, 2015

High Plains Near Laramie, WY, June 9, 2015

High Plains Near Laramie, WY, July 12, 2015

High Plains Near Laramie, WY, July 20, 2015

Red Desert, WY, July 1-5, 2015