Two Great Wyoming Books

December 10, 2024Inspiring Artists, UncategorizedAnn Stebner Steele

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.”

The Meadow, James Galvin

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.

Transition and Hope

November 10, 2024Author Update, Deep Map of Place, Inspiring Artists, Lessons from AnimalsAnn Stebner Steele

Fall is a time of transition, and this year, transition feels hard. The day this is published, November 10^th, is the one year anniversary of my father’s death. I am exhausted by the vitriolic lead up to this year’s election, which has left so many people at seemingly irrevocable odds with one another. Now, I’m reaching for some beauty and light, and I’m finding it in art, creativity, the generosity of animals, and the beauty of wild places, which give me the inspiration to keep writing and loving. Here’s what I’m turning towards. I hope you’ll explore what speaks to you.

Reflection and Retreat: A Week Alone in the Desert

October 10, 2024Author Update, Deep Map of PlaceAnn Stebner Steele

At the beginning of September, I spent a week by myself at my family’s cabin in the Red Desert. It was a self-designed writing retreat, and I walked for two or three hours each morning, wrote the rest of the day, and took another shorter walk in the evenings. I usually picked up my writing again for an hour or two after dark. I also played several rounds of pasture golf on the “course” my dad designed way back when I was a kid, which consists of nine four fairways with a bush or fence post serving as the flag for each one.

I wasn’t totally off-grid since I could find cell service in high places and send “all-is-well” messages to my husband. My brother acquired a solar panel for the cabin this summer, and being able to charge my laptop was a game changer. As much as I’d like to be an old-fashioned, pen-and-ink writer, I write more deeply and effectively on a computer, especially during revision, when I’m often moving large blocks of text around like I’m rearranging furniture.

I didn’t see another human being while I was there, though I had my good dogs, Snips and Djinn, with me. I did encounter multiple small leks of sage chicken, lots of antelope, (I know they’re technically grouse and pronghorn, but I grew up calling them by their informal nicknames), an immature golden eagle, many mule deer, and several herds of wild horses. I also heard a meadowlark, which I’m not sure I have experienced in September before. None of these fellow desert lovers were sparkling conversationalists, but I feel like they each told something with me important anyway.

I soaked in the place, reflected on wilderness, and mulled over scenes and stuck-points in my novel-in-progress. By the last day, during my final round of golf, I realized I was engaging in rather lengthy conversations with myself, so it was probably time to rejoin society. But, truth be told, give me my husband, my son, and my horse out there and occasional visits from family and friends, and you might never see me in town again.

More than any of my writing insights, that’s what I came away with, the deep and certain knowledge that I can always find my way to my truest home.

What Does It Mean to Be

September 10, 2024Deep Map of PlaceAnn Stebner Steele

I wrote this poem the day before we spread my father’s ashes. The next day, before we gathered for that ritual, I walked the Sweetwater River and came up on a bull elk browsing on the far bank. Call the timing what you will – beauty, perhaps?

What Does It Mean to Be

A husband, a father, a brother, a friend? 
Or an antelope, an elk, a red-tailed hawk, a horny toad? 
Or a penstemon, a paintbrush, a prickly pair, a limber pine?
Or flame flickering willow, water over stone, 
wind through sage, granite against sky?

What does it mean to be, to have been, to continue 
in the quiet of bedrock, the whisper of air, 
the sweep of rivers, the lift of ash, 
in us, through us, and on?


(In Memory of Ken Stebner, 1944-2023)

The Rifle

August 10, 2024Deep Map of PlaceAnn Stebner Steele

It’s heavy, this Weatherby bolt action 7mm Mag,

and the sling digs into my collar bone on cold days walking

the woods, ducking beneath pines, stepping over deadfall.

My friends call it a relic, me brassbound—so many

upgrades have been made available in gear in the years since

it was minted. Composite stocks and carbon fiber barrels

come light, innovative calibers precise.

But this honeyed wood and blued steel speak

to my heart and other important matters. Legacy,

for one. Joining a family, too, the day they said,

“Granddad would have wanted it to go to you.” It looks

right on the gun rack next to her .270, which he likewise left to her,

and the .30-06 that belonged to her mother before.

Somethings change, have to if they’re to go on—evolutions,

a frontline scope, a silicone harness—but I’ll carry it as long as I am

strong enough, will pull the trigger—I savvy the subtle slack—

will make the killshot necessary to bring home sustenance

I know was taken with care. In doing so, I’ll fill also

myself with hours moving quiet, hoping to scent

the musk of elk, to hear the crack of branch.

This rifle, I’ll lay it down then, press

my palm against yet warm hide and give

my thanks. Then I’ll shoulder it again, heft my pack

laden with quartered meat, and walk on.

It’s good, I think, to carry such weight, to feel it in the sinew of our backs,

the long bones of our legs, the soles of our feet, until each step

becomes a meditation on the circle of the world, and our place in it.

~For Rob on his 40^th Birthday, August 5^th, 2024

*I would also like to apologize for sending my last post about Joe Wilkin’s new novel, The Entire Sky, out twice. I changed my regular publishing schedule to get the review out before his book launched, and it caused a glitch with my newsletter platform. I now am aware of the issue and hope to avoid the same mistake in the future. Please know I appreciate you signing up for my newsletter very much and want to avoid inundating your inbox.

Inspiring Artists: Joe Wilkins’ New Novel, The Entire Sky

July 2, 2024Inspiring ArtistsAnn Stebner Steele

Joe Wilkins, a fellow University of Idaho Creative Writing MFA alum, has a new novel, The Entire Sky, coming out July 2^nd (which is the day I am publishing this review). Like his memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, and his first novel, Fall Back Down When I Die (read my review of it here), the new novel features stunning, precise language and a deep evocation of place.

It is the story of Justin, a teenage runaway, Rene Bouchard, an aging rancher mourning the loss of his wife and the growing distance between him and his grown children, and Lianne, Rene’s daughter and a woman struggling to find connection and meaning in her marriage, her work, and her relationship with her father. When Justin’s flight brings him to Rene’s Montana sheep ranch, the three discover an unexpected opportunity to redefine family and home. But Justin can’t outrun his troubled past, and it threatens to destroy the life he’s created with Rene and Lianne and wrest him from the place he’s come to call his own.

When it comes to bringing the contemporary American West to life on the page, Wilkins’ work is some of the best I’ve read. His descriptions of rural Montana, from the plains to the mountains to the tiny, rural town of Delphia to the much larger Billings, sing with specific detail and lyric imagery. Depictions of sheep ranching ring with both grittiness and wonder, reflecting the awe inspired by work that ties people so deeply to the natural world, to birth and death, blood and sky.

Justin’s reactions to these cycles reflect Wilkins’ keen eye and ear for character development and dialogue. A city kid, Justin is amazed but also sometimes appalled as he learns to help Rene with lambing. (A scene that describes the necessity of “jacketing” a bum lamb is especially powerful.) His spoken responses are often inelegant, but beneath the cursing are a tenderness and authenticity that speak to the character’s deepest nature. In another story, an old rancher like Rene, who has distinct ideas about what is right and wrong, might take the boy to task for his language, but in Wilkins’ hands, Rene’s taciturn non-reaction comes through as a form of nurturing. He allows Justin to be who he is while also providing the space and structure for the boy to explore what it means to be responsible to and for other living beings.

Likewise, Lianne and Rene’s relationship is full of complexity and truth. The oldest of four and the only girl, Lianne is also the only one of Rene’s children who lived up to his expectations and hopes for working the ranch. But she left home to attend college, got married, and moved away. Now, in the wake of her mother’s death, she’s trying to understand a pull to return the Montana she once knew even as she wants more from her relationship with her father and can clearly see the hard edges and limits of life in such a place. As she and Rene try to reckon with the legacy of a past family tragedy, the reader aches with all they cannot say and all they manage to convey.

The wholeness of all its characters is perhaps my favorite part of this novel, with the beauty of the language and the descriptions of landscapes tied for a close second. The supporting characters feel real (and if there was ever a better name for a power-hungry land baron than Orley Pinkerton, I’d like to hear it.) Their hopes and troubles add layers and nuance to the community of Delphia, harmonizing with Justin’s, Rene’s, and Lianne’s as they emerge as allies and adversaries.

Ultimately, The Entire Sky takes a hard look at failures in our society that allow so many of us to become wandering, broken survivors, each in our unique way. Through Justin, it asks us to consider what has happened and what will happen to boys who have been left outside the circle of love and family that should support their growth into thoughtful men who can claim their own authenticity rather than being defined by cultural morays of masculinity.

Many novels about the contemporary West lean hard into bitterness and bleakness, perhaps as part of an effort to demythologize the West and challenge oversimplified, romanticized versions of its past and present. Notably here, Wilkins doesn’t shy away from that work or from harsh realities, but his novel also values the beauty of the land and the humanity of the people who live there.

Given the sharp-eyed crafting of Justin’s character and those of the people surrounding him, it would be naive to wrap this story up with a “happily-ever-after.” But without looking away from the likely outcome of Justin’s trajectory, Wilkins offers the possibility of hope, a version of the boy’s future that could, just maybe, be true in a world so filled with violence and beauty.

The Entire Sky is available July 2^nd, 2024. Check your local bookstore to buy a copy or order the book online from Third Street Books, a bookstore located in Wilkins’ stomping grounds in Oregon. Also, you can learn more about the book and about Wilkins’ work on his website.

On Time or In Time?

June 10, 2024Author Update, Deep Map of PlaceAnn Stebner Steele

The arrival of summer comes with changes in schedules and routines — my son is out of school and in a summer program part time and with me and family friends on the off days, we’re eating dinner and staying up later as we try to squeeze in as much outside time as possible, swimming has given way to hiking, and my horseback rides have grown longer as I explore the surrounding country instead of utilizing the arena. I’ve transitioned from a deep focus on my novel to running my summer class, and, now, as the course wraps up, I’m preparing to switch back to writing. We’re traveling more while the roads are good and while the camping season lasts.

All of this shifting has me thinking about time, as does my tendency to try to fit as much summer into each day as possible. I find myself in a push-pull between relying on my watch and calendar and wanting to throw both away.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with watches and clocks, and this ambivalence has increased since I switched to a smart watch.

In ways, it is amazing. With the touch of a button (or rather, an app), I can view my calendar, set an alarm, set a timer, or start a swim workout and follow the lap intervals set for me. I can view data that tells me how I used my time, how productive I was, how many times my heart beat per minute.

If I carefully frame how I interpret all this data, the watch helps me. It verifies that I indeed do a lot. If I close those rings or hit those step goals, I feel satisfied, motivated to continue. Calendar reminders offload the pressure of keeping track of appointments in my head, can ease that vague sense that I should be somewhere doing something by telling me specifically where and what. I feel good when screen time is down and time riding, swimming, hiking, and writing are up. I am proud when my swim app congratulates me for shaving a few seconds off my average one hundred yard freestyle time.

But here’s the problem: my watch, or rather the attention I give it, puts me on time rather than in time. I begin to focus on what comes after this task, how this hour leads into the next, on what I can get done in a fifteen minute quadrant between turning off my activity tracker for yoga and starting a timer to remind me to look away from my computer screen every twenty-five minutes while I work.

When I’m in time, the world feels different. Slower sometimes, but not always. If I leave my watch at home when I ride Scout, I sink into being with her. I notice when we’ve accomplished something meaningful, or I notice that the wild irises have bloomed in a lacy white and purple blanket across the hay meadows. Without my watch and with my phone silenced, I experience my hikes differently. I don’t over-stride trying to get back to the car, I hear meadowlarks and say hello to bursts of yellow wallflower and purple penstemon, remember to breathe, to smell the sweetness of blue-stemmed wheat grass mixing with sage. I can play action figures with my son in the yard and settle into his imagination while feeling the cool grass beneath my fingers, the softness of the earth beneath my feet. I can get lost in writing, move completely into the story.

As a (mostly) functional adult in modern American society, I can’t forgo clocks and calendars all together, but I’ve been wishing I could. I want to be in time, not on time, to be in the flow of it, to get swept up and caught in eddies and turned around before drifting on. Perhaps if I did, I would feel the shifting cycles of the earth differently, would not measure my life in minutes or count the number of summer weekends and lament how few they are and how much I won’t get done before school starts.

Perhaps I could move through the seasons with joy, greeting the wild flowers and birds in spring, the shock of cold river water in the heat of summer, the blaze of aspens in fall, the muffling of snow in winter, and could find peace in the ebb and flow of this great circle. I wonder if I can make this leap while still keeping my commitments to other people, if I can honor both my son’s pick up schedule and the wind on my face as we ride our bikes home. I hope so. I aim to try.

10 Signs It’s Spring in Wyoming

April 10, 2024Deep Map of PlaceAnn Stebner Steele

In Wyoming, spring can feel more like a series of allusions and suggestions than an actual season. March and April in particular seem to be uncertain if they belong to winter or are the start of something new. Thus, I always look for assurances that spring is here, even if the forecast calls for the imminent arrival of more snow:

1. Red-winged black birds: In March, the red-winged black birds begin calling from the trees, power poles, and fences at the barn where I keep my horse, Scout, which is in the Little Laramie River valley. I also hear them and sight them along the Laramie River where it winds through town. With a trilling whistle that sounds like “okalee” or “conk la ree,” these birds summon spring. https://youtu.be/hrgGTvzuA1I?si=Dx28kLfGA53i4L0Q

2. Wearing Sandals in 45 Degree Weather: If the sun is out and the temperature rises about 40 degrees, we Wyomingites convince ourselves it is shorts-and-sandal weather, or at least sandal weather. Are my toes cold? Of course, but I can imagine the insinuation of warmth.

This photo is of a juniper tree in spring.

3. Summer is Already Booked: In a state where many of us love to be outdoors as much as possible, we also are forced to cram twelve months of warm-weather activities into about four. By mid-April (if not sooner), my email and text threads are full of inquiries and responses regarding summer plans, and my calendar reminds me that there just aren’t that many weekends in June, July, and August.

4. Whispers of Green: In our yard, the cinquefoil and flax are among the first plants to start showing a little green. It creeps up from under the gray-brown thatch of dead leaves left from fall, tiny shoots of new growth, and I have to search for it at first, bending low to the ground as if to hear a secret.

5. Wedding Invitations: Especially if you’re somewhere in the age-range of 25 to 35, or if your kids are, you can bet your mailbox will be full of wedding invitations this time of year (see #3.). Winter weddings in Wyoming are beautiful, but not as common as summer nuptials thanks to wind, bitter cold, and blizzards that close major roadways.

This photo is of a meadowlark singing from a fence post. — Photo by Jeffrey Hamilton on Unsplash

6. Meadowlarks: This year, I heard my first meadowlark on April 3^rd. These yellow-bellied, brown-backed, fence-post and sagebrush perchers are my favorite bird, and their fluting, plaintive whistle reminds me of time spent on the Laramie Plains and in the Red Desert as well as of my father and grandfather, who also held a special affinity for their song. Though they’re the state bird of five other states (Montana, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Oregon), they will always call my heart to Wyoming in spring. https://youtu.be/fRgU4xS06sM?si=ewoeoRV1bebpe4ba

7. Ill-Planned Excursions: Desperate for nicer weather and an opportunity to get out “into the hills” (as my father always put it), the first run of sunny, low-wind days always tempts me to go for a drive, hike, ride, or run into higher country, which usually ends when I encounter enough snow to force me to turn around. (I am learning though — when I was in my twenties, these adventures resulted in getting stuck more than once.)

8. The Horses Start Shedding: I used to warn them that more snow was sure to come, but it turns out that shedding is triggered by longer daylight hours more than rising temperatures. There is something deeply satisfying about picking up a brush and combing loose hair off a horse’s neck until it begins to pile around your boots. Then, there’s the moment of placing your palm against a soft, sun-warmed, summer-sleek hide.

This photo is of a horse watching cattle.

9. Nocturnal Ranchers: Once calving starts, the early-rising ranchers I know start monitoring heifers and cows around the clock. Spring is the season of renewal, and no one understands that better than those who live close to the land, whose days are shaped by its cycles. As wobbly-legged calves emerge into pastures and fields, the lowing of their mothers joins the medley of an awakening land.

10. Riparian Air: It comes unexpectedly, those first hints of water against warm stone, twining through growing things, carried on a warm breeze. Can you smell the color green? It is the scent of spring.

Holding the Larger Shape: Writing & Rewriting with Help

March 10, 2024Author UpdateAnn Stebner Steele

I sat at the dining room table with my seven-year-old son, helping him complete a worksheet on reading comprehension. His task was to answer questions about the plot and details of one of Arnold Lobel’s Frog & Toad stories.

Thinking of those answers came easy to him — he has loved books and movies since he was tiny. Every night, he helps me make up a story about characters based on his stuffed animals and favorite literary and film heroes. The result is that he has a good sense of how stories work. He would read a question, mull it over, then tell me what he thought.

Yet, writing those answers down was hard work. I watched him labor, sounding out the syllables, placing his finger between each word to space them just so, shaping the letters. He worked through mistakes and frustration, using his eraser often and looking to me with his mouth pinched when he couldn’t spell a word he felt he should know.

My role was to simply to help him hold onto his previously formed ideas while he struggled through the steps of constructing each sentence. If he got lost between one word and the next, I would repeat back to him what he had already figured out, what he had spoken to me moments before. I could see the larger shape when he could not.

He finished the worksheet, took it back to school, and earned a sticker for putting in extra effort. He was satisfied, motivated to do more optional worksheets for the rest of the Frog & Toad adventures. In other words, he’s tucked away that experience and has moved on.

But I am lingering still, thinking about how difficult it can be to write even when we know the story we want to tell. How hard it is to find the right words, to marshal them into the correct order. How challenging it is to stick with it when we begin to forget why we started to begin with.

Which is why I decided to start working with a writing coach and developmental editor to help me finish the latest (and, hopefully, the last) revision of my novel. She is talented and smart and has a brilliant eye for story. She is helping me rediscover the big picture as I roll up my sleeves and begin the scene-by-scene and sentence-by-sentence work.

Sometimes that is what we need most, someone else to sit at the table with us, to hold space for the ideas we can only find inside ourselves, to repeat them back to us when we get lost.

An Update and a Request:

Due to the demanding nature of the revision process for my novel, I have decided to start sending out my newsletter posts once a month instead of twice a month. I look forward to continuing to share my writing and my creative journey with you!
A friend of mine was recently in a major car wreck near Laramie. She was seriously injured and is recovering, but she will not be able to return to her work as a horse trainer for some time. If you would like to help her and her family out during this difficult time, please visit their GoFundMe page. Thank you for considering!

Grief

February 25, 2024Deep Map of PlaceAnn Stebner Steele

Grief is like a stone dropped into a slow autumn river. First, its entry, the splash, the circular ripples reverberating out and out and on. Then, the repose. Water moves around it, yields to its edges, creates new eddies, turns it now and again. It rests amongst other rocks, shifts in texture and even shape with passing currents and years, becomes part of the stream itself, bits of sifted silt refracting sunlight, settling to bedrock.

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