My Brother, the Judge!

Author Update

One of the biggest events of the year for my family occurred this spring — my brother, Dan Stebner, was appointed as the Wyoming Ninth Judicial District Circuit Court Judge in Riverton. He asked me to speak at his robing ceremony, which was last week, and I am so proud and pleased for him that I wanted to share my words about him here. I owe Danny many things — he is an outstanding big brother and great friend — and I can add yet another entry to the list: I have been experiencing some writer’s block since finishing my first novel and sending it to agents, and having an assignment with a deadline got me writing again. I enjoyed writing this speech, and though I was nervous to present it in front of the Wyoming Supreme Court, Governor Gordon, and many other esteemed guests, I enjoyed delivering it.

Below is the text of the speech, or, you can watch the robing ceremony here. My portion starts at 20:20 mark, but all of the speakers were excellent, and it was an honor to be included among them.

Justices, Governor, esteemed guests, all – it is my honor to address you today as we celebrate my brother’s appointment as the Circuit Judge for the Ninth Judicial District. I could not be happier for him nor prouder of him, but I have to admit up front that I simply can’t bring myself to call him Judge Stebner. To me, he’ll always be Danny.

When he asked me to speak, I was flattered, surprised, and little panicked. One of my first thoughts was that it should be our father addressing all of you today on behalf of our family, and I know we all wish he was here. Unfortunately, his health precluded that from happening. And so, over the last few days, I have reflected on what I might tell that would shed light on Danny’s character and what makes him so well suited to this profession.

I could tell you about how we wrote and illustrated stories when we were little, how my stories were always about fast, wild horses and his were about a talking gerbil who became an attorney and then a judge. I could tell you about how Danny has always been certain of his place in the world, has always loved Wyoming so much that he hesitated to pick me up from the Denver airport when I was in graduate school because doing so would break his eighteen-month streak of not leaving the state even though he lived in Laramie, a mere 2 hours from DIA. I could tell you about how, after he did pick me up, we joined our parents and friends at our family’s camp in the Red Desert and how I listened to his passionate, articulate discussion of constitutional law around the campfire.

And that’s it, that campfire. For when I think of my brother, I think of Wyoming’s wild country. You see, though Danny and I were born in Rawlins, we both came of age in the Red Desert and the Wind Rivers. As often as they could, our parents, Ken and Karey, took us camping and backpacking, and many of our formative experiences unfolded in that big country. This is a tradition we have both continued with our own families — as many of you know, Danny, Stacy, Bess, and Charlie spend more nights in the spring, summer, and fall at our family’s cabin near the Sweetwater than they do in town.

And when I think about being with my brother in the wilderness, I see him most clearly walking ahead of me over Windy Ridge. Our parents started backpacking in the Winds in the 1970s, and they discovered many beautiful spots that they later shared with us. The fastest route to and from one of those camps is over Windy Ridge. If you are especially motivated, you can walk out from our camp and back to the truck in one day. And I do mean one day – it is over 15 miles, with a two-thousand, three-hundred-foot elevation gain in the first two-mile stretch, and if done well, it easily takes 10 hours of steady walking with only a handful of thirty minute breaks. Those of you who know our father and mother will recognize that they think this sort of thing is normal.

So, Danny and I grew up believing this is what most families did for vacation, and we have walked over Windy Ridge together many times. Danny walks faster than I do, and the image of the back of his pack is indelibly etched in my mind.

My brother is fond of saying that you never remember the trips where everything goes perfectly – he usually says this when we’re stuck in a bad crossing or standing around a campfire in the backcountry in a five-day downpour. But I remember with clarity a trip over Windy Ridge that did go perfectly, or at least as perfectly as a 10-hour hike can go. Our parents left camp a day before Danny and I did, opting to take a different way out that they could split up with an overnight. So, it was just the two of us walking over Windy Ridge.

Most of the trip is above timber line, over rocky ground and through multiple boulder fields. It requires attentive route-finding – there is no trail. One saddle in particular is especially tricky to navigate – if you get too high, you end up stuck in the boulders. If you get too low, you get stuck in the boulders. Pick the wrong route through the middle, you get stuck in the boulders. These rocks are huge slabs and chunks of granite – if you’re on a good path, you can walk across them and take small hops between them. But if you get sucked off course, you find yourself scrabbling around in scree fields and having to crawl down into the pits between the boulders, which are favorite haunts of rather large, black spiders. You can spend hours trying to get across this boulder field if things go awry.

What I remember best is this – my brother deliberating on our parents’ stories and our own previous trips through this saddle, the topo map spread between us, and the landscape and moment before us. That we discussed all of this, the precedent and the current facts, that we used that information to chart a course through the boulders. That my brother made decisions based on history and advice but not rigidly beholden to it, that, as we walked, he adjusted our path as the circumstances dictated.

It was the smoothest route I have ever taken through that patch of boulders, the fastest we have ever traversed that saddle. I will always remember that sterling trek over Windy Ridge. It wasn’t easy – it never is. Yet, the sun was bright, the eponymous wind was still, and my brother walked before me, studying the country and waiting for me to catch up when it was time to ponder what line we would take.

Danny, I know that your time in Wyoming’s wild places will serve you well in this new adventure. You will bring the same thoughtful, careful consideration to your judicial decisions that you do to choosing backpacking routes. You will treat those who appear before you with the same compassion and fairness you bring to your companions in the country, listening carefully to what they have to say. You will bring to bear both your intelligence and your sense of humor. You will respect the law as you respect the mountains and desert, as something you are a part of but not in control of. The Wyoming legal community and Wyoming at large are lucky to have you serve in this role, just as I am lucky to call you my brother and my friend.

And when you need to get away from the pressures of your job, you know I’ll be ready to go to the hills with you, just like our parents showed us how to do.

Inspiring Artists: Ken Kesey & Sometimes a Great Notion

Inspiring Artists

Because I am a writer, people often ask, “What is your favorite book?” And thus begins an If You Give a Mouse a Cookie situation: Because I am a writer, I love to read (or perhaps it is more accurate to say, because I love to read, I am writer), and because I love to read, I love a great many books. Because I love a great many books, I struggle to give a succinct answer to that question, and because I struggle with that question, people walk away from our conversation with a stew of titles from a vast majority of genres and probably very little idea what books have influenced me as a writer, and because they have very little idea of what books have influenced me, they probably have an unclear idea of what sort of writings I actually author. Therefore, I would like to begin sharing with you not only the books that have inspired me as a writer and an artist but also movies, music, and other forms of art that spark for me.

So, to kick it off, there are several books that I nearly always name, and the one that nearly always comes up first is Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion. Though not as well-known as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, this experimental, epic novel has inspired me more.

On the face of it, Notion is about the struggles that the Stampers, an Oregon logging family, face as they come under increasing pressure to change their operation and unionize. Against that broader external conflict, long-smoldering resentments and longings within the family come to a head. At the heart of these tensions is the rivalry between Leland Stamper and his older brother Hank. In the balance hangs the future of the logging operation, the love of Hank’s wife, Vivian, and the pride, independence, and internal fortitude of both men.

The first time I read the novel, I was in high school and had never encountered anything as experimental. Kesey weaves together strands of third-person narrative with direct streams-of-consciousness from multiple characters, switching between the main story and flashbacks and character perspectives without notice beyond shifts in font (from regular font to italics to parentheses and back, for example). Major characters and minor characters alike break into the main narrative to offer their thoughts and opinions, though we don’t always know who is speaking. If this sounds confusing, it is, at least at first. I came close to giving up on the book that first time through, but something pulled me along, a thrumming, urgent insistency though the story unfolds slowly. As I learned and have tried to explain to everyone to whom I have recommended Notion, it is a book that teaches you to read it, and by the end, I am always so swept up in the drama of the tale that I feel my way through those point of view and tense shifts without a hitch. In fact, the experimental nature of the book serves the story, making it more nuanced, sweeping, and specific all at the same time.

Each time I read the novel, I am struck by a deeper and deeper appreciation for the techniques Kesey used — the plot drives along, relentless, unyielding, until the reader is begging the characters to “Stop!” or “Just say something, anything, that is true and honest and meaningful right now!” The slippery perspective and timeline add layers upon layers of richness to that plot as we see how years of family history — generations of it — and myriad and often myopic individual experiences have brought everyone in the Stamper family to the brink. Further, the novel captures Oregon logging company with depth and breadth, taking the reader inside the landscapes and culture of the place like all great deep maps of place do.

Because the book requires more of its reader than passive consumption, it engages me on a profound level, leaving me feeling as if I have experienced not only Hank’s story or Leland’s or Viv’s, but all of them along with countless others. There is no doubt in my mind that Sometimes a Great Notion inspired me to write my own stories about family, belonging, and place. That my first book is deeply place-based in Wyoming’s Red Desert and focuses on the challenges faced by a long-time ranching family as the two grown brothers fall in love with the same woman comes as no surprise. That is not to say that my work is derivative of Kesey’s — our stories are different, and while my style owes homage to Notion, it is not an imitation of his but something of my own making. Our themes also differ, though I’ll leave it to readers to parse that out and see if they agree with me. But Kesey’s novel grabbed me when I fifteen and has never let me go entirely. It is a part of me now, one of the many shifting voices in my own head that pushes me to find my own true, authentic voice and to tell true, authentic stories with it. Only Ken Kesey could have written Sometimes a Great Notion, and I hope that my own work rises to that same great standard.

Waiting for a New Season

Author Update

Every November is National Novel Writing Novel Month, or NaNoWrMo. The goal of the event is to write a 50,000 word novel in four weeks. I feel like I just completed the opposite of that, which was to cut 77,000 words from my novel in five weeks. Using the strategies I wrote about last month was effective, and I got the novel to under 100,000 words. That makes it a 350 page manuscript, double-spaced in Word in Times New Roman font.

Now I am headed back into sending the novel to agents and waiting to hear what they think. This is perhaps the hardest part of the writing game for me. Writing new material sometime comes easily, but even when it doesn’t, it is an active process. Cutting the novel back so substantially involved questioning every chapter, scene, page, sentence, and word I’ve written over the last ten years, and that was challenging. But it was focused and tangible. Waiting, on the other hand, involves letting things go, letting them be, and admitting that I have no more control over the outcome. 

I think this is a tricky practice for all of us, no matter the specific application. We apply for jobs and then have to wait. We go to medical appointments and get labs drawn and then have to wait. We send that email or text, make that phone call, leave that message, and then have to wait. We schedule that vacation and then have to wait. And waiting can feel like slowly going mad, if we keep thinking about the potential results. 

So, what I’m trying to figure out is how to let waiting be a process of becoming, of drawing inward and trying to recommit to the present moment. I am working on a second novel, and though the brainstorming and planning is slower than I would like, I am curious to see where it takes me. I am trying to let it show me the way into it. 

I am riding my horse in the indoor arena at the barn where I keep her and waiting for spring, trying to concentrate each time on the exercises we practice, to see how much progress we can make during this fallow period rather than longing for rides in the hills. I am smelling woodsmoke on the wind and trying to appreciate the taste of cold on my tongue instead of counting the days until a true thaw. 

So it feels right to me, then, to be sending my first novel to agents at this time of year, when we can almost imagine that winter will indeed end but before we can feel spring in our bones. What comes next is a new season.

Around the Block August-October 2022

Deep Map of Place

Every year in February, I start to get cabin fever and long to be outside. So, in honor of looking forward to getting outside and as a reminder that the seasons do indeed turn, here’s looking back to summer and fall!

I love to ride my horse, Scout, on dirt roads that form a square around the ranchlands surrounding the barn where I keep her. The barn owners jokingly call it “going around the block.” Scout and I watch the seasons turn each time we ride the loop.

Picture of Country Road in Fall

Precision: Cutting A Novel Down to Size

Author Update

After receiving feedback from a couple of key reviewers, I have decided to shorten my novel considerably before submitting to more agents. Thus, my current project is to cut about 77,000 words in hopes of hitting a length closer to recommended industry standards for literary and upmarket fiction. When all is said and done, I hope the book will be just under 100,000 words.

When I shared this goal with a friend, saying that I needed to make the novel shorter, he asked, “Does it need to be shorter or simply more precise?” What a wonderful question. I’ve used it as a guide as I decide what to cut and what to keep. Does a scene move the story forward in a precise way? Does a description cut to the core of a landscape or character? Can I say the same thing with one word instead of ten?

I have identified a good handful of scenes that I could cut without really affecting the main arc of the story, and so I pulled those out wholesale even when it pained me to do so. But by and large, I have made most cuts by evaluating the precision of the line-by-line writing. After reviewing whether every scene is truly serving the story, I have tried to cut each chapter by one third. I do the math, set a target word count, and start asking myself if every scene, every paragraph, every line, and every word is earning its keep. I have cut over 60,000 words so far, and most of them have pained me. To ease the sting, I cut and paste longer passages into a “notes” file for each chapter. Then all that (I think) beautiful but nonessential (probably) writing doesn’t get totally deleted. It’s mostly a mind game, but it helps. And if I need to, I can always go back and find a sentence or paragraph to reintroduce.

Additionally, I’ve discovered a few “easy” cuts. Initially, I wasn’t using contractions in the main narrative, choosing to write out “will not,” “do not,” “is not,” etc. Doing a find and replace search of those common contractions cut nearly 2,000 words from the novel. I also tend to describe things through the point of view of a character when I could simply state what is happening. For example, “She watched the horses stamp in the dusty corral” becomes “The horses stamped in the dusty corral.” And in that same example, chances are that I can cut “dusty” because I’ve probably already described the corral in some way in another sentence. Taking a close look at descriptive action (“he paused,” “he walked to the door,”) and choosing one detail or action instead of listening three or four has also yielded a high number of deleted words.

Ultimately, I hope that cutting the story down makes it more marketable and gives it a better chance of making it to readers. I also believe that the novel will be better—easier to read and more tightly paced—as a result. I am learning a lot about my own writing style through this revision. I’m a maximalist and will likely always “over-write” my drafts, which means I will need to be committed to precision in each subsequent rewrite and edit. Have I spent some time wishing I’d done this work a year ago, and certainly before I sent to my first round of agents? You bet. But agonizing about the past is extraneous and unproductive work, so I’m cutting it out and moving the story forward.

Picture of Red Desert, WY at sunset

Deep Map: Red Desert, Wyoming

Deep Map of Place

How best to know this place? On a map, it is a giant dotted border that extends through most of southwest Wyoming and into Colorado and Utah, covering over nine-thousand three hundred square miles. It overlaps multiple counties — Carbon, Sweetwater, Fremont, Sublette, and Natrona. Places commonly noted on driving maps include the Great Divide Basin, the Killpecker Sand Dunes, Adobe Town, the Oregon Trail, and the former mining towns of South Pass and Atlantic City. To drive around it, you might take Interstate 80, US Highways 191 or 287, or State Highway 28.

From these ribbons of asphalt, perhaps it looks like flat, dull country, miles of sagebrush going out across alkali and dust to a few ragged ridges and on to the thin, white edge of the horizon. Online guides describe it as shrub steppe and high desert, as housing diverse landscapes, like badlands sand dunes, and alkali flats. Photographs show red-white dirt, clay cliffs, sagebrush, antelope, and wild horses.

But the desert only truly begins to come alive when you dare to take gravelled and grated roads until they trail off into two-tracks, when you roll down your windows and feel the wind whip through the cab of your truck, the cool, dry touch of it against you cheek, your neck, when you rest your elbow on the window-sill and feel the sun warming your arm even if the day is cool, when you see antelope race flat-backed across the road ahead of you and wild horses proud-stepping through the sagebrush, when you can smell the strong, nearly metallic bite of sage and sun warmed rock.

This is the Red Desert I grew up in, the place where I came of age just as much or more than I did in my hometown of Rawlins, Wyoming. I do not know it’s more famous locals (fame in desert landscapes is relative, less easily won than fame for picturesque mountain peaks and waterfalls, which more readily fit cultural definitions of “scenic) like Adobe Town and the Killpecker Sand Dunes. The desert of my heart is the Antelope Hills in the northern stretch, just beyond the way stations of South Pass and Atlantic City. Those liminal hills tumble down from the Wind River Mountains, another soul-scape for me, and crease into wondrous draws along the Sweetwater River’s unexpected canyon.

Even if you are within a few miles of the river on a two-track, it is easy to miss it — in this stretch of the desert, the Sweetwater cuts deep and sudden, and if you look out across the flats and ridges of the desert, across all that sage between you and the sky, the river canyon can look like any other small coulee or wash. But draw nearer and you see the size of it, how it drops steep-sided and wide to the river bottom. Walking down is like taking the stairs from the top of an old five story building, except for the uneven, sometimes shaley-footing. Smaller canyons and draws crease the sides of the river canyon, winding up into the desert and out into the sagebrush waves, some steep scrambles, others angled ambles.

Over and over, I come to know the desert more deeply, walking all those draws and the high country rising up beyond them. Many draws are dry, though runneled by spring runoff. Others cloister clear groundwater springs and streams, some of which run year-round, others that fade to trickles before retreating beneath the ground, perhaps rising to the surface once more nearer the river. At my feet, not just sagebrush and gravel, but also bright and surprising wildflowers, scarlet Indian paintbrush, blue flax, lemon and orange prickly pear blossoms, golden spearleaf stonecrop.

In that broken country, I might see antelope, yes, but also mule deer and sometimes elk, perhaps a moose. I have seen bear and mountain lion sign in the deeply timbered bottoms of a handful of draws, amongst the limber pines and aspen stands, once saw a bear trundling down the far side of a ridge. I might bust a lek of sage chickens (grouse, technically, but not in my family’s lingo) or track the flight of a red-tailed hawk or a golden eagle across a sky so blue it pierces me through.

This is the topography of my soul, my heart, twined into me as if part of my own flesh and bone. Which is to say it is like any other place a person might know and love while others simply pass by, never knowing the beauty and awe which it holds.

Ann’s Update: A Novel Edges into the World

Author Update

When people ask me what I’m writing, I usually fumble around a little bit and give a vague answer. But I don’t want to do that here — I want to tell you what I’m really working on and where I am in the process.

Right now, I am getting ready to submit my first novel to agents, and it is an exciting and scary time in my writing career. The novel’s working title is Land Until the Sky Comes Down, which comes from the last line of James Galvin’s poem “Utah Ghost Town.” It is the story of two brothers bound and broken by tradition and ritual, the passionate and lyrical woman they both come to love, and how the three of them struggle to hold onto each other and themselves as they reimagine their own places in a family defined by Wyoming’s hard, beautiful country.

I have been working on the book in earnest since 2012, though the idea originated with a dream I had in 2009. It has been a constant companion for over ten years, and I am both elated and frightened to move onto this next stage. I have gone through it one last time to check grammar and spelling, and now it is ready to go out into the world. Finding an agent is the next step towards publishing it since I have decided to go the traditional publishing route. (I am intrigued by self-publishing but believe this book, a literary, place-based novel, will do better through traditional channels.)

Several people have asked me how I’ve decided which agents to submit to. My process was relatively simple — I went to my bookshelf and pulled down all my favorite books that are in a similar genre to Land. Then I mined the acknowledgements and the authors’ websites to find out who represents them. Because I admire these authors and their writing, I believe that their agents and I would also work well together.

I have read several places that it is best not to submit to agents between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, and so I am drafting my query emails and getting them ready to go. On January 17th, I’ll officially hit send and Land will take a huge leap on its journey. My great hope is that, after I find an agent and a publisher, the book will reach you and make a positive impact in your life, whether it simply entertains you, makes you feel less alone, or leaves you contemplating your own love of place and sense of belonging.

Here are those links to a few things that have caught my attention and which you might find interesting as well:

Image of the Red Desert and Wind River Mountains

Orienting a Deep Map

Deep Map of Place

A deep map of place.

This phrase rang like truth for me from the moment I first heard it, spoke to my own love of wild places like Wyoming’s Red Desert and Wind River Mountains. The term, which I first heard credited to Wallace Stegner, comes from the subtitle of William Least Heat-Moon’s Prairie Erth (a deep map).

But I didn’t know that back in college and graduate school. My initial understanding of the concept was linked to my study of literary, place-based fiction and non-fiction, and thus I always thought of authors like Edward Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams when I thought of deep maps, of authors who came to know wild places in complex layers — personal and familial experience, history, informal and formal ecology, close-looking and listening, meditation, reflection — and who wrote lyrically and beautifully about them, depicting them from different angles and perspectives, returning to them over and over again like a river-smoothed stone. I strove to create my own deep map of place, one focused on “my” Wyoming, on the Red Desert and Wind Rivers, on the horses that have carried me across the plains and into mountains, on the traditions that have tied my family to these landscapes and to each other for generations.

Since then, my understanding has expanded, has allowed me to see that deep maps are not limited to wild places and literary writing. For example, the HBO show Sex & the City was imminently popular with college women when I was in school, and looking back, I see that the show was, in a way, a deep map of New York City. I have encountered some interesting projects online that extend the what and how and why of deep mapping, like This is Not an Atlas (https://notanatlas.org/#atlas-maps). I have also read academic work in disciplines like Wildlife Biology and Anthropology that are excellent examples of the nuanced layering required of deep maps.

And I have realized that, though I bandy about the term frequently, I am far from being an expert on what it means. Therefore, I am beginning a, well, deeper exploration of the concept while also embarking on expanding my own deep map of place, and I invite you to join me.

Ann sitting by a river

Author’s Update from Ann

Author Update

“What do you do?” It is long been one of the toughest questions I receive on a regular basis. It used to be easier to answer, back when I was working full-time as an academic advisor at the University of Wyoming, though even then I’d sometimes tack on a weak, “And I write, too.” It has gotten more complicated as I moved to a part-time role split between advising and teaching and then to part-time teaching only so that I could focus on my writing more in my “off” hours.

When I was advising and teaching full-time, people usually asked me follow up questions about that work, not the writing, which made sense since I was leading with the more understandable, contained career. And it seemed easier to answer those questions, simpler, cleaner. Less revealing.

But my answers weren’t quite true, though they were factual. Because at my core, I am a writer. For years, I have written regularly, and now I write nearly every day and have recently finished the manuscript for my first novel. I am researching and beginning to query agents. I have published essays in literary journals (you can find links to those journals here) and hope to place more of my writing soon. I have cut my teaching back even further, a decision predicated almost entirely on my drive to prioritize my writing. Now, I am at a jumping off point, trying to move from doing the work behind the scenes to putting it out into the world.

Though I still feel awkward when people ask me what I do, I tell them I write. Then I struggle to gracefully explain what I, you know, really do as a writer because there are a lot of ways to be a writer, a lot of reasons to write, and a lot of things to write about. Through this blog, I intend to practice answering those questions, and I want to make it easy for people to find my writing so they can experience it for themselves.

Why? Because, as I’ve stated elsewhere, I believe stories matter, that they connect us, make us feel less alone, and enrich and inform our experiences as human beings. I feel the most authentic, the most in my internal integrity, when I write regularly and when I am brave enough to share that work. And I want to own my vocation when people ask me what I do. Because when we ask each other that question, we are, at least in part, asking, “Who are you?”

Thanks for reading this author’s update! This is the first of many posts I will be making from here out. Throughout the month, I want to share a little about my process and my author’s journey with you. I will also write short pieces of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry and some reviews of books, films, and music that have inspired me as an artist and that I think you might want to check out.

In each author’s update, I will also link to a few things that have caught my attention and which you might find interesting as well. Here are those links for this inaugural update:

  • I just re-read Patricia McKillip’s the Riddle Master trilogy. It is one of my favorite epic fantasy books, and I highly recommend it. http://patriciamckillip.com/portfolio/riddletrilogy/  
  • I’ve been listing to a lot of the Vandolier’s music. Many of their songs are thematically resonant with the sorts of relationships, experiences, and characters I write about in my fiction. http://vandoliers.com/music
  • I have stuck with a meditation practice for almost two months (a record for me) thanks in large part to Insight Timer. https://insighttimer.com/