Letters to the Editor
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Wyoming Stories
As I'm sure many others will also be inclined to point out, Annie Proulx has issued a second set of Wyoming stories under the title, "Bad Dirt". Every one of her stories in both volumes absolutely nails the place, in the same way that Tom Wolfe's wonderful quasi-non-fiction short stories capture what New York must have been like in the early 60's. Though for my money "The Mud Below", about tough-as-nails rodeo riders, is the cream of her crop so far, perhaps even equalling in its toughness Tom Wolfe's "The Truest Sport - Jousting with Sam and Charlie" -- the best story about war this side of "All Quiet on the Western Front" I've ever had the pleasure to read.
I look forward to checking out the other recommendations.
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Pickett's Unvarnished Portrait of the West
Often overlooked is Wyoming native Billy Q. Pickett. He recently published "The Jolly Rancher," another short story of cowboy life, in Electric Storytime (http://electricstorytime.blogspot.com).
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Outsiders looking in
I had the great good fortune to live in Wyoming for seven years. It wasn't long enough, and I still miss it. Yet, in seven years of living and working among people who had been shaped by Wyoming all their lives and all their parents' lives, I always knew I was an outsider. I didn't mind that feeling because I knew it was true. My interior landscape was formed by the rolling hills, forests, and dairy farms of West Central and Northern Wisconsin, not the wide open skies and hardscrabble sagebrush desert I found in southwestern Wyoming.
As I tried to get to know Wyoming, I read Gretel Ehrlich and Annie Proulx. Then I talked to the real Wyoming folks about those women and their writing. Most of them felt condescended to in the work of Ehrlich and Proulx, as though some anthropologist had come in, scratched the surface a little, and pretended to know something about them. I, too, heard the condescension in the writing about Wyoming from people who hadn't lived in the West long enough to allow its landscape to enter their blood, the dust to blow into their pores. Western writing, the best of it, is formed by the land because the land forms the writers.
Am I saying that no one has a right to write about a place that they've only just discovered? Not at all. But just as sitting on a porch and hearing stories for a couple of nights doesn't make one a "Southern writer," neither does going to a rodeo, riding a horse, visiting an oil field, or realizing that you can see four or five whole weather systems in one huge canopy of sky make you a "Westen writer."
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Wyoming
I've lived about 12 of my nearly sixty years in Wyoming, in the northwest corner. We raised our kids there, and it shows. They know what freedom looks like, and have had a hint of the sacrifices that go along with it. Some Wyomingisms: "there are three seasons: July, August, and winter". "if the population's higher than the altitude on the city limits sign, move on". "It may not be heaven, but you can see it from here". "What America was, Wyoming still is". Not far off. We've been back in "civilization" almost eleven years, and we still miss it, an always will. It's home. Until I saw Jackson Hole on an August afternoon in 1964, I didn't know you can love land the same way you love people. You can, and I do.
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I Hate/Love Wyoming
I agree with Jeanne. One must love the land, the sky, the water, and the life of Wyoming to truly love the place. Hating Wyoming is easy -- the easy way. But the easy way is not the Wyoming way. Wyoming is all about taking the hard way where the risks are greater, but the rewards are greater still. Ask outdoor adventurist/writer Mark Jenkins, resident of Laramie, and author of the book actually titled The Hard Way. Ask Caroline Marwitz, who also grew up in Laramie and wrote Naming the Winds: A High Plains Apprenticeship, a prose/poem published by Wyoming's High Plains Press, which describes her love/hate relationship with the land and the weather that created it. Ask me. I grew up in Wyoming and recently returned to complete the six-day Tour de Wyoming bike tour this past week, which took 340 Wyoming lovers through some of the most beautiful, most bleak, most chiseled, and most blighted landscrapes the state -- and country -- has to offer. We were blessed with minimal winds but scorching heat, though we were prepared for both.
Yes, Wyoming is about taking The Hard Way.
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Like everything, there's the positive and the negative
Great reviews and great article. Outside of Wyoming-focused media (i.e. Wyoming Wildlife Magazine, published by the State Game and Fish Department), this is the first thing I've read that didn't just slam Wyoming as a bass-ackwards state filled with poor white trash and alcoholic Native Americans. Wyoming does have it's warts, which were duly discussed, but I was pleased to read a positive discussion on Wyoming, its residents and its environment.
I've never lived in Wyoming. I have visited there often, though. My father's family was and is scattered throughout the state in Hanna, Laramie, Rawlins, Wheatland, Casper and Cheyenne. And as my sister decided to follow in both of our parents' footsteps and attend UW in Laramie, she met her husband and I can now add (extended) family ties to Lander and other areas surrounding the Wind River reservation (it is amazingly beautiful country, btw). I've always loved Wyoming, but it does have its problems. As the article discussed, the boom and bust economic cycles have not aided the stability of the area, and the murder of Matthew Sheppard back in the late 90s uncovered a part of society that most would like to sweep under the rug. Isolation and a lack of growth economically obviously contributed to a lack of social growth.
But Wyoming-ites are a hardy group. They have to be to survive the elements. When my father graduated from the university, it snowed. Cold day in hell and all that, but the powers that be have put forth a huge effort to overcome many of the stereotypes that have come to the surface, particularly with Matthew Sheppard. UW has one of the more intense diversity programs in the United States, and I didn't hear much uproar over Brokeback Mountain, purportedly set in and around Riverton, outside the Wind River reservation (filmed in Canada, natch). That's not to say there wasn't any, but I heard more about opposition to Brokeback in the Bible Belt areas than I did in Wyoming. It's not perfect, but by and large the people are good, solid citizens and the scenery and landscape are second to none gorgeous. Hiking along the Popo Agie river outside of Lander. Fly fishing in the Snowy Range mountains south of Laramie. These are the types of environments that set the tone for the authors you discussed, and Alexandra Fuller did a great job in bringing the unvarnished experience out for all to see.