It would seem that education transformed your life, since you were the first member of your family to go to college. Do you think education continues to be valuable to young people and why?

Over and over I heard it from my father and his ranch hands: "Kid, get yourself an education." I would think that ought to be on the state seal these days, instead of Oro y Plata. Learning how to think and function in a world changing so rapidly and inexorably seems to me absolutely essential to today's youngsters; you can't light out for the territory or hunker in on the homestead and be a citizen of your time any more.

Do you have any thoughts about how Montana universities can best prepare the state and its people for its future?

Education is an investment. In my case, a college scholarship took me from being a $150-a-month ranch hand to a guy, as you said, who has put a million books into the commerce of the era, a lot of those through Montana bookstores. I'm not savvy enough about the future to know specifically what Montana's universities ought to be focusing on, except to say those institutions absolutely must keep being the tickets for the state's young people to get on in life. If it proves to be the ticket out of Montana for some of them, as it was for me, in the long run that is justifiable, I think. One way or another, those of us in what I call "the Montana Diaspora" (usually for job reasons) stay linked to Montana.

While most of your readers know of your connections to both White Sulphur Springs and Dupuyer, you also have a connection to Gallatin County, don't you?

Heart-deep, literally. I've told in Heart Earth, possibly my secret favorite among all my books, the story of my mother's last months of life, when she and my father and I were herding sheep at the north end of the Bridger Mountains in the summer of 1945. "The Gallatin" was something like a valley of milk and honey to us, compared with the tough sagebrush country around Sixteen and Ringling. I cannot describe what a cloud of pleasure it was in 1984 to come back to the Gallatin Valley and, no doubt by the fine hand of Mike Malone, receive an honorary doctorate from MSU.

The view from your office window is that of Seattle and Puget Sound. Does your separation from the state make it easier or more difficult to write about the state? Do you anticipate a permanent return to Montana?

The accidental goddess of writers like me is Greta Garbo, with that magnificently accented self-excusal from the public world, "I want to be alone." Actually, have to be alone, to get the writing done, is more like it. So in that sense, not being physically in Montana-or for that matter Chicago, which is also part of my past-does help with the books; the quiet of this same Puget Sound suburb has produced all dozen of them, from This House of Sky to The Eleventh Man, so I have to think it works. As to the permanent return to Montana, I can't resist making the answer James Joyce did when he was asked in Paris, after Ulysses, if he would ever be moving back to Dublin: "Have I ever left?"

Do you believe stories about Montana and the region will continue to appeal to an increasingly global readership and why?

My novel The Whistling Season, set in a one-room school in the Marias River homestead country in 1910, is just about to be published in Japanese, so from where I sit there is a readership out there in the greater globe interested in Montana matters. Again, I think it goes back to that quote of Stegner's; if the quality of the work is good enough, any place of the heart that you write about-the brilliant contemporary African and Australian novelists prove this-will find readers.

Photo by Stephen Hunts

Return to regular view	Text-only              Email this article	Published: 4/27/2009