Photo by Thomas Lee

You write on a computer but are a reluctant e-mail user. Do you have thoughts about how electronic communications are changing literature and readers? Does the book have a future?

This very day my literary agent called me about a new deal with an audio company, which will record nearly all my books unabridged-not so much for audio cassettes or CDs but for digital downloads. This is an indicator of the kind of change that is going on, as more and more literature goes online one way or another. I do think that for as long as any of us are around, there will be books to some extent; reading books has always been an elite pursuit, in a sense, and it seems reasonable that there will continue to be an audience of intellect that will want to hold a 21st century book just as the earliest booklovers wanted to cradle that Gutenberg Bible.

Do you have any thoughts on the state of American literacy?

I think it's difficult to measure the literacy of this society right now, when everyone but me seems to be up to their ears in e-mail, until we have more perspective on what the online capacities do to people. I do believe that the demise of newspapers is really bad news for us all; bloggers are not a substitute for the kind of painstaking and expensive investigations the best newspapers undertake.

You return frequently to Montana. What are the thoughts about the state today as opposed to the Montana you left many decades ago?

The great change that I've seen in Montana came a couple of generations ago now, as could be seen when I returned to the state in the late 1970s to gather the last of the research for This House of Sky. Carol (his wife) and I spent most of a summer going around to the places where I had lived and it was a different, less hidebound Montana than I had grown up in. An environmental movement had been born, the rattletrap state government that always seemed to be looking over its shoulder for the ghost of the Anaconda Company had been modernized with the new state constitution, progressive politicians were in the main statewide offices. Then, as we formed new friendships in Bozeman and Helena and Missoula as my books came out, there was a feeling of new blood. One example: Carol and I are deeply interested in the fate of the Rocky Mountain Front, the old, loved landscape of my teenage years that has come into my novels as the Two Medicine country, and we have been supporters of the Nature Conservancy's efforts along the Front. When I was a kid, around Dupuyer and Choteau, most of the hardbitten old ranchers there at the foot of the Rockies would have cussed at any notion of cooperating with an "outside" outfit like the Conservancy. The younger ranchers today have smartened up from that old blindered attitude and seen that their existence is tied to conservation of the Front as an unbroken ecological area.

You've now established yourself as a fiction writer, even though This House of Sky is masterful non-fiction. Do you have plans to write another non-fiction book?

A writer should never say never, so there is always the chance that I'll look up from my fingers one day and discover they're turning out non-fiction. For now, though, I'm busy delivering Morrie Morgan, the almost flabbergastingly popular schoolteacher from my novel The Whistling Season, into Butte in the tumultuous aftermath of World War I. That will keep me occupied the rest of this year. There's another novel set in the Two Medicine country, in my own growing-up time there in, as the old-timers used to say, "the middle of the last century," brewing after that.

Do you believe the themes that shaped Montana in the 19th and 20th century-those of the rugged individualist and the wilderness of the landscape and the soul-still will shape it in the 21st? If not, what do you think will form Montana's near future?

My Ph.D. is in history, so I'm only licensed to drive in the past. I would hope, though, that Montana never ceases to be a little rugged and ornery, a bit wild and soulful-a place with roaming room for the imagination.

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