My Fave Western Books - Meg Mims

Okay, I admit it. I haven't read enough of the western genre to really have a good opinion, so I'm hereby declaring that I am totally inept and biased. But hey, it is what it is. FEEL FREE to add your own "favorite western" books, give a reason why, and we'll all be happy. Or write your own blog post. This one's mine.

CLASSIC WESTERN: 

For me, this is a toss-up between Owen Wister's The Virginian and Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage. Which I'm reading right now. Have I read other western classics? No. Not yet. Give me a list of books and I'll add them to my (stacks and stacks) of TBR pile(s). How can I say they're my favorites when I haven't read more Louis L'Amour (I read one, sorry - not my favorite), and how could I not have read Hondo, Shane and other classics? So hang me. And I really think Wister's style was wonderfully fresh and pure. Sort of a romance set in the old west. Heh.

SHOOT-EM UP WESTERN:
Hoo boy. This one's tough. Again, because I haven't read a lot of shoot-em up westerns, but I will definitely throw these in my favorites ring: Johnny Boggs's West Texas Kill and Courtney Joyner's Shotgun. Go ahead and add to the list, because the more, the merrier. Just like at the O.K. Corral. Dodge those bullets.

CHILDREN'S WESTERN:
Who can fault Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series? Although her daughter Rose Wilder Lane helped write/edit them (read Susan Wittig Alber's A Wilder Rose if you're curious), Laura's childhood memories still resonate through the ages and give us a glimpse of how pioneer life was like. Through rose-colored glasses, I suppose, since she kept out some tougher times. My favorites of the series are On the Banks of Plum Creek and By the Shores of Silver Lake, but for grim reality, don't miss out on The Long Winter. For incredibly rich detail, read Farmer Boy. But I'm adding Gary Paulsen's Tucket series, because boys will LOVE the action in them, and Paulsen's tight writing. Definitely favorites.

ROMANTIC WESTERN:
Hmm. Some people would say Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. I have to admit some favorites are far more romance than western: LaVyrle Spencer's Morning Glory and Hummingbird. I'd also throw in Pamela Morsi's Wild Oats and Courting Miss Hattie, plus Maggie Osborne's The Wives of Bowie Stone. But for more recent western romance, just go to Prairie Rose Publications -- my fave is A Cowboy's Brand (sorry, my own book is in the boxed set, but the others are fabulous too!), but I also love Kathleen Rice Adams's Peaches and Livia Washburn's Charlie's Pie.

TRUE-TO-LIFE DIALOGUE IN A WESTERN:

Hands down, it's Charles Portis for True Grit. No competition.

REVENGE WESTERN TALE:
Again, Portis's True Grit. This book (and the John Wayne movie, of course) totally influenced me in writing Double Crossing (my version of True Grit on the transcontinental train). The Coen Brothers version emphasized how right I was in being influenced - what a fabulous book! And I'm not saying my book or writing style is anywhere near Portis, because it ain't. True Grit is simply a masterpiece. Which is why I made a "dialogue" category.

NONFICTION WESTERN:
I have to name Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown, as my top contender. I cried while reading its stunning honesty. It's heart-wrenching. And while I've read lots of non-fiction research books, I guess the only one I enjoyed for its fun stories is Andy Adams's The Log of a Cowboy: A Narrative of the Old Trail Days. But I'll add in Ramon Adams's Western Words as a great resource.

WESTERN COWBOY TALE:
I loved Panhandle, by Brett Cogburn, and I also enjoyed The Traditional West anthology with Rod Miller's "The Death of Delgado" and Troy Smith's "The Sin of Eli". Both are fabulous in a fabulous anthology. If you're a fan of the Wolf Creek books like I am, my favorite is Night of the Assassins.

WESTERN MYSTERY:
I will vote for Ann Hillerman's Spider Woman's Daughter, because she stepped into her father's shoes and made them fit her own feet - and she's making fresh prints in the mystery genre. I'll also add John Fortunato's Dark Reservations, which won the Hillerman Prize. My daughter looooves the Steve Hockensmith series Holmes on the Range, which are also on my TBR pile. I'll take her word for it, since I trained her in reading mysteries. Heh.

So there you have it. And I've got more western books that could be added, once I finish (if ever!) my TBR pile. It keeps growing, despite the whip and chair. READ!! It *is* March, after all, SO SPRING into READING! And yes, I stole that from school days. But it fits!

Award-winning author Meg Mims writes historical and contemporary novels and novellas, plus short stories for anthologies. Double Crossing won the Best First Novel Spur Award. She is also one-half of the writing team of D.E. Ireland for the Eliza Doolittle & Henry Higgins Mystery series. Book 1, Wouldn't It Be Deadly, was nominated for a 2015 Agatha Award and Book 2, Move Your Blooming Corpse, is set at Ascot Racecourse. Meg is working on a cozy mystery series for Kensington that will debut in 2017 under the pseudonym Meg Macy. She lives in Southeastern Michigan, loves tea, books, Mackinac Island, cookies, and currently has a sweet Malti-Poo rescue.

FRIDAY FIVE WITH ROD MILLER

An interesting fact about my genealogy.
My great-great-grandfather on my mother’s side, Benjamin Franklin Stewart, had three wives (at the same time). He was in the first group of Mormon pioneers who came to Utah with Brigham Young in 1847, but stayed behind to run a ferry across the Platte River where Casper, Wyoming, is today, so he did not arrive at the shores of the Great Salt Lake until September.

The favorite car I ever owned.
Unlike most American males, I was born without an automobile gene. I don’t care a whit about cars as long as they run. So, on that basis, I guess our current conveyance, a 2003 Toyota Camry, is my favorite. We bought it used from Enterprise Rent-a-Car and it’s just about to turn over 200,000 miles and hasn’t given us ten minutes of trouble in all that time. Not too exciting, I know.

My favorite food.
Potatoes. No matter how you cook them, they’re tasty—fried, baked, roasted, boiled, mashed, hash browns, home fries, french fries, scalloped, au gratin, chips…. You can’t hardly screw up a potato. Besides, they’re cheap. And good for you.

My favorite song.
I like lots of music. But one of the best songs ever is “Faded Love” by Bob Wills. His recordings of it are great. Unfortunately, the two most famous versions—by Patsy Cline and Ray Price—are too slow, turning it into a dirge. The best of all is a duet by Lyle Lovett and Shawn Colvin on an Asleep at the Wheel album. It swings like Western Swing is supposed to.

The words are beautifully written: “I miss you, darling, more and more everyday /
As Heaven would miss the stars above” with its subtle simile makes the faded love affair sound otherworldly. “As I think of the past and all the pleasures we had / As I watch the mating of the doves” is euphemistically magnificent. And, “It was in the spring time that you said goodbye” is just so sad—more heart wrenching, somehow, that getting dumped in November.

Something you may not know about me.
I won the trophy for Fitting & Showmanship of pigs at the Utah State Junior Livestock Show in 1970. (And I may have had a hangover at the time.)


To learn more about Rod Miller and his writing, visit www.writerRodMiller.com or his Amazon page, www.amazon.com/author/rodmiller

FAVORITE WESTERN SHORT STORY by ROD MILLER

“It seemed to the young Englishman that if anyone had been watching from the bench he would have seen them like a print of Life on the Western Plains….”

So begins my favorite Western short story, “Genesis” by Wallace Stegner. Those are the thoughts of the tale’s central character, Lionel “Rusty” Cullen, a 19-year-old Englishman who migrated to the cattle country of Saskatchewan in search of adventure. His musing reveals that by 1906, when the story is set, dime novels and the art of Charles M. Russell, Edward Borein, Frederic Remington, and others had already romanticized the Old West and made the cowboy a mythical figure. For Rusty, and the reader, this story corrects those notions.

“Genesis” is a long story, 82 pages tucked into the middle of the memoir of the author’s childhood days in Eastend, Saskatchewan, Wolf Willow. Stegner, born in 1909, said he “lived in twenty places in eight states and Canada,” spending his developmental years in Eastend, Great Falls, Montana (where he mowed Charles M. Russell’s lawn), and Salt Lake City, Utah. He ran the creative writing program at Stanford for many years, teaching several noted Western writers including Edward Abbey, Thomas McGuane, Ken Kesey, and Larry McMurtry. His novel Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972, The Spectator Bird won the National Book Award in 1977, and he claimed three O. Henry Awards for short fiction. Stegner died in 1993.

But, back to “Genesis.” It didn’t take Rusty long to realize his romantic notions of cowboy life were misguided.

“Already, within a day, Rusty felt how circumstances had hardened, how what had been an adventure revealed itself as a job.”

Rusty also realizes he is but a pilgrim, least among the nine men who ride out on a late fall roundup to bring in calves for winter feeding. Still, he is determined, eager, even, to give it his best, to prove himself a man among men.

“He had the feeling that there would be a test of some sort, that he would enter manhood—or cowboyhood, manhood in Saskatchewan terms—as one would enter a house. For the moment he was a tenderfoot, a greenhorn, on probation, under scrutiny.”

The nine cowboys on the fall roundup comprise the cast of “Genesis,” but like many Western tales, the land is also a character.Stegner shows it in passages like this:

“When he chopped through the river’s inch of ice and watched the water well up and overflow the hole it seemed like some dark force from the ancient heart of the earth that could at any time rise around them silently and obliterate their little human noises and tracks and restore the plain to its emptiness again.”

And, later, this:

“They got what they deserved for daring Authority; the country has warned them three separate times. Now the punishment.”

Weather, too, is a character in the story and the source of the punishment. The roundup is interrupted repeatedly by a series of snowstorms, early blizzards that scatter the cattle time and again and challenge the cowboys.

“The darkness was full of snow pebbles hard and stinging as shot, whether falling or only drifting they couldn’t tell, that beat their eyes shut and melted in their beards and froze again.”

Eventually, the storms become so violent and the cold so brutal the men are forced to abandon the herd, even the remuda, to race across the plains at a snail’s pace, trying to outrun death itself.

“He does not need to be told that what moves them now is not caution, not good judgment, not anything over which they have any control, but desperation.”

Romantic notions, if any still exist at this point, are further disabused by the awareness that these men, and others like them throughout the West’s cattle country, put their lives at peril…

“For owners off in Aberdeen or Toronto or Calgary or Butte who would never come out themselves and risk what they demanded of any cowboy for twenty dollars a month and found.”

As much as I like “Genesis” for what it includes—a realistic look at cowboy life and work, albeit in extreme circumstances—I like it for what it does not include. In all of its 82 pages, there’s not a single gunfight. No Hollywood walk-down quick-draw contest, no snarling packs of bad guys shooting up the streets and back alleys and saloons of a wooden town. There’s no damsel in distress—unless you count mother cows and heifer calves. No splendid super steeds racing at top speed across page after page with nary a stop for a blow, a sip of water, a mouthful of grass. And there are no six-foot-tall bulletproof heroes with broad shoulders, narrow hips, and a steely gaze.

That’s not to say there’s no courage, bravery, or heroics in “Genesis.” But it’s realistic valor, not the over-the-top imaginary superhero stuff so common in Western stories. Near the end of the tale, Stegner says this about Rusty:

“It was probably a step in the making of a cowhand when he learned that what would pass for heroics in a softer world was only chores around here.”

AUDIO BOOK LINK FOR GENESIS FROM BARNES & NOBLE:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Genesis-by-Wallace-Stegner?store=allproducts&keyword=Genesis+by+Wallace+Stegner

Of Rodeos, Trochees, and Western Novels

By Rod Miller

 Most writers of my acquaintance have been at it for a long time. They claim they wrote their first story at age nine or thereabouts and haven’t stopped writing since. Many say they “must” write, and suffer some sort of withdrawal when not tapping away at the keyboard.

Not me.

I spent the first 45 years of my life with no notion of writing a poem or a story or anything else we usually call creative writing. Other than the routine stuff in required English classes, I’ve never had any education or formal training in creative writing.

That said, I suppose I have been blessed with the ability to string words together. But it has always been with a purpose in mind—essay questions on tests, writing for school newspapers, and the like. And, since graduating from college with a degree in Journalism back in the mid-70s, the purpose has been business—writing advertising copy of all kinds. Other than a few essays for advertising trade magazines and such, that was pretty much it. 

Then, one day in the mid-90s (the decade, not my age—I’m not that old, yet) I wondered if I could write a poem. A cowboy poem to be specific. 

You see, I grew up in a cowboy family in a small town and spent a good part of my youth horseback, and a lot of time feeding, branding, and otherwise tending cattle. Cowboy stuff—real cowboy stuff, not that nonsense on TV and in movies—was a big part of life where I grew up. Like a lot of kids then and there, the rodeo bug bit me, and throughout high school and college and for a time afterward I spent most every spring and summer weekend straddling the bucking chutes at rodeo arenas around the West, climbing onto the backs of horses called broncs whose only function in life is to eat hay and buck off cowboys like me with the temerity to think they can’t.

  Well, they can.

 There may still be depressions the size and shape of my head in several rodeo arenas that attest to that fact. I tell you this only because the addled brain that resulted is responsible, more than anything else I can remember, for my (eventual) taking up of the pen to write for fun, rather than work.

As a lifelong member of the cowboy culture and longtime fan of cowboy poetry, it’s only natural, I suppose, that when I wondered if I could write a poem, that would be the kind of poetry I would attempt. And, given my appreciation for rodeo, it’s no surprise that a lot of the poems I wrote (and still write, on occasion) use rodeo life as their subject.

Not knowing any better, I assumed the reason one wrote poems was to get them published. There were, at the time, a couple of national and a few regional magazines edited for Western enthusiasts that published poetry either regularly or occasionally, so I started sending them poems. And, much to my surprise, they started publishing them. Other poems made their way into anthologies.

Which only spurred me on. I managed to get enough poems published to qualify for membership in Western Writers of America, where I met lots of real writers who knew what they were doing and were kind enough to offer advice and encouragement.

That, along with the same curiosity that led to me to write a poem (and the addled former-bronc-rider brain that allows such ill-considered notions to pass through unfiltered), made me wonder if I could write a short story. So I did, and several of my stories have been published in Western anthologies. I tried a novel and that was published. Then another, and that was published. A couple of nonfiction books got written and published. A collection and a chapbook of poetry. A bunch of magazine articles. Some book reviews. A series of essays on writing poetry for CowboyPoetry.com (in which I pretend to know how to write poetry). And so on. 

All in all, writing has been a pretty smooth ride, compared, at least, to riding broncs. I’ve been lucky. Most everything I’ve written has been published, by everybody from well-known New York imprints to unheard of art-house presses.

One of my short stories was even a Finalist for a Western Writers of America Spur Award back in 2006. A recent short story, “The Death of Delgado,” from the anthology The Traditional West, won a 2012 Spur Award for Best Western Short Fiction and was a Finalist for a Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award (as was my novel, The Assassination of Governor Boggs). A 2012 Spur Award for Best Western Poem for a piece from my collection Things a Cowboy Sees and Other Poems also came my way, and the book won the Fred Olds Poetry Award from Westerners International.

Who knows what the future holds? I write for fun (and occasionally for profit), but do not feel compelled to do so and, thank goodness, don’t rely on the income to pay my bills (advertising still does that). So, I write whatever seems interesting and enjoyable at the time, then figure out who might want to apply ink to it. At the moment, I’m awaiting publication of a third novel (Cold as the Clay) that’s due out anytime now From High Hill Press/Cactus Country Books, and there’s a fourth  novel in the hands of a publisher awaiting rejection. A nonfiction pictorial about westward migration and settlement, Go West: The Risk & The Reward, is slated for October release.

And there are a few poems and stories, a novel, and a nonfiction book either in progress or awaiting attention. I’ll get to them, as soon as I find the time and the inclination.

Finally, while I came to writing late and took an unusual road, I like it here. It’s a whole lot easier than getting bucked off ornery broncs. And at least as much fun.

 Rod Miller is among the original members of Western Fictioneers. He is Membership chair and serves on the Executive Board of Western Writers of America. Visit www.writerRodMiller.com for more information.