An Interview with Montana writer, Thomas McGuane. "Gallatin Canyon"

Montana writer Tom McGuane lives on a 3,000-acre ranch in the Boulder River Valley, not far from the old post office at McLeod. On the drive south along the river, the vast wall of the 10,000 foot Beartooth Plateau dominates the eye, until you’ve become accustomed to it, and can relax in the intense green of the foothills, thickets of aspen glowing, amid stands of darker lodgepole. Snowmelt fed creeks, buried in low growing willows, are everywhere on the hills like an anatomist’s diagram of the vascular system of the earth.

If it seems like a long way from the smoky bars of Livingston and postcard scenes of the Yellowstone where the legendary wildness of McGuane and his friends played out in the 70’s and early 80’s, stamping an entire generation’s perceptions of the place and the state, that’s because it is.

By Hal Herring in New West "The Voice of the Rocky Mountain West"

Full Interview: http://www.newwest.net/index.php/city/article/9790/C8/L8

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Thomas McGuane’s Newest Collection, "Gallatin Canyon"

By and large, there are three sorts of writers: The misfortunates who have sacrificed everything for their art (the Lowrys of the world, the Sextons); the mean average (with their bitter stories about publicists); and the fortunate few for whom, when a deck of cards is tossed high, all the aces flop face up (Foer, Franzen).

But maybe there’s a fourth category as well. I’m thinking now about those famous writers who have nevertheless not done as well as they perhaps deserve. Rilke never won a Nobel, for instance. Up here in Montana, you read Thomas McGuane and you can’t help but feel a dose of indignation on the author’s behalf. As successful as he is, it still feels like there should be more. Where are the major awards, for instance? His is a career that’s been built on essays (An Outside Chance, Some Horses), a few screenplays (Rancho Deluxe, The Missouri Breaks, Tom Horn), and a portfolio of fictions that, taken together (Panama, Nobody’s Angel, Nothing but Blue Sky), float him up into the most rarefied kind of literary air. Surely he’s due another ace or two. There are so few American writers who can make you laugh even as they’re breaking your heart.

Maybe it’s time. His newest book, a collection of ten short stories called Gallatin Canyon, contains moments nearly as fine as anything he has written, and if there are soft spots, they serve only to emphasize the soundness of the larger whole.

By Allen M. Jones, http://www.newwest.net/