Altitude abbreviates the summers here, and makes the flora more spare than lush, but does not altogether preclude flourishing: a few days ago I took this snapshot of a stand of hollyhocks that seeded itself next to my house. “Here” is not so far from where two lines would intersect if you drew one due south from Saskatoon and one straight west from Toronto, but for Laramie a more similar sibling Canadian city would be Banff. If Banff sits at 1,400 meters and looks at Mt. Rundle, Laramie, also on the eastern side of the Rockies, sits at 2,200 meters and looks toward the Snowy Range.
Laramie is not a literary capital after the manner of New York (the center of corporate publishing in the U.S.) or Chicago (home of the Poetry Foundation) or Minneapolis (a hub of independent not-for-profit publishing). It is a small university town (of approximately 30,000 people) in a sparsely-populated state. Many of Laramie’s most visible writers have been associated with the university: John Edgar Wideman once lived and taught here, and more recently Paisley Rekdal did. Wyoming’s state economy, which depends almost exclusively on mineral extraction, especially coal and natural gas, is in a shambles, so the state university, too, is in a shambles, divesting itself of everything except business and engineering, so its students will be prepared for the 1950s. (For a probing analysis of the cultural consequences of a narrow economy in an inbred state, see Laramie author Jeffrey Lockwood’s Behind the Carbon Curtain. Wyoming’s fossil-fuel-industries-driven self-destruction would be a good cautionary from anyone supporting canary conservation in Alberta.)
No one reading this blog, though, needs me to tell them that luminous writing does not occur only in literary capitals or depend exclusively on the health of universities, so no one reading this post will be surprised that lights are shining in literary Laramie. To give just three examples:
Nonfiction writer Ann McCutchan recently published The Life She Wished to Live, a biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the gender-convention-defying author of The Yearling, a novel that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938. McCutchan has a rich musical background (some of her previous books, such as Circular Breathing: Meditations from a Musical Life, are about music), so it is not surprising that she introduces Rawlings by relation to music. “When Marjorie Kinnan was nine years old, her mother, convinced she’d birthed a nightingale, took the child to a voice teacher near their home in Washington, D.C., for an audition.” When the voice teacher “dismissed Marjorie’s musical potential, Ida [Marjorie’s mother] switched gears and began watching for signs of other talents in her girl.” All it took was Marjorie’s winning two dollars in a writing contest in the Washington Post to enable Ida to celebrate that her “daughter had an ear for language and, after all, signs of a voice — on the page.” Ida did not have musical talents to match those that McCutchan herself nurtured, but McCutchan shares with Ida a rich voice on the page.
In her slender but (as one might guess from the title) intense poetry collection, Cuntstruck, Kate Northrop sings with an equally rich but very different voice on the page. Northrop’s poems pay close attention to the world outside: “The semis rising from the east” and “dropping into the valley” drop “Easily as coins through a broken soda machine.” But they attend, also, very carefully to interiors: “the dishes settle under the dishwater, / Clunking like dull mollusks.” Her poems address the real more fully by imagining it more clearly, as when, speaking to an ice sculpture of a giraffe made “Out of chicken wire and weather,” she says “if you could gallop savannah, / you would sound like holidays / in our rickety, old apartments.” I saw that giraffe, and nothing could be more true of it than Northrop’s words. Like her previous poetry books, most recently Clean, Northrop’s Cuntstruck is driven by “A force as fierce as roses / climbing over a gate.”
In Laramie, there’s no genre left behind, and Alyson Hagy’s novel Scribe offers a voice on the page to match in fiction McCutchan’s voice in nonfiction and Northrop’s in poetry. Hagy lives now in the Rockies, but it is the culture and stories of an older mountain range, the Appalachians, on which she draws in portraying the mythical world of Scribe. The events in Scribe take place in a time equal parts past and future, a post-civil-war rural dystopia in which the unnamed protagonist survives by trading her ability to read and write for goods lower in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, such as firewood and tobacco. The treacherous journey she undertakes generates plenty of tension and conflict for lovers of plot, but also plenty of sentences to satisfy those of us who are suckers for sonority, as when the protagonist has gone to her antagonist, Billy Kingery, for safe passage through his territory, and the atmosphere of Kingery’s place, no less than its appearance, wants compact description. “She’d become fairly certain there were no bargain men in the store. Yet she felt surrounded. The shelves that laddered all four walls loomed over her, some full, some empty. Several of the large, misshapen bundles on those shelves appeared, from the corners of her eyes, to be moving. She also smelled the predatory tang of feral cats — the smaller kind.”
I’m enjoying the “periodicities,” and I’m glad to be able to add notice of these three voices to the news these letters are circulating.
