Hypertext Magazine asked Christy Stillwell, author of The Wolf Tone, “Was it hard to write a book set in Montana without any of the typical ‘western’ themes?”
Like the southern writer who wants to tell a story that doesn’t involve a town gimp, incest, or kudzu, the western writer has to juggle the baggage that comes with the territory: conquest, western expansion, gun fights, floozies, and, more recently, fly fishing.
My Montana novel features an injured cellist who discovers she’s a grandmother. Like other states, Montana has college towns, symphony orchestras, children’s museums and gymnastics teams. As of the 2011 census, most people west of the Rockies live in cities. If the rough-edged, non-conformist cowboy exists here, he no longer dominates the population. Ditto the floozy.
My novel was set in Missoula, Montana. Missoula, like most of my state, contends with its own myth. Norman McLean’s Missoula, made famous by the movie A River Runs Through It, is a frontier outpost. More recently the nation was given Jon Krakauer’s Missoula, a university town fraught with sexual scandal. Neither of these were the town I was seeing in my fiction. The more I wrote, the more self-conscious I became. Every locale within the city became overly large, to the point of pretend. Suddenly I was writing caricature, like the set of a western film. Missoula simply wasn’t big enough to overcome its own name.
So I made up a town. Deaton, Montana, is a lot like Missoula, but without the myth. Because I live in Bozeman, Missoula’s rival city, Deaton quickly became a blend of the two. Both cities have burgeoning medical marijuana industries, part of the plot in my novel. Both have colleges and both have symphony orchestras, which will come as a surprise to people who only know Montana through legend and tall tales.
As I wrote, Deaton became more and more real. It held Bozeman’s affluent visitor population, mixed with Missoula’s grittier, river’s edge feeling of transience. A minor character in the novel loves to fly fish, but the story has nothing to do with cattle ranching, horses, or floozies. Montana, it turns out, is big enough to hold all kinds of stories in all kinds of towns, even if they’re fiction.
Christy Stillwell is the author of THE WOLF TONE (January 8, 2019; Elixir Press) and the poetry chapbook AMNESIA (2008; Finishing Line Press). She is the winner of the Elixir Press Fiction Prize, a finalist in the Glimmer Train Short Story Contest and the recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination, a residency at Vermont Studio Center and a Wyoming Arts Council Literary Fellowship. She lives with her family in Bozeman, MT. You can visit her at christystillwell.com.
