Hypertext Magazine asked Tara Lynn Masih, author of The Bitter Kind, “Setting plays a large role in The Bitter Kind. Have you been to all the places your character Brandy travels through and lives in?”
By Tara Lynn Masih
Brandy is part Chippewa, his mother a Landless Indian from the Little Shell tribe. While I have not been to the actual Judith Basin his people settled in, I have been to that general area of Montana. The Chippewa were a mix of French Catholic colonizers and New England and Canadian Native Americans who weren’t recognized by our government as an official tribe. It’s a century-long battle for recognition through legal fights that ended in December 2020, when they were finally granted federal recognition. This brings them land rights and much-needed federal assistance. I’m so glad the book is releasing with this recent news, as they were still in court when I was doing research!
You can’t escape the mountains in this part of Montana; they always tower in the distance, and it creates a dual existence, two ways of living, side by side. You can’t escape frontier myths and ghosts.
The Bitter Kind is also a historical novelette. John Quigley’s manmade Frontier Town that Brandy first works in was very real, just west of Helena, and proudly displayed one of the longest one-piece bars (56 feet) with an animated diorama behind it. The tourist site closed in 2001 and is now a private residence. It housed so many fantastical western stories, and it was a delight to bring some of them to life, even in brief.
And during the early 1990s, I did visit the ghost town that Brandy settles into. While I fictionalized some facts, many of the descriptions are taken from this road side attraction resting near train tracks and a river. And we were the only visitors there. So I got to walk around and get the feel of the place, just as Brandy does in his isolation. And wondering what it would be like to be a caretaker and live in such a place was the inspiration for Brandy’s story. That setting remains one of my favorites, and I’ll never forget the heat, the dust, the hodgepodge town made up of repurposed frontier cabins and houses, frozen in time. Americana at its best.
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The Bitter Kind will be releasing October 2nd with Cervena Barva Press. In turns tender and brutal, this gorgeous novelette in flash is collaboratively written by acclaimed flash fiction writers James Claffey and Tara Lynn Masih. It’s a slim one, coming in at just under 70 pages.
