Several months back, when I accepted an invitation to appear at the inaugural Southern Utah Book Festival, I was excited. My sponsor, Kase Johnstun, has become a good friend these past couple of years, and a chance to do two of my favorite things—travel and talk about books and writing—was not to be missed.

But there was something else, something that had weighed heavily on my thoughts for most of my life. Being in the book festival's host city, Cedar City, would put me less than an hour from a little town called Milford, a place I'd been hoping for decades I might return to, a place that had proved elusive in that it's not really on the way to anywhere else. I've lived in the West most of my life, and save for the summer when I was nine years old, Milford had been vapor trail in my memories, a place I could close my eyes and picture, a place that sometimes slipped into my dreams, and a place that remained out of reach through the 45 years that stood between me and it and our one season together.

I pined for it sometimes, which is strange, because the memories it holds for me are not happy ones. Life that summer in 1979 seemed like the edge of the knife, or a bullet chambered in a gun. The adults in my immediate sphere—my dad and my stepmother and her son and a host of others—were angry and unreasonable, at each other like crazed dogs, wild and vituperative and ugly. And I was just a boy, one who cherished those summers with my dad, away from the suburban life I knew the rest of each year. I sensed the danger around us that summer but didn't know how to escape it.

​We'll get to all that. But first, I had to get to Milford.

Upon arriving in Milford around 8 a.m. on October 20, I spun through town, reorienting my memories—and, truly, it was like an unstoppable rush—and then I found the little gas station/convenience store I'd mined in my memories nearly 15 years ago as I wrote The Summer Son and the bit above. The building frequented by my then-stepbrother and the townie girlfriend he met in Milford was still there; I'm certain of that. But time has its way, even in a place as cast in amber as Milford seemed, and that old store had been upgraded and rebuilt, and perhaps given a sense of humor it had lacked 45 years ago when I had nuked a refrigerated burrito into hard carbon, to the ire of the proprietor.

On this day, I found a bored, talkative store clerk named Dayna who wanted to know who and what I remembered. I pitched her a few surnames, and she said, yep, we have some of those. She assured me I'd get no trouble from the locals while I walked around town, as long as I wasn't from California. I thanked her for her time and took off. I knew what I wanted to see.

​Knew what I was a little frightened to see, too.

We lived that summer—Dad, his wife, me—in a motel room that was clean and tidy but nothing special, exactly the kind of place Dad preferred when he was on a drilling job and whatever his housing cost was would come off his own bottom line.

Problem was, there wasn't enough oxygen in that little room, not with the way the two of them were fighting. It wasn't particularly physically violent—that's the imagination part taking hold of the memory for fictional purposes—but it was, in its way, almost worse, because it was ceaseless. They knew every button to push with each other, and they did so in a way that seemed to me, even then, to be addictively gleeful. 

I spent a lot of time that summer in the parkway strip across the street from the motel, where I stood again 45 years later as I took the picture above, capturing a motel that's neither clean nor tidy nor recommended, Dayna told me.

Dad and his wife's separation from each other—the first one, anyway—came not in Milford but back at their home in New Mexico, during a weeklong break from Dad's work. He spilled an ashtray and told me to clean it up. His wife told him to clean it up himself. A wildly grotesque fight ensued, with each screaming at the other that it was time for divorce, and all the while I thought it was my fault because I just didn't do what I was told fast enough. 

​That's in the book, too. Sometimes a memory is enough and you can just hold imagination in abeyance. You don't need it.

Things turned dark for Dad when we came back to Milford absent a wife and a functioning marriage. His yearning for drink, frequent back then in the best of times, became unquenchable. He began leading with violence in his encounters with fellow drillers, his stepson, acquaintances, hired hands. I've always said the biggest victory in his life is that he never rolled physical abuse downhill at me after suffering it in his own childhood. But I still took it in from the cheap seats.

The first time I saw him punch a man came in Milford, in an alleyway after an old drunken fool who'd been teasing me in the bar followed me outside when I chased after the bar owner's dog. The old man grabbed me by the wrist, and I screamed, and Dad came flying to where we were, uncuffed me from the man's grip, and deposited him on his ass. Justified, I'd say.

The second time, I didn't see the punch, only heard it. Again, we were back in New Mexico, that same summer, and a fellow rancher with whom Dad had been feuding came to the house to renew the beef. I was in the kitchen with the wife of one of Dad's friends when I heard the slap of an open hand against a soft cheek, then the pathetic sobs of the struck man. I don't know whether he had it coming or not, but I felt the shame that man felt, the emasculation. Dad chased him out of there, into the night, and told him not to come back unless he wanted to know what dead felt like. I'm certain he meant it. I went to sleep that night whispering a silent wish into the air that the guy would have the good sense to stay away.

Again and again that summer, I walked with my father as he plodded to the precipice of rage and violence. Sometimes, I could walk him back without incident. Sometimes, I watched in horror as he plunged in against a world he thought was mistreating him.

​And I never said a thing, to anybody. Whom could I tell? Who could stop it? Had I told my mother in one of our weekly phone calls, there would have never been another trip to be with my old man, and that I could not bear. Little boys love their daddies. So I shut up and took it.

As chaotic and crazed as that summer was, as unhinged from any kind of healthy living as Dad was, he was a worker without peer. I don't recall his missing a single day out in the field, digging exploratory wells. Rides out to work, early every morning, were contented and quiet, with my sleepy head bouncing between the shoulders of my dad and my adult stepbrother as I rode in the middle of the pickup's bench seat.

Forty-five years later, I reveled in seeing that route again, of driving past the ruins of the mining town of Frisco, of looking at and remembering the scrub brush and the rugged peaks, of recounting the particulars of the work at which Dad was so good. He started earlier than everyone else, and he stayed at it later, and that made him valuable to the companies that wrote the checks, until the money stopped flowing. Four years after that summer, in 1983, the drilling economy bottomed out, and by 1985 repossession had come for Dad's drilling rig, casting him into a crisis of work identity that he never managed to surmount.

In 1979, though, he was a deeply troubled man possessed of a work ethic that might have been the one thing that kept him from entirely spiraling away from me. He taught me to drive a stick shift that summer. He trusted me to do it, too, and pressed me into duty after firing a helper in a rage and having no one else to drive the pickup. He sometimes laughed at my jokes. He was usually nice about it when he told me to shut up. Usually.

I deeply admired him. I sometimes feared him. I daily feared for him. And it would be years yet before I felt as though I'd started to understand him, a process that stumbles along even as I lay down these words today. Back then, I couldn't have imagined he'd make it to 45, let alone 85. Sometimes now, I wonder if time has forgotten to swoop in and collect him.

But it hasn't. What's coming for him is coming for all of us.

This terrible, beautiful view. That's Milford at the end of the road there, as seen from the Ely Highway as you're coming back into town. This is what I saw at the end of every workday as we returned to hot meals and hot showers and the many entanglements my father could find, even in a town of fewer than 1,500 souls.

The work was rote, predictable, pleasurable in its way. Dig a hole, move the equipment, dig another. Each return to Milford, on the other hand, came as a wild card. Drunkenness? Maybe. Fighting? Certainly. The worst human impulses, on full display, allowing no escape? Yes. I saw things no child should see. I mourn for the kid I was, to have those hard things visited upon him without a choice in the matter, even as I'm thankful for the fodder. Much was taken from me in Milford. Much was given to me that I've been able to lean on in my life and my work, and for that, gratitude sprouts among the shattered pieces.

Two days after I saw Milford again, I sat in Dad's little dining room and asked him if he remembered that summer. He did, but not with the clarity I possessed. Perhaps that's not surprising, given the gulf in our ages and our divergent roles back then. He had a mind for work and a crude method for blunting his pain. My mind, then and now, sops everything up. Pain is the straw I try to spin into...something. Understanding, in the best moments. Acceptance. Empathy. I need all of it.

I told Dad what I'd seen, the town fixtures that hadn't changed much, the highways stretching to horizons, the memories that whispered from every vista. He shook his head. "I don't remember much about Milford," he said. It's the constant tension in our relationship. He leaves the past where it is. I dredge it, looking for lessons and shiny objects amid the wreckage.

Here's one: Despite it all, I wouldn't trade my summer in Milford for something else. There's not enough in anybody's pockets to shake me loose from it now.

*--I used this phrase in my most recent newsletter, and one of my dearest friends wrote me a wonderful email with it as the subject line. Consider this a case of virtuous recycling.

It has been nearly two months since I put something new up here. Sorry/not sorry, as the saying goes. So much has happened, and I have so little to say about it, and that's a strange combination. Confronted by this dynamic in the past, I've found it best to turtle up and wait until something worthwhile comes to mind. If you're seeking mindless blather, surely there's a high-frequency, low-content Substack site out there for you.

And yet, enough has changed, and enough good intentions have been met with poor follow-through, that an accounting is in order. Let's do this scattershot style:

Elisa covered this beautifully in her own newsletter, so I'll neither say a lot more nor take issue with any of it. She now lives in New England, her other heart earth, and I still live in Montana, mine.

I'm renting space in a lovely old rambling house in my favorite Billings neighborhood, pushing on with life and art. I have a beautiful office setup that is a joy to pile into each morning. My primary work, which I find interesting and fulfilling, continues apace (you can read a piece I wrote for PaymentsJournal here). Fretless and I take walks, sometimes alone, sometimes with my roommate and her dog. I tend to my dad. I have lunch with friends. It's a good life but also a different life, and I think Elisa would say the same thing.

Once I decided to spring Northward Dreams loose from its intended publisher, spring became a blur as I pushed out a retitled, re-jacketed version of the book and embarked on an ambitious series of appearances. Those have largely subsided as summer has come on, and it will probably be fall before I rev up again. The paperback comes out in November, and that's a good opportunity to hit the road again. I had so much fun with the hardcover.

What hasn't been fun—and I'm only being honest here—is going through the wringer of publishing, which can be a heartbreaking business. Writing is the best kind of joy—challenging, yes, but also a test of self, of the quality of ideas, of endurance. Publishing...Well, if I can't say something nice, and I can't, best not to say anything at all. It's not like my travails register as important in the larger scheme of things; hell, they're not even all that interesting to me given all the ways the world is on fire (literally).

But if I'm going to write stories—and I am—I will have to resolve my attitude one way or another. Right now, I feel three impulses:

1. Forget publishing altogether.
2. Find another partner like the one I just dispatched, something I never wanted to do, and approach the altar again.
3. Do with every subsequent book exactly what I did with this one.

Until my heart settles, I'll do nothing.

After the final curtain closed on Straight On To Stardust last fall, I set about writing a new play and turned it around quickly. It's called The Garish Sun--know your Shakespeare—and I hope to have some interesting news to pass along soon. #deliberatetease

At this juncture, I'm much more interested in and satisfied by working as a dramatist than I am in writing another novel. These feelings, of course, are subject to change (and always do), so I wouldn't read anything into that declaration. Just something I wouldn't have predicted, say, three years ago. Life, man.

At the beginning of July, I joined at the speaker roster at Humanities Montana. I'm thrilled about this, as a longtime admirer of and sometimes participant with this organization that advances the humanities in Montana's public life. 

My program, titled Where Memory and Imagination Meet, draws on subjects that have long held fascination for me—the roles of memory as an ignition point and imagination as the building blocks of fiction—but expands the idea to take in such diverse topics as family, background, community, even citizenship. When we talk about our memories of the things that shaped us and marry those with imagining different ways of talking and connecting, great things can happen.

My program, like all the others sponsored by Humanities Montana, is available to schools, libraries, civic groups, and other such gatherings. Information at the link above. If you have a group in Montana that would benefit from this conversation, let's talk!

Oh, you mean Craig Reads the Classics? The Saturday craft talks? General keeping in touch?

What can I say? I've been quiet lately. But I'll be back.

That's a promise.

I wrote about my home* state several weeks ago. It was a wide-angle, pulled-back view, and I thought I'd unloaded what was in my heart and my head. But here I go again...

No, really, here I go. It's a quick trip this time, not my usual two-day drive down, weeklong stay, and two-day drive back. I'm going for a reading and signing at a bookstore in Keller, the once-sleepy town just north of where I grew up. Like other parts of the North Texas I once knew, it doesn't really match up with my memories anymore. It's bigger, more congested, more diverse, more interesting.

The book I'm taking with me, Northward Dreams, is the most personal piece of fiction I've ever written. The best thing I've ever written, too, not that anyone should trust me to judge such a thing. I'm proud of it. I'm proud of how I willed it into existence. And I really, really want to share it with the people who underpin it, in ways subtle and overt. They're in the book, all of them, whether they would recognize themselves or not. They're in it because they're in me, in the memories I carry around.

To that end, I sent out about 100 postcards earlier this year, addressed to people from across the years I spent in Texas: classmates, old neighbors, former bosses, teachers, colleagues, friends, former lovers. I asked them to come out and see me and to meet this book, to renew acquaintances or to prolong friendships that never ran dry. 

I'm hoping to see a constellation of faces I recognize come Saturday, but I've also put this event squarely in a holiday weekend, so who knows? I haven't always done a wonderful job of staying in touch as I've wandered the country, looking for the place I'd call home. 

I found it, years ago. But I've also come to realize that the place I'm from—as much as I'm from anywhere—is also home and always will be.

When I say Northward Dreams is my most personal book, I'm thinking, among other things, about this snippet from one of the four timelines the novel covers. Here, in 1972, Electra and her little boy have arrived at their new home in Texas:

After they’ve gone downstairs, after Electra has made her assessment of the pantry, after she’s pictured the days stretched out before them, after Nathan, red-faced and watery-eyed, has come down and asked for a glass of water, after Charley has fetched the rest of their things and stacked them by the door for sorting out later, after they’ve come back up the stairs, quieter, the three of them lie askew on the king bed. Charley is on his side, head propped up by an angular arm. Electra lies far opposite of him, attentive to her son, and Nathan sleeps in between, curled like a kitten’s paw and under a loose blanket.

Electra reaches across the distance, and Charley takes her hand.

“Probably not what you expected.”

“It’s everything I expected,” he whispers. “You?”

“It’s what I want,” she says.

“Me, too.”

“He’s really a good boy,” she says.

“I know.”

“It’s a lot to deal with.”

“It is.” Charley sits himself up, careful not to jostle the boy. “Kids are resilient, though. I ever tell you about when we moved from Vernon to Wichita Falls?”

“No. I’d remember.”

“You went through both towns,” he says.

“I know.”

“I wish I could have been there.”

“I know,” she says.

“Fifty-some miles, might as well have been moving from earth to the moon. I was nine. Everything I knew, every friend I had, they were all in Vernon, but my dad, he was a history teacher, and the high school in Wichita Falls, they offered him $15 more a week, so we moved. I didn’t have any say.”

“Had to be hard at that age.” She’s thinking now of Nathan’s best friends, the Miles boy two doors down and the Fletcher kid, the one she doesn’t much like but whom Nathan adores, and how she plucked him up and took him away without his getting to say goodbye. She hurts for him in a way that she hasn’t allowed herself to think about until now.

“Hard at any age,” Charley says. “But the thing is, in the end, I made new friends. Wichita Falls became home, every bit as much as Vernon had been. I adjusted. He’ll adjust, too.”

“Tomorrow,” she says, more thoughts she’s held at bay rushing toward her now. Enrolling Nathan in school. Finding a job. Learning where the supermarket is.

“It’ll all get done,” he says, as if inside her head. It’s a talent he has.

She leans across and kisses him for the first time.

Where all of that comes from is both imagination and memory, little snippets that I heard, others I conjured, all of it front and center in my brain, ready to be accessed when I got hold of a story that needed it. This story. This place. Another time of life, forever salient because the decisions that were made had such gravity to them that their effects radiated out to lives yet to be launched.

​It's powerful stuff, fiction. Often more powerful than the real life that informs it.

Now we come to a man in Northward Dreams who's misunderstood, misjudged, and taken too lightly. He's also a ghost and a whisper in time. He's the father sixteen-year-old Ronnie, in the 1952 timeline, reaches faithfully toward. He ends up being the car bumper in the dog's teeth. You've got him. What are you going to do now?

When Oscar's timeline-breaking chapter comes in, roughly halfway through the book, it's the dawn of the 1970s, and he's far afield of where we discover him in the main narrative, working his handyman schemes. In an episode of Rich Ehisen's Open Mic podcast, I described Oscar as walking unwittingly into the teeth of his own demise.

An excerpt:

That's the thing about rooking people out of what's dear to them. It doesn't always work—and when it goes wrong, it's sometimes spectacularly so—but the cops almost never get called. The shame of it all is too great. How could they be so stupid, so naive? It's what you count on—that they are, in fact, so stupid, and that when the deed goes down, one way or another, their primary concern is making sure nobody else finds out.

Isn't it pretty to think so, Oscar, you fated man? Read on...

So I hear what you're saying: "Craig," you're saying, "just how much of this thing is memory and just how much is imagination? You're hinting at both, but you're not really giving me the scoop. Is Northward Dreams mostly memory or mostly imagination?"

Yes. That's my answer.

OK, OK, so as we dive deeper into the characters and their breakout chapters, here's where the imagination definitively comes in. Erica Stidham--Charley's eventual wife, Ronnie's former wife, Nathan/Nate's forever mom, a woman with her own power dependent on no man—is no longer with us. The woman whose life provided some inspiration for her—remember the great gift I talked about in the previous installment—is most assuredly still here. She's my mother. I ought to know.

​You happy now?

A minor bit of craft talk: When I start writing something new, I usually know little about what is going to happen but much about who will be in the middle of it. That was mostly true for Northward Dreams, save for one character:

Electra. I always knew she'd be leaving early, mostly because I deeply knew the pain her son was in, and would have to be in, and would spend the story fighting against. And sure enough, when the structure of the story began taking shape, we eventually got to Electra, and her busting loose from the established timelines had to happen in a way that fortified the loss of a little boy who grew to be a good, flawed, troubled man:

It's one of the cruel jokes of the universe, that he'd come to you not a year and a half ago and said, Am I going to die someday? ... You'd had to sit him down for one of the Big Talks that's in all the child development books, and you'd had to explain that, yes, he will die someday, we all die after all, but not for a long, long time. Are you and Charley going to die? Yes, but not for a long, long time. Daddy? Yes. But again...

More craft talk: I mention empathy a lot. It's an essential ingredient. When a memory prompts an idea, imagination sweeps in and leaves you with characters whose defining characteristics and subtleties are yet to be discovered. Empathy—understanding them and their thoughts, choices, and motivations—is the pathway to realizing what you wish to do with the work.

I found empathy with Electra, and found her to have surface-level commonalities with my mother but also to possess qualities that were uniquely hers. I didn't have to imagine my mother's death—and good, because I would have hated to contemplate that. I had to feel what losing Electra would be like—her own sense of it, yes, but also, and especially, what it would do to her child.

It was a gut punch, both ways.

Onward we go into primary, secondary, and even tertiary characters from Northward Dreams who break away from the main narrative in a series of chapters that exist beyond the boundaries of the book's four established timelines.

My role is not to play favorites with characters. My job, such as it is, lies in achieving empathy with all of them, listening to what they have to say, and, at least in the case of these chapters, talking to them. But if I were inclined to play favorites, Charley might well be my choice.

You don't have to know a lot about me to know why. The most consequential male role model in my life is my stepfather. That my mother imagined something different for our lives and took us to him remains the single biggest gift I'll ever receive. That's well-covered ground. One could argue—I certainly would—that without that gift, this novel wouldn't have come to me. I would further surmise that the writing life itself might have been beyond my reach without that gift's presence, but that is an unknowable for which I am grateful.

As I often say, though, there is memory (what actually happened, or what we perceive happened in our faulty hindsight), there is imagination (the fanciful stuff of world- and character-building), and there is what comes where the two meet. Charley Stidham won't tell you a thing about the life of the boy I was (and why should you be interested?). He'll tell you much about what it is to love, and to yearn, and to find gifts in the unexpected.

As Charley's chapter dawns, he is arriving at the concluding paragraph of a life spent with words. Retirement. It's 2005, and he has seen a lot. There have been losses along the way, as there are for anyone with the audacity to live long enough to see them.

He also has a whale of a surprise lurking at a public event he reluctantly attends:

You're struck by something. You can still hear her when his mouth flies open, can see her inside his eyes and the small of his mouth, remember the way she would sometimes throw herself between the two of you in a fraught moment, until she learned to trust, and until you made your own way with him and all of you became a three-legged family and learned how to lope along together. And then...

And then? You'll have to read the book.

Now that Northward Dreams, at long last, is out in the world and available in hardcover and e-book (with the audiobook on the way!), I'm enjoying the payoff for all the lonely work of writing it and preparing it for delivery: the idea that there are people out there reading it. (Thank you!)

If you're one of those people, you didn't have to go far—the very first words—to encounter one of the book's devices, for lack of a better word. Spread out among the 32 numbered chapters of the book, which encompass four timelines (1952, 1972, 2002, 2012), are nine chapters that focus on individual characters who inhabit the book. These chapters—which I've heretofore been misnaming as intercalaries—exist outside the story's established timelines and illuminate aspects of the characters that inform the whole of the narrative. They're also written in second person, a choice I expanded on in this interview with Chérie Newman:

​I think I went with the second-person point of view initially just to talk to them: Here's what's happening to you, what you're feeling, why it has gone the way it has. Any notion I had about changing that up went away once I saw the effect. There's an immediacy to the POV. Those characters are illuminated in ways they couldn't have been even in close third person.

So that's why I did it, but this isn't really about that. (It's not expressly a craft talk.) Instead, I want to dig into who these characters are and why they spoke to me—and why they allowed me to speak to them—without giving away the essential plot, so to speak.

​(Before I get too far into that, about the errant use of intercalary: These chapters don't quite fit the accepted definition because they do involve main characters and are less about theme, I think, than they are about backstory. For a more traditional view of the intercalary, think of the turtle chapter of The Grapes of Wrath. I certainly do—I referenced it many years ago in a short story.)

Opal goes first because...she goes. She dies, right there on Page 13:

You kneel, the knees of your jeans in the mud, and you take the clipping shears from your apron pocket. You size up the job, and you pitch forward into the bush.

Two crows, languid on the telephone line above, bear witness. Across the way, the hammering goes on, beating out a rhythm, a simple song for the dead and gone.

Here's the thing about Opal, though: She is, in a significant way, the master key to the story, the connector of 1952 and 1972 and 2002, when she leaves us, and even 2012, when she's a full decade gone. Without Opal, the connections among Ronnie and Cherie and Nate and Electra—the four primary characters of those timelines—lack resonance. And without those four, Oscar and Anna and Charley and Brandon are four characters in search of a story. In subsequent installments of this series of posts, I'll introduce you to all of them. You'll just have to believe me that they all fit, eventually. Or read the book, please!

Today, it's my pleasure to host one of my all-time favorite human beings, Chérie Newman, as she answers some questions about her book Other People's Pets: Critters, Careers, and Capitalism in Yellowstone Country. 

One of the things I like best about Chérie is how deeply she thinks about things, a tendency of hers that is written across her answers to my questions (and I promise, we're getting there soon). Then, of course, I'd have to consider the other things I like about Chérie, and the list grows. She has wide-ranging talents, she's a supportive pillar of the culture she exists in, and as I know from personal experience, she'll drive a few hours to see your play. (Well, maybe not yours. But mine. Thanks again, Chérie!) I've known her for going on two decades, and I'm continually impressed by the breadth of what she dips into and becomes proficient at doing.

Without further ado, then, here's Chérie Newman and her thoughts about Other People's Pets...

I'm fascinated with the resumption of your—not career, really, but work—as a pet sitter after a long break from it. What prompted that? Was it like riding a bike, as the saying goes, or were there rigors to the second go-round you didn't anticipate?

The resumption of my work as a pet sitter happened during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Before March of 2020, I earned most of my freelance income as a podcast editor, working with audio files recorded during live events. Then, suddenly, there were no live events. No live events meant no money for me. My hasty reaction to the loss of income was to accept a job as an office manager. Yuck!! I do not like office work. So, I quit that after a year and agreed to become a subcontractor for a Bozeman pet sitter who had way more work than she could handle. This was the end of 2021, when many people were starting to travel again. She started sending me on interviews and that’s when the fun began.
 
Although, I’ve taken care of other people’s pets all my life, it was mostly for friends and family. Right now, I can only think of four or five people—“clients”—who hired me as a professional, home-stay pet sitter between 1990 and 2022. The rigors, as you say, of these new situations were complicated and multi-faceted. Most of the people I worked for were nice. But they weren't paying a lot, and their expectations were high. And, I have to say, that even though they were paying me two or three times the amount I’d earned before, the average hourly rate came out to about $4 an hour. Four dollars an hour for being on duty 24/7 is not great. Especially when you factor in responsibilities for other people’s property, package delivery (Why do people order stuff when they know they’re leaving town?), invisible fences that fail and other high-stress events, and the fact that most of the houses were located far from central Bozeman. The $4/hr didn’t include fuel and other travel expenses. It didn’t include travel expenses incurred when I drove 30 miles for an interview.

At what point did you realize you were gathering book-worthy material? 

​When my friends started yelling, “You have to write a book about this!” every time I told stories about my experiences at dinner parties.

I love how the book uses something as seemingly picayune as pet sitting to explore much deeper themes about where we live and how. What are the big takeaways for you regarding our relationships with our animals and the places we call home? 

Well, first let me say that I’ve noticed a trend: pets are now treated more as children than animals. The love-of-my-life dog, MooJee, lived with me for 15 years, but I never considered her my child. She was a beloved companion and, of course, I did everything I could to keep her happy and safe. She was dependent on me for that. But. She. Was. A. Dog. During my recent pet sitting adventures I noticed an increase in bad pet behavior. Lots of neurotic animals, made so, I believe, by their people. For example, I took care of two Irish setters whose daily schedule included cocktail weenies at 4:30 p.m. and an 8 o’clock bedtime. They also expected their lunch at 2 p.m. and acted out if it wasn’t served on time. By acting out I mean behavior such as opening the freezer and letting food thaw or dragging kitchen scraps out of the sink and throwing them all over the floor or hiding car keys under a dog bed.
 
The places we (some of us, anyway) call home seem to be much more temporary than they were in the past. And people who have more than one house/home often leave their animals with a pet sitter while they live somewhere else for long periods of time or take pets with them and leave their houses empty. I wonder about all the huge, often uninhabited houses standing on Montana land, places that used to support wildlife, land upon which wildlife can no longer migrate or find food.

What have you learned about humans through their pets? 

I’ve noticed an increase in the human need for external approval, which some people try to extract from their pets. Kind of crazy. Pet pics on social media attract lots of attention, which offers online validation for people. But of course, pet pictures and stories are entertaining and fun. We can’t safely post images of children online these days. Maybe our pets are stand-ins? And then there’s the amount of money people in the U. S. spend on their pets—nearly 150 billion dollars in 2023, according to Market Watch. So, your question is insightful. Are humans devolving as the status of pets rises? Are pets usurping control of our behavior and finances?

What's next for you (wide-open question; I'm talking books, music, vocation, avocation, etc., etc.)? 

Ha! Thanks for asking. My mind is always blazing with new ideas. I just published another book, Do It in the Kitchen: a step-by-step guide to recording your life stories (or someone else’s). When they find out I’m an audio producer, people often ask me questions about recording audiobooks and oral histories, or want to know how to create a podcast. This book will help anyone who has those kinds of urges.
 
I just finished writing a children’s book about a dog who saves his family from a house fire (true story). The process of finding an illustrator has been, well…interesting. I wish I had better drawing skills. (But maybe not because then I’d draw and I have too much other stuff to do.)
 
My list of podcast clients has grown again during the past few months, so I do that editing/production work as it comes in. I’m also a musician and play in a band called Ukephoria Montana. We perform public and private concerts and participate in twice-monthly sing-along sessions at the Gallatin Rest Home. I participate in a songwriting collaborative and write songs on my own, as well. Every so often, I land a public speaking or workshop facilitator gig.
 
I can’t name names, but I’m talking with an educational group about the possibility of producing a podcast series for them. It would be a dream gig for me. All fingers crossed, please.
 
Since I’m self-employed, the marketing and PR tasks are endless. There’s always something new to learn.
 
And, oh yeah, I read a lot of books and listen to several audiobooks a week. Yep, a week. Recent favorites:
 

• The Book of Boundaries, by Melissa Urban (should be required reading for everyone, especially tweens and teens)
• No Two Persons, a novel by Erica Bauermeister (brilliant premise)
• True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America, by Betsy Gaines Quammen
• The Practice: shipping creative work, by Seth Godin
• The Art of Thinking Clearly, by Rolf Dobelli (much-needed perspectives)
• The People We Keep, a novel by Allison Larkin

What am I missing? What else would you like to say? 

Oh, you are a brave man. I always have something else to say and usually say way too much. But I’ll stop now, except for this and this:
 

• Most of what happens in Other People’s Pets: Critters, Careers, and Capitalism in Yellowstone Country is hilarious. I had to see and write it that way. Otherwise, I’d have gone berserk. It’s an entertaining book.
• Many pet sitters have thanked me, in person and via email. One woman sent this message: “I LOVED your book. I'm typing this from the kitchen island of a pet sitting gig. I relate so much to so many of the stories. It has been such a treat to follow along. I feel so seen."

 
Wait! One more thing: Thank you for these questions and for reading my book.
 
Oh, and another thing: I’m champing (yes, champing — to more precisely convey “impatience” — not chomping) at the bit to talk with you about your new novel, Dreaming Northward.
 
Okay, that’s all my things. Maybe. But you should stop reading now.

There is a point to this, I promise, but I can't get there without first telling a sweet little story. So just bear with me, please...

I've been contacting old friends on Facebook and other social sites, collecting mailing addresses. I'm having a literary reading and book signing this May in Texas, my first one in my home state in many years, and seldom does one get a chance to gather his foundational friends and acquaintances in one place and say thank you, for everything. I'm going to take that shot.

The address search eventually led me to a man named Jim Fuquay, and that's where both the sweet little story and the point come in.

Jim, an avid gardener, told me he was fighting the doldrums of February by reconnecting with old friends, that it had been a nifty little coincidence that I had reached out when I did. He asked me to give him a call, and I did, and let me tell you, it's been a long time since I enjoyed a half-hour as much as I did that one.

​But that's not the point.

Jim was the first person to give me steady work in my first chosen field. It's been many years since that happened—thirty-five of them as of November of last year—and we both are, to state the obvious, much older now. We established on the call that he's eighteen years my elder (I honestly never knew the age gap, only that when we met, he was a fully mature man and I was...not). Eighteen years doesn't seem like that many now that I'm breathing heavily on age 54, but when I was eighteen years old and standing in his office, asking to be turned loose on writing newspaper articles, he sure seemed like an elder. An exceptionally kind and accessible elder, yes, but an elder just the same.

​Here's how I described Jim's decision to hire me in a public lecture I gave several years ago:

The month before, I’d answered an ad in the Star-Telegram seeking correspondents for weekly community sections of the newspaper. I was eighteen, and the hiring editor wasn’t much interested in me until he read my clips. ... He gave me a job: the lowest-level, worst-paying, crappiest-assignment kind of writing job there was, but a job. Our deal was that I’d keep plugging away at school, he’d feed me a story opportunity every week or so, pay me $50 per, and let me build up a body of work. By late December...I had a story on the front page of the main newspaper. I was 18 years old, and I’d climbed a mountaintop of sorts. I wasn’t in the place I’d wanted to be, and I hadn’t made much headway into my half of the bargain with my boss, but I was getting somewhere.

So many somewheres, as it turned out.

During our phone call, I couldn't help reflecting on something that has crossed my mind plenty of times in my long working life, when I've considered how I got from there to here (and all the destinations in between): Jim didn't have to hire me. He could have given me a cursory look and sent me on my way, and his life would have been continued apace.

Mine changed that day.

A life has some number of true turning points, and that was one of mine. What Jim did that was so kind, so basic, and yet so uncommon is that he took a good look at me and imagined what I could be rather than fixating on what I was not. I was eighteen; I had no track record. I had only potential and gumption.

Jim said yes to a kid who badly needed to hear that word.

This is my point.

And this is my plea: If ever you're in a position to take a gamble on someone, to surprise someone with a "yes" when you could save yourself time and aggravation with a brush-off, breathe that "yes" into the air. It could be the break that unlocks everything else for the recipient of that welcome word.

I talk about this a lot with a friend with whom I lunch regularly. Where is the ladder anymore? What's a kid who doesn't emerge from the traditional mold supposed to do? What is a career and how does anybody get one?

When I was eighteen years old, in 1988, I was audacious in seeking a job, but at least I knew where to look. I had my eyes on a journalism career, and the procession into one was fairly well established at that point. You went to college. You gathered some experience. You did an internship. You caught on somewhere and started swimming.

​If you didn't read my public lecture, linked above, perhaps take a look now. I inverted that formula. More than that, I yanked it up by its feet and bounced it off its head. I bombed the college part, eventually. Internship? Never had one, at least not in a traditional sense. Experience? Not so much, no, not at that point. I came to Jim that fall bearing clips of stories I'd written for my high school paper. Not exactly a bastion of journalistic excellence. I came to him with chutzpah because chutzpah was all I had.

​Still, he said yes. He knew where the ladder was, knew he'd climbed it himself, knew the responsibility he had to make sure it was in good stead for someone else. He'd gained some latitude in his profession and spent some of it on me. A simple word, "yes," with fraught possibilities and potentially difficult outcomes. But what's the good of having a "yes" in your pocket if you're not willing to draw it out and slap it on the table?

As we rang off, I thanked him for taking a chance back then.

"I've never regretted it," he said.

​Neither have I, Jim. Neither have I.