Bearlodge Writers

Featured Book

 

 

 

 

 

Voices From The Underground

by James Bowers

PROLOGUE

I am sitting in my chair in the cabin built by my own hands, looking out at the stream flowing through my property, with my feet elevated, piles of newspapers and my dog at my side. It is not that I am lazy. I’m retired, and retirement means not doing whatever I do not care to do, not talking with people I do not find interesting, not being anything other than what I want to be. It is the ultimate in freedom, just to be myself: no more games to play, no role to tell me how I ought to act, only silence and intuition. But that also involves getting to know who I really am. Memories from the past float to the surface, long-forgotten, painful, surprising. I am changing in unexpected ways: death and rebirth in my late sixties, as if one can start over again at that age. I am becoming more reclusive, more observant, delighted by the vast panorama of inward experience.

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I Quote

"Pass the chocolate."

Bearlodge Affiliates

Doug Dumbrill

R. Douglas Dumbrill is a native of Newcastle, Wyoming. His grandparents were great educators; every one. His parents always believed that everything which teaches about life was worth exploring. Doug’s father told him that his ideas were as good as anyone’s in the world. Some part of him was bound and destined to be a poet and a storyteller; for that is the art of everything.

Gene Gade

Gene Gade is a life-long educator who enjoys outdoor adventures, especially river trips, with his wife and two children. He has lived and worked in five western states and writes mostly non-fiction.

Mary Hadley

Mary Hadley grew up riding jumping horses, married a cowboy, and moved with him to Nevada, on to Oregon, and finally to Wyoming while raising their seven children.

Page Lambert

Page Lambert, described in Inside/Outside Southwest Magazine as one of the most notable women writers of the contemporary West, is the author of the memoir In Search of Kinship, a Denver bestseller, and the historic novel Shifting Stars, a Mountains & Plains Booksellers finalist. A contributor to Writing Down the River: Into the Heart of the Grand Canyon, her River Writing Journeys for Women were featured in the January, 2006 issue of Oprah’s O Magazine as “one of the year's six great all-girl getaways.”

Jackie Lindstrom

Jackie Lindstrom, (alias JL) Spearfish, has had a love affair with horses all her life. Now a golden-ager, the ground is too hard and the stirrup too high for riding so she expresses her love for horses through writing and painting.

Merle Lossing

Merle Lossing – “Born in 1956, I grew up on my parent's farm in Northeast Montana, moved to Gillette, Wyoming in 1981, and have worked for United Parcel Service since 1984. The year 2005 brought many changes; a move to Sundance, Wyoming, a new marriage, and new family.”

Trent Redfield

Trent Redfield is a native of Minnesota, but has been wandering around the Midwest and the West for the past 5 years. Bearlodge Writers was the first group of writers that he joined and has inspired him to help form the Chequamegon Bay Word Affiliate writers group in Wisconsin. Trent is currently working for the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, a unit of the National Park Service, on the Corp of Discovery II traveling exhibit. He’s a member of the Bearlodge Writers “at large.”

Shelly Ritthaler

Shelly Ritthaler is the author of numerous articles, short stories and poems. She is the winner of the Western Writer’s of America Spur Award and has eight published books to her credit, five of which are children’s books. She and her husband, Reuben, own a cattle ranch and are busy raising their two year old granddaughter, Shayna.

Mary Jean Wilson

Mary Jean Wilson’s writing has changed with greater emphasis on how situations around us affect us. It still has the slant towards the historical—sometimes more and sometimes less.
Mary Jean’s essays have been published in magazines, journals and newspapers.

Other Affiliates:

Fred Collier

Kristen Collier

Gwen Morgan-Jones

John Newcomb

Tuffy Mitchell

Terry McNutt

In The Shadow Of The Bearlodge

“This is a bold idea that a community can write a book. In the Shadow of the Bear Lodge can only be described as polyphony-individual melodies and themes contributing to a greater, more unified whole, which is the voice of the Bear Lodge itself.” Kent Meyers

"…readings from In the Shadow of the Bear Lodge will help transport the reader to a still, renewing and deeply personal inner space."  Midwest Book Review

"In the Shadow of the Bear Lodge  is a fine example of how accomplished poetry, fiction and nonfiction are being written in many parts of our state and also illustrates the success of the informal regional workshop groups in encouraging their members as the develop and share their abilities and professionalism.  Given the distance between communities and isolation occurring  during winters and bad weather, these writing groups are an important resource in the state's literary life....."  Robert Roripaugh Wyoming Poet Laureate 1995-2002

In the Shadow of the Bear Lodge: Writings from the Black Hills. An Anthology by Bearlodge Writers. www.bearlodgewriters.com  Rapid City, SD. Many Kites Press, 2006. ISBN 0-9729002-8-7. 200 pp. $15 plus shipping and handling.

Now Bearlodge Writers has published its first anthology. Inside the stunning cover illustration of buffalo painted by renowned watercolorist Sara Rogers is a rich and full-bodied collection of writing.

Contained in this volume are reincarnations of historical personages as well as entities who inhabit other worlds. Characters in this prose may bid sad farewells to grandmothers or puzzled hellos to oriental mystics. They find stories in their socks as well as in The Satisfy Café. Stained glass windows and river rapids sing to them, and they find Rome's Coliseum in a tipi ring, hear history in "the remembering wind."

Experienced, these writers gnaw every bit of flavor from the most gristly details of their lives, and can still laugh and solve the problems of the world while rolling hay into long, tight windrows. "Hang on, hang on," they say in a dozen ways, because "lonely is a state of mind." Each page offers a new treasure, a unique viewpoint, a glimpse of what we might say about lives that might look ordinary to others. With "a firm hand and a no-nonsense look," they give us reasons to go on, to "sing on the waters" as we float through our lives.

These writers are, in fact, you and me, all of us: ranchers and artists,
teachers, lawyers, professors of English, musicians and librarians, nurses and extension educators, a UPS driver, college students, corporate and private business persons- and they all encourage and support each other in their efforts to understand and capture what is most important in their lives. These ordinary men and women, in creating this writing collection, demonstrate in one more way their awareness of the exquisite fragility of this world. They understand deeply that they live and work "in the shadow of the Bearlodge."

Linda M. Hasselstrom
Between Grass and Sky