Featured Bearlodge Writer

Updates:

April 2010:
National Poetry Month!

Featured Bearlodge Writer

Carol Panerio

Then Face To Face

Then Face to Face
by Carol Panerio
Pine Seed Press, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-615-27178-1
340 pp., $13.95

In her contemporary novel Then Face to Face, Spearfish author Carol Panerio weaves a rich story of self-sabotage and alienation, family patterns and estrangements, catastrophe and redemption. Set against the backdrop of a village in the lush countryside of southern Italy, her lyrical narrative is grounded in Italian culture, strong family dynamic, and one man’s struggle for absolution.

Dante Carlucci, an ailing, lonely widower, is desperate to reconcile with his son’s family—his only child—before he dies. But he harbors a secret, and hides behind an armor of self-justification and resentment, with his intransigence and rigid principles creating an ever-growing rift.

His young grandson’s innocent wisdom and a terrible accident propel Dante, and the family, toward fundamental change, showing that even the most intractable situation can be transformed. Renewing relationships and attitudes can be agonizing, but for the Carlucci family, it is never without hope.

Author contact information:
Carol Panerio
381 Upper Valley Road.
Spearfish, SD 57783
605-722-8438
acarp(AT)rushmore.com

Previous Featured Bearlodge Writer

Now Available:

Patricia Frolander's Grasslands Genealogy

The distance between Bearlodge poet Patricia Frolander's Boston, Massachusetts childhood experiences and her life as a Wyoming ranch wife must be counted in more than miles. It is a cultural revolution of sorts, a self-development that is more than simply "a growing up." It is the story of a woman not afraid to dig deep . . . a woman willing to take a hard look at the grassland she loves . . . a woman who will readily admit she is not in absolute control of her life.

In her newly-published Grassland Genealogy (Finishing Line Press, July, 2009), Frolander shares forty years of ranching, raising children, and poetry. Her lines sing "a heart-deep melody." They capture the essence of the land and its people, revel in the blessings of close friends and closer family, and reflect upon hardships caused by unpredictable weather, markets, and livestock.

Frolander's authenticity evokes laughter . . . and tears. With it she plays the reader's life experiences by sharing hers. She coaxes, nurtures, calls us out past that safe zone we build around our memories; she makes us see that everything, including life's smallest mishaps, must be engaged. Robert Roripaugh, Wyoming Poet Laureate 1995-2002, sums up Frolander's poetry when he says it will "develop a reader's appreciation for her understanding of the subtle strands of heart and mind that tie humans and animals to each other and the grasslands they share."

Grassland Genealogy, a paperback, is Pat Frolander's first book. It is available for $14.00 plus shipping and handling from Backpocket Books (click on "Books" on this website) or from your favorite bookstore. You may also purchase a copy from the publisher, Finishing Line Press, P. O. Box 1626, Georgetown, KY 40324, or check their w ebsite,
http://www.finishinglinepress.com/NewReleasesandForthcomingTitles.htm for ordering information.

Previous Featured Bearlodge Writer

Dave Wagner

Now available: Powder River Odyssey: Nelson Cole's Western Campaign of 1865 by David Wagner

"Lyman G. Bennett ended his diary entry for 8 September 1865 with a simple sentence: 'We marched and fought over 15 miles today.'"

With that thought, David E. Wagner begins his history of the Powder River Indian Expedition, a military mission gone seriously awry for the 1400 men of the Eastern Division who, deployed by the U. S. Army's western command, had departed Omaha City on 1 July 1865 with a simple task before them: punish the bands of Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Sioux that were attacking white immigrants and commercial traffic moving west along the Oregon Trail.

Late of Hulett, Wyoming, Bearlodge Writers member Dave Wagner was a serious student of the Indian wars in the American West. His book, already in the works at his death, offers fifteen detailed maps of the expedition's route, as well as a selection of photos—several historic and several taken by the author himself—which add to and clarify the text.

Dave's skillful joining of previously unpublished memoirs and eyewitness accounts of the hastily-formed campaign quickly reveals how poorly-provisioned the members of this campaign really were. Dave pulls from military records and unpublished memoirs, comparing them and allowing such men as Colonel Nelson D. Cole, who led the three-month odyssey through virtually unexplored territory; civilian military engineer Lyman G. Bennett; First Lieutenant Charles H. Springer; and others to share their stories, stories of soldiers, often on half-rations, who died from scurvy while their horses failed and fell from exhaustion and from lack of feed and water. It seemed there was always more marching than fighting as the soldiers encountered the Indians they were chasing.

Powder River Odyssey also provides facts to support the theory the army's western command was pathetically ignorant of the terrain faced by those who embarked on this expedition and that the government seriously underestimated the determination of the Indians to defend their homeland and hunting grounds.

Volume 27 in Arthur H. Clark Company's Frontier Military Series, Powder River Odyssey: Nelson Cole's Western Campaign of 1865, may be found at your favorite bookstore, or can be ordered from Gaydell Collier at Backpocket Books—just click "Books" under "Tour Bearlodge" to the left on this page. It is also available from the publisher (check the Web site at www.ahclark.com), from Amazon.com, and from Borders.com. Hard-bound, cloth-covered editions are available for $39.95 (plus shipping and handling) each; leather-bound, limited editions (fifty are being offered for sale) may yet be available for $125.00 (plus shipping and handling).

This outstanding history has been called "a detailed recounting of the difficult campaign that presaged the post-Civil War Indian wars of the western plains." Wagner's second book, Patrick Conner's War, is due out in the fall of 2009 and will further tell the story of this largely forgotten campaign.

Other Featured Writers

A Singular Notion

by Renee Carrier A Singular Notion Cover

$16.95 196 pages

ISBN 1-932636-27-7

by Pronghorn Press

Beneath an old school bell in front of the author's rural Wyoming home, hangs the sign, "LISTEN." In this multi-hued work, Renée Carrier invites us to listen with her as she "seeks balances" while facing the reality of her mother dying. "As a species," she writes, "we seem to require contexts lest we become lost in life's twists and turns." She finds these contexts in literature, art, and science; in the wisdom of Christ, Rumi, and others; in weather proverbs and the down-home homilies of neighbors; in the flight of an eagle, the strum of a guitar, the planting of garlic after the full moon. While remaining well grounded in the land, she invites us to immerse ourselves in the interconnectedness of our world and of life itself, learning "as much from woods and stones as from books." In exquisite prose, Renee plumbs the depths and music of mind and spirit. As we read these essays, we too begin to listen, "anticipating rhythms" not of an imposed, artificial structure, but of a fullness that transcends known paths and unfolds into an open field of expectancy. These essays express beauty and grace, joy and benediction, and above all, power and wholeness. ~ Gaydell Collier, co-editor, Leaning Into the Wind, Woven on the Wind, and Crazy Woman Creek. Houghton Mifflin Publishing.

Voices From The Underground

by James Bowers

“In my opinion [Voices From The Underground] is a crystallization of your past experience and observation of life, personified in different characters and presented in an intriguing, insightful, and philosophical way.” Fei Jijing, Shanghai, China,“ In over 30 short stories, Jim Bowers explores with courage and honesty the nature of the human heart. He plunges deep into the psyche, confronts the beast within, and emerges with redemption, hope, and a bittersweet understanding of the meaning of life. His stories touch on human frailties and anguish, the complexities of relationships, the power of faith and the spirit, on good and evil itself. They are disturbing or uplifting--sometimes together--and they challenge us to be as daring in subjecting our own innermost thoughts and fears to the crucible of honest attention. Expressing a profound mastery of language, Jim writes with beauty and elegance, sincerity and passion. These stories "speak to the soul."

Gaydell Collier, author and editor

In The Shadow Of The Bearlodge

by Bearlodge Writers

Many Kites Press 2006. ISBN 0-9729002-8-7. 200 pp.

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

Publisher
Between Grass and Sky