Montana Book Festival 2018

Both Barrels: How Two Women Built an Anthology of Great American Gun Stories with contributor and editor BettyJoyce Nash
Fictional guns are powerful on the page, as they are in life, yet stories that use them effectively are rare. Lock & Load’s editors, BettyJoyce Nash and Deirdra McAfee solicited stories from American masters, among them Montana’s Rick DeMarinis. Others include Annie Proulx, Bonnie Jo Campbell, John Edgar Wideman, Pinckney Benedict, and thirteen new voices; more than half the stories were written by women.

On the day the world learned about the massacre in Las Vegas, the University of New Mexico Press published Lock & Load: Armed Fiction. These and other shootings have underscored the project's significance. Lock & Load’s audiences in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Youngstown, Greensboro, N.C., Richmond, Va., and Charlottesville, Va., have been eager to hold the sensible discussions that fiction fosters.

Lock & Load's stories—of love, war, and coming of age, in landscapes familiar or ordinary, distant or dystopian—reflect, and inspire readers to reflect, on the pervasive and complex meaning of guns in American life. Novelist Roxana Robinson, author of Sparta and Cost, called Lock & Load “a powerful, challenging and often exquisite response to gun culture” that reveals “our complicated relationship to weapons.”

BettyJoyce will discuss how she and Deirdra McAfee conceived and built Lock & Load and found its audience.