Montana Book Festival 2018

Join us for a reading and self-moderated discussion of writing with a focus on location.

KISHA LEWELLYN SCHLEGEL is the author of Fear Icons (Mad Creek Books, 2018). “Who are we to each other when we’re afraid?” Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel asks in this moving and original debut essay collection. Her answer is a lyric examination of the icons that summon and soothe our fears. From Donald Trump to the Virgin Mary, Darth Vader to the Dalai Lama, Schlegel turns cultural criticism personal with bracing intelligence and vulnerability. Each essay is woven through with other voices [Baldwin, Auden, Du Bois, Cixous] positioning Schlegel's arguments and meditations within a diverse and dynamic literary lineage.  Fear Icons is a vital and timely inquiry into the complex relationship between love and fear—and the ways that each intensifies the other.

SCOTT F. PARKER is the author of A Way Home: Oregon Essays (Kelson Books, 2018). A Way Home is a love letter to Oregon and an ode to living in the present moment. Living for several years in Minnesota, Scott Parker finds himself longing for the Oregon of his youth. He explores this longing by returning to his home state both over the course several visits and through the unfolding of memory, to find out what he is capable of understanding about time, home, and himself. The temptation of nostalgia is regarded from many angles—rueful, ironic, yet always still beckoning. Its antidote: being present in the actual moment, with its paradoxes and mixed blessings. Parker's passion for his subject is apparent, and his meditations prove him to be a nimble and penetrating thinker on absence and presence.

BECKY MANDELBAUM is the author of Bad Kansas (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Winner of the 2016 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. "With heart and precision, and a fresh and resilient humor, Bad Kansas reveals the lives people are living in that flyover state in a collection in which every sentence is a made thing, never merely a vehicle for conveying information to the reader. Mandelbaum’s sharp eye for detail, a deep emotional intelligence, and a slightly canted―yet ultimately compassionate―worldview combine to produce complex, authentic, empathic characters, reminiscent of two of the greatest place-based collections ever: Richard Ford’s Rock Springs and Annie Proulx’s Close Range." - Pam Houston author of Contents May Have Shifted

BERNARD QUETCHENBACH is the editor of The Bunch Grass Motel: The Collected Poems of Randall Gloege. The volume also includes three prose essays commemorating the poet, who is deceased. It is illustrated with photographs by the poet. Randall Gloege, Bernard Quetchenbach's colleague at Montana State University Billings, was a poet, musician, photographer, and advocate for the Montana wilderness. When he died in 2013, he left behind a significant body of mostly unpublished work. The Bunch Grass Motel is the result of a long process of transcribing and editing. Through the efforts of a variety of people throughout the state, these poems are now available to readers.