Grace Stone Coates of Martinsdale, Montana was one of the most widely published poets of the American West during the first decades of the twentieth century. A recent resurgence of interest in this extraordinary writer has brought the republication of her novel, Black Cherries, and the biography, Grace Stone Coates: Her Life in Letters, by Lee Rostad.

Food of Gods and Starvelings

Literature & Fiction

Grace Stone Coates

Poetry

Drumlummon Institute

This issue of Drumlummon Views sheds fresh light on the industrial and domestic landscapes that make Butte and Anaconda so distinctive.

Coming Home: A Special Issue [of Drumlummon Views] Devoted to the Historic Built Environment of Butte & Anaconda, Montana

History

Americas

Researched and written by architectural historian Randall LeCocq, "Frank Lloyd Wright in Montana: Darby, Stevensville, and Whitefish" highlights the intriguing stories of three little-known but important Frank Lloyd Wright projects built during the 20th century in western Montana. Author LeCocq writes: "T]he Wrightian legacy survives in Montana. Montana had, and has, significant Wright projects, and the state is favored in having architectural bookends, representing early and late Wright phases, showcasing his development as well as the evolution of modernism in the twentieth century. In 2012, the Wright Montana properties, in the Bitterroot Valley and at Whitefish, were formally listed in the National Register of Historic Places."

Frank Lloyd Wright in Montana: Darby, Stevensville, and Whitefish (Drumlummon Montana Architecture Series)

LeCocq, Randall

In 1931, Alfred A. Knopf published Grace Stone Coates’ first novel, Black Cherries, made up of a series of linked stories. In her introduction to the 2003 reprint of Black Cherries, Mary Clearman Blew wrote that Coates wasn’t entirely satisfied with the novel, noting that perhaps “a more coherent book would have been a more revealing book.” Clear Title, written soon after the publication of Black Cherries, may be that more coherent book—it certainly tells a more revealing story. Just as Black Cherries reveals, in Blew’s words, a “family caught in a web of tension so acute that it binds them inexorably even as it separates them,” Clear Title tells the story of the same family, but more directly, revealing the secrets, lies, and betrayals that created that painful web. In her introduction to Clear Title, Caroline Patterson—editor of the award-winning anthology, Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart—writes, “Clear Title is a frank exploration of power in marriage: the moral, sexual, intellectual, and legal power between a husband and a wife. . . . By the end of the book, the power in the family has shifted. . . . Instead of a father ruling the roost, we see three sisters, traveling as equals, released . . . from the rigidity and anger of the past.” Drumlummon Institute now makes this powerful, heartbreaking novel available to readers already passionate about Coates’ writing and life. Clear Title is Grace Stone Coates’ last remaining major work still unpublished.

Clear Title: A Novel (Drumlummon Montana Literary Masters Series)

Coates, Grace Stone

Literary

Theodore Waddell: My Montana―Paintings and Sculpture, 1959–2016

Born in 1941 in Billings, Montana, painter, sculptor, and rancher Theodore Waddell stands as one of the West’s most celebrated contemporary artists. His late modern “landscapes with animals” couple abstract expressionist technique with creatures—Black Angus cattle, horses, and bison—that populate the high plains and mountain valleys of today’s ranching West.  Heavily illustrated with the artist’s own work, as well as images from his personal archive, Theodore Waddell: My Montana traces Waddell’s influences, ranging from the Cezannesque works of Montana rancher and teacher Isabelle Johnson to the abstract expressionism of Robert Motherwell, the expressionist figuration of Robert DeNiro Sr., and the classic western paintings of Karl Bodmer, Charles M. Russell, Frederic Remington, Thomas Moran, Joseph Henry Sharp, and Maynard Dixon.   With access to Waddell’s journals and letters and an extensive oral history recently completed, author Rick Newby offers unprecedented insight into Waddell’s first years as an avowed artist and his period of struggle and disciplined creativity. Newby portrays Waddell’s decades as a practicing rancher and the years of his success—when his sculptures and vast canvases have found homes in leading museums.   Ultimately, Theodore Waddell’s works are important, not simply because they bring together disparate traditions but because they stand as emotionally and sensuously resonant works of art that speak of landscapes and animals, life and death, austerity and abundance. They possess, in the words of Seattle Times critic Robin Updike, an “immense, poetic dignity.”   This volume also includes a gathering of essays celebrating the life and art of Theodore Waddell by the Montana curators, critics, scholars, poets, and fiction writers who have known him best.  Contributors include the Honorable Pat Williams, Robyn Peterson, Bob Durden, Gordon McConnell, Mark Browning, Donna Forbes, Greg Keeler, Patrick Zentz, Scott McMillion, William Hjortsberg, Paul Zarzyski, and Brian Petersen.

Arts & Photography

Newby, Rick

Individual Artists

Born in 1941 in Billings, Montana, painter, sculptor, and rancher Theodore Waddell stands as one of the West’s most celebrated contemporary artists. His late modern “landscapes with animals” couple abstract expressionist technique with creatures—Black Angus cattle, horses, and bison—that populate the high plains and mountain valleys of today’s ranching West. Heavily illustrated with the artist’s own work, as well as images from his personal archive, Theodore Waddell: My Montana traces Waddell’s influences, ranging from the Cezannesque works of Montana rancher and teacher Isabelle Johnson to the abstract expressionism of Robert Motherwell, the expressionist figuration of Robert DeNiro Sr., and the classic western paintings of Karl Bodmer, Charles M. Russell, Frederic Remington, Thomas Moran, Joseph Henry Sharp, and Maynard Dixon. With access to Waddell’s journals and letters and an extensive oral history recently completed, author Rick Newby offers unprecedented insight into Waddell’s first years as an avowed artist and his period of struggle and disciplined creativity. Newby portrays Waddell’s decades as a practicing rancher and the years of his success—when his sculptures and vast canvases have found homes in leading museums. Ultimately, Theodore Waddell’s works are important, not simply because they bring together disparate traditions but because they stand as emotionally and sensuously resonant works of art that speak of landscapes and animals, life and death, austerity and abundance. They possess, in the words of Seattle Times critic Robin Updike, an “immense, poetic dignity.” This volume also includes a gathering of essays celebrating the life and art of Theodore Waddell by the Montana curators, critics, scholars, poets, and fiction writers who have known him best. Contributors include the Honorable Pat Williams, Robyn Peterson, Bob Durden, Gordon McConnell, Mark Browning, Donna Forbes, Greg Keeler, Patrick Zentz, Scott McMillion, William Hjortsberg, Paul Zarzyski, and Brian Petersen.

One of Montana’s and the West’s finest fiction writers, Matt Pavelich is an author of universal appeal. His earlier books, the collection of stories, Beasts of the Forest, Beasts of the Field, and the novels, Our Savage and The Other Shoe, have been acclaimed by both reviewers and fellow authors. Now, with the publication of Survivors Said, his best stories written over four decades, Pavelich reveals extraordinary range and penetrating vision. As the novelist Gish Jen, author of Typical American and The Love Wife, writes, “What writing! The stories in Survivors Said are of the young and the old, of people getting out and people getting by. . . . [A]ll of them are vintage Pavelich: sharp-sighted and phrased just so, they are singularly alert to the worlds in a word.” In praising Pavelich’s second novel , Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Bone, wrote, “Matt Pavelich is a native Montanan, he knows that world inside and out, and The Other Shoe is rich with details that convince, insights that amaze. His prose is among the most impressive now being written, elegant, nuanced, rough when needed, the high and low of language. The Other Shoe, is a brilliant novel of crime, love, and the American West, and it deserves a wide readership.” The late Evan S. Connell, bestselling author of Son of the Morning Star and Mrs. Bridge, called Pavelich’s first novel Our Savage “an extraordinary book, more Continental than American. . . . I don’t know anything like it in our literature. . . . Matt Pavelich is uncommonly vital and original.” Writing in the Washington Post, Lizzie Skurnick wrote: “Some authors can master domestic scenes, and others are successful at handling sweeping, historical tableaux, but Pavelich is the rare writer who can skillfully combine the two.” In an interview in Narrative Magazine, Jack Shoemaker, Pavelich’s publisher for both novels, even claimed: “We published what is in my opinion the best novel to come out of the West since Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion—a book called Our Savage by Matt Pavelich.” Matt Pavelich makes his home in Hot Springs, Montana.

Survivors Said: Stories (Drumlummon Contemporary Fiction Series)

Pavelich, Matt

In 1903, after a devastating fire destroyed its original building, the Montana Club of Helena, Montana, commissioned architect Cass Gilbert to design a new home for the club. Eventually becoming one of the nation’s most famous and prolific architects, Gilbert is frequently credited as the “Father of the Skyscraper” for his design of the fifty-five-story Gothic Woolworth Building in lower Manhattan, the world’s tallest building until eclipsed by the Chrysler Building in 1929. Cass Gilbert was no stranger to Montana. In 1883, McKim, Mead and White of New York had hired him to execute their Minnesota, Dakota, and Montana Northern Pacific Railroad projects. Eager to begin his own practice, Gilbert left New York City and started his own firm in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota. By the summer of 1883, McKim, Mead and White began directing their Northern Pacific Railroad work between St. Paul and Helena to Gilbert’s fledgling office. Among the designs Gilbert executed was the railroad’s depot in Helena and a railroad hospital in Missoula. Gilbert’s Montana Club was certainly his most important project in Big Sky Country. Upon its completion, the Helena Daily Record headlined it as “[a] Dream in Architecture . . . [the] handsomest building in Montana . . . . [a] magnificent structure complete in every detail of furnishing and equipment from Rathskeller to ‘sky floor.’” In her superbly researched and heavily illustrated essay, historian Patty Dean tells the story of the design of Gilbert’s Montana Club, places it in the context of gentlemen’s clubs internationally, and offers fascinating detail on the evolving design of the elegant club, with its five stories, custom furnishings, and soaring spaces. Published on the occasion of the 130th anniversary of the Montana Club, Helena, Montana 1885–2015

Cass Gilbert in Big Sky Country: His Designs for the Montana Club (Drumlummon Montana Architecture Series)

Dean, Patty

Caroline Patterson, best known as the editor of the Willa Award–winning anthology, Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart, is also the author of powerful short fiction. Her new collection, Ballet at the Moose Lodge, showcases sixteen of her extraordinary stories. In these stories, Patterson explores what it is to grow up female in the American West. As her narratives reveal the lives of travelers, homemakers, radio show announcers, mothers, teachers, dancers, shop clerks, and the subterranean world of girls, they take the reader from a ferry dock in Resurrection Bay, Alaska, to a two-room school in the Bitterroot Valley, from brash, backpacking college students to young new mothers on the edge, from the 1920s to the 1990s. In Ballet at the Moose Lodge, Patterson explores in delicate and searing prose the visible and invisible negotiations women make to navigate lives bound by the rugged western landscape.

Ballet at the Moose Lodge: Stories (Drumlummon Contemporary Fiction Series)

Patterson, Caroline

Roger Dunsmore's latest volume, On the Chinese Wall: New &amp; Selected Poems, gathers some fifty years of writing by one of the finest poets of the Great Subculture. The voices of this Subculture emerge from shadow and silence in song, art, story-telling and myth-making, and in particular in the common speech of everyday life. Such is the speech of Dunsmore's poetry, informed by the lyric past of ancient Greece and the visionary traditions of ancient America as expressed by the Sioux visionary Black Elk. Here, among echoes of Archilochos and Meister Eckhart, can be found a poem for a loose ram, a poem for a woman kissing all the icons in the Byzantine Museum in Athens, a poem for a trapper in Montana whose pet wolverine loved Oreo cookies. Dunsmore's poetry derives from an old world of people, creatures, and things held in the compromising embrace of the New: Che Guevera in the mountains; the voices of students in China; and a man named Mike Blue Horse, "best night-hawker on the Hi-line," dancing solo in a bar in Montana.

On the Chinese Wall

Dunsmore, Roger

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Drumlummon Institute publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Drumlummon Institute

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Drumlummon Institute publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Food of Gods and Starvelings

Coming Home: A Special Issue [of Drumlummon Views] Devoted to the Historic Built Environment of Butte & Anaconda, Montana

Frank Lloyd Wright in Montana: Darby, Stevensville, and Whitefish (Drumlummon Montana Architecture Series)

Clear Title: A Novel (Drumlummon Montana Literary Masters Series)

Theodore Waddell: My Montana―Paintings and Sculpture, 1959–2016

Theodore Waddell: My Montana―Paintings and Sculpture, 1959–2016

Survivors Said: Stories (Drumlummon Contemporary Fiction Series)

Cass Gilbert in Big Sky Country: His Designs for the Montana Club (Drumlummon Montana Architecture Series)

Ballet at the Moose Lodge: Stories (Drumlummon Contemporary Fiction Series)

On the Chinese Wall