When it comes to writing, finding a supportive community can mean the difference between keeping a story or poem private and sharing it with the world.
Knowing this, The Writer's Voice in Billings created a master-level writing workshop, The Writer's Community, that brought together writers — who normally work in solitary settings.
The workshop, which ran from 1991 to 2006, was a chance for veteran authors to impart their knowledge and give encouragement and guidance to promising writers, said Corby Skinner, longtime head of The Writer's Voice.
The program, which was funded throughout the U.S. by the William Bingham Foundation, no longer exists. But the foundation wanted to do one last hurrah for the successful program.
"I asked for $9,000 to celebrate the importance of The Writer's Community, people helping other people grow in terms of their work," Skinner said. And that became the theme of this year'sHigh Plains BookFest.
Seven of the instructors will take part in this year's book fest. Three of those writer/instructors, Gary Ferguson, David Romtvedtand William "Gatz" Hjortsberg, plus one of their students, now a successful novelist, Sid Gustafson, spoke in separate interviews about their journey as writers and what The Writers Community has meant to them.
Writing comes from a place of passion, said author Gary Ferguson.
"For me personally, it was the desire to be in relationship with the natural world that drove me as a writer to celebrate that relationship and to use it to open up discussion in myself, and hopefully in my readers, about things we all value," Ferguson said.
The author of 23 books and numerous essays, Ferguson, 60, grew up in northern Indiana "in the corn and the rust." He remembers telling his parents when he was 9 that one day he would move to the Rockies, and he did. These days he and his wife, Mary Clare, split their time between Red Lodge and Portland, Ore.
Early on Ferguson gravitated toward personal essay as a style of writing. From the beginning, Ferguson was drawn to writing because it helped him break the frame he built around how he thought the world worked.
As he interviewed people from various walks of life for his projects, they would boost his understanding and cultivate what Buddhists call "a beginning mind."
"There's an imagined security thinking we've got things figured out," Ferguson said. "But there's great freedom in realizing we don't, and that's what writing has done for me."
Some of his best mentors were the writers he read, including John Steinbeck, Terry Tempest Williams "and a lot of others." He also had an especially supportive professor at Indiana University.
While in college, he and a friend also took a small road trip and visited with four different authors in the Midwest. The two wanted to get a sense of what the path of a freelance writer was about.
"It was less a matter of having the craft itself mentored and more of gaining a reality check on how big a task we had in mind was," Ferguson said.
He initially started publishing in small magazines and newspapers. Ferguson developed a system for sending out 25 separate queries at a time, and as soon as one publication rejected a proposal, he'd send out more letters.
One of the things the writers he met prepared him for was the many times his early queries would likely get turned down.
"I could have papered the wall with all the rejection letters I received," Ferguson said.
Gradually though, the letters started coming back with handwritten notes telling him the piece wasn't quite right for that publication, but to try again.
"From that small amount of encouragement, it was enough to keep me going," he said.
Now an award-winning writer, Ferguson cites two of his books as his favorites. One, "Hawk's Rest," gave him the opportunity to have an extraordinary wilderness experience.
"The Carry Home," his most recent book, was meaningful not only from the storytelling perspective, but because of the opportunity to work through the difficulty of talking about grief and his interior emotional transitions.
As for his stint teaching the master class, Ferguson loved it.
"That particular class was very satisfying because the people who showed up there were willing to put themselves out there," he said. "When you share yourself in any artistic endeavor, you're vulnerable, opening yourself to criticism, to the idea that your work is never perfect and it can always get better."
The class also provided a sense of community for all of the student writers.
"You gain a level of support that allows you to go into the world where you're sending things out and getting rejected," he said. "That community, which understands and can sympathize and encourage you in your struggles, is very important."
When it comes to his own work, Ferguson's goal is to write every day, preferably in the morning.
"If you wait until you've got an uncluttered weekend, and that happens every couple of months, there's a big abyss that opens up between sessions," he said. "If you can write even the tiniest amount every day, there are many fewer steps to pick up where you left off."
David Romtvedt, Wyoming's former poet laureate, became a writer "by backing into it." Romtvedt, a writer and a musician who lives in Buffalo, Wyo., was raised in southern Arizona in a working-class family, with a family tree filled with laborers and farmers.
"I still believe that dignity arises out of the work of the body and it was very hard to accept being a writer, sitting in a chair, wiggling a pencil around," he said.
But stories always interested him, and to this day that's what propels him in his writing.
Romtvedt, 66, graduated from Reed College in Portland in 1972. An instructor there nudged Romtvedt toward poetry. At her urging, after graduating from college, he applied and was accepted to the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he earned an MFA.
In his writing, Romtvedt goes back and forth between writing poetry and prose, saying the two have different pleasures.
"The wonderful and lovely thing about a poem is you can finish one in a brief period," he said. "There are times you feel impaled by heaven, you write a poem in 20 minutes and you don't change it."
Novels obviously take a much longer time.
"In a novel you enter that world, you become embedded by and surrounded by it," Romtvedt said.
He has also worked as a journalist, which he enjoyed. He appreciated the deadlines that came with writing for a weekly paper, and not agonizing over each word.
"I love that because it forces you to make decisions and get it done," Romtvedt said. "Some writers can write something for 20 years and won't let go of it."
His awards include a Pushcart Prize, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and the Wyoming Governor's Arts Award. His book "A Flower Whose Name I Do Not Know" was selected for the National Poetry Series.
Romtvedt's writing routine involves sitting in his office, setting a timer and getting started. When the timer goes off, he brings the writing to a good stopping point and goes on with the rest of his day.
His newest book of poetry, "Dilemmas of the Angels," will be published in 2017 by Louisiana State University Press.
In addition to writing, he teaches part time at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. Romtvedt is of the mind that writers are made, not necessarily born that way.
"It means you don't have to give up on the possibility on what you hope for because you're not born with it," he said.
But it takes a lot of effort to get there, Romtvedt said, pointing to the adage that "writing is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration."
He enjoys encouraging others to write.
"I just like being with people and watching them try to gain mastery over something," Romtvedt said.
William 'Gatz' Hjortsberg
Award-winning writer William "Gatz" Hjortsberg is known for his books, his screenplays and his many articles. He's been published in Esquire, Playboy, Sports Illustrated and The New York Times Book Review, among other magazines.
His books include "Falling Angel," "Nevermore" and "Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan." Hjortsberg also wrote the screenplay for the Ridley Scott-directed "Legend."
But the truth of the matter is that he almost didn't become a writer. Hjortsberg, who had an artistic bent growing up, in addition to his writing skills, was groomed to be a scenic designer.
Then, in college, he began to have second thoughts.
"All my writing buddies, they didn't do anything but sit around and write and smoke cigarettes," he said.
Since he had published a story and written a couple short plays, Hjortsberg decided to turn his attention to playwriting. He attended Dartmouth College, the Yale School of Drama and Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow.
Hjortsberg, 75, and his wife, Janie, live in Livingston and at a cabin on the Boulder River, north of Big Timber. On the day of the interview, he was on the phone with a contact in Hollywood talking over a possible project.
Asked the favorite of all the books he's published, Horjstberg said it's always the one he's working on.
"I have a first draft that's nearly finished, a novel," he said. "It's way overweight, it needs a lot of editorial stuff."
Talking about where his ideas come from, Hjortsberg said things sort of "bubble into place." He first tried writing what he knew, but has since realized allowing his imagination have full reign imbues his novels with the best kind of creativity.
"You can take a book that doesn't work and keep most of it, do a top-to-bottom rewrite and make it completely another thing," he said.
Hjortsberg subscribes to the philosophy that writers are born, not made, saying, "you either are a writer or you're not."
"I don't think it's a career choice anyone with brains would make," he said. "Why not a corporate lawyer or astronaut? Writers are people who are completely alone all day in a chamber with no windows."
When he taught his Writer's Community workshop, Hjortsberg selected students after reading their works in a blind submission process. Their work sold him on the individual writers.
"Talent can be recognized and it can be encouraged," he said.
Hjortsberg remembered one particular exercise where he had each student grab one of the many strange postcards he brought to class. Then he challenged the writers to pen a mini-story that would fit on the back of the postcard, connected to the image it held.
"I was trying to jar anyone out of the notion that the story had to be a certain way, or base ideas on a kind of reality that corresponded to their perception of reality," he said. "I wanted to launch them into something wholly unexpected."
After a lot of encouragement, Hjortsberg is going back to something familiar to his fans. His latest novel will be a sequel to "Falling Angel." But he still hopes to give his readers a twist.
"I came up with a way to have a new surprise ending for the sequel," he said. "I know where I have to get to and what I'm doing. I'm hoping whatever energy the first book had will propel this into some quasi- or enormous success."
Dr. Sid Gustafson
By day Dr. Sid Gustafson is a veterinarian in Bozeman. But he is also a successful novelist who has been getting great reviews for his latest book, "Swift Dam."
"We had a ranch on the Blackfeet Indian reservation, with no TV but we had radio," Gustafson said. "So I started reading a lot and then I became interested in the subject matter I eventually wrote my novels about. I'm fortunate to be raised among Indians and horses."
Gustafson, 62, had always had in the back of his mind the idea of writing. But veterinarian school doesn't leave much room for the humanities.
Once he graduated, he took some classes in writing from Montana State University and through The Writer's Community. He took part in a workshop taught by writer David McCumber, and one taught by author Linda Sexson.
"They gave me guidance — and probably better was confidence," Gustfason said. "The teachers were very encouraging and they were open to all styles and types of writing."
Interacting with the other writers also helped a lot.
"We all got very motivated and excited, so it made us passionate somehow to keep going," he said. "It was a social thing where we were able to gather together."
Fiction has to be entertaining, if you want to get it published, Gustafson said. And it has to be compact and to the point. His teachers and fellow students helped him hone his craft.
His upbringing is central to his writing. His ideas, he said, come from his subconscious.
"It's a combination of my experiences and my subconscious, my fears and my joys," he said. "And then I want to change society so it's softer toward people and animals."
Gustafson remembers the first time he heard from a publisher that his book had been accepted. He got the call from a woman with a New York publishing company.
"It was extremely exciting, I'll never forget that moment," he said. "'You want to send me some money and publish my novel? Yes! It was just as good for the next two. That won't get old."
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