Alone in the West?
THEY SAY WRITING IS A SOLITARY THING—as if we are all lone wolves howling into the wind with only the moon as our companion. Yet from the first writer’s conference I attended as a freshman at the University of Colorado in 1970, where Reader’s Digest managing editor John Allen befriended and encouraged me, to a 1996 reading at The Writer’s Voice in Billings, Montana, where Kim Barnes and I read from our memoirs, to the upcoming reading and panel discussion at The Tattered Cover for the new anthology West of 98: Living and Writing the American West , I have found writing to be about community. Writers support other writers. Especially western writers. If author Laura Pritchett had not suggested my name to the editors of West of 98 , my essay might not have found its way into the collection. Thank you, Laura! And had John Allen not tucked me under his wing when I was only 18, I might never have held onto this dream. But he did. And she did. And they did. And we all do. O