Breakfast In Montana

For their ninth episode of Breakfast in Montana, Montana writers Russell Rowland and Aaron Parrett take a break from their usual format of discussing two Montana books to honor a writer who has published more than 80 novels. Richard Wheeler has been a finalist for ten Spur Awards, the highest honor for Western literature, and won the award six times. And he didn't get published until he was almost...

In the eighth episode of Breakfast in Montana, authors Aaron Parrett and Russell Rowland discuss two outstanding memoirs. The first is The Story of Mary MacLane, also known as I Await the Devil's Coming, a worldwide sensation when it was published in 1902 by a nineteen-year-old aristocrat from Butte. The second is Driven: A White-Knuckled Ride to Heartbreak and Back, a book that explores Melissa S...

For this episode, Montana writers Aaron Parrett and Russell Rowland discuss two poetry collections by poets from Helena, Notes from a Novel by Frieda Fligelman and Natalie Peeterse's Black Birds, Blue Horse, the winner of the Gold Line Press Chapbook competition. We also interview Natalie about her writing process as well as her own small press, Open Country.

For this episode of Breakfast in Montana, writers Russell Rowland and Aaron Parrett discuss two books that should have received more acclaim, Matt Pavelich's short story collection, Survivors Said, and a 1979 novel published by Dirck Van Sickle called Montana Gothic.

For the fifth episode of Breakfast in Montana, Russell Rowland and Aaron Parrett discuss two of the most commercially successful Montana writers, Ivan Doig and Jamie Ford. We talk about the mysterious nature of successful books, and Jamie Ford tells us about his responsibility to write about the stories of Chinese immigrants in America.

In this episode of Breakfast in Montana, hosts Russell Rowland and Aaron Parrett discuss two books by Montana authors, The Hanging Tree by Dorothy Johnson, and Shaking Out the Dead, by Kate Cholewa. The Hanging Tree was made into a film starring Gary Cooper, another Montanan, one of several Johnson stories that made it to film. And yet she has never gained quite the status of male writers from her...

For the third episode of Breakfast in Montana, we discuss A Good Day to Die, by Jim Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall and other classic novels about the West, as well as a novel by his daughter Jamie Harrison Potenberg called The Widow Nash. There are several interesting parallels between these two novels, despite the fact that they take place in different times and despite the fact that the...

For this episode, we discuss two mysteries, the first being Death and the Good Life, one of only two novels written by notable Montana poet Richard Hugo, who was instrumental in developing the reputation for the Creative Writing department at the University of Montana. The second is a terrific mystery called A Bloom of Bones, by Allen Morris Jones, who is currently the editor of Big Sky Journal, a...

In this first episode, Russell and Aaron talk about two books from Butte, Mile High, Mile Deep by Richard K. O'Malley, and Brave Deeds, by David Abrams. These two books represent two of the interesting facets of Montana literature in that one of them, (Mile High) was written while O'Malley was the Associated Press Bureau Chief in Paris. But it's considered the quintessential Butte novel. The other...