Glen Chamberlain

In one of Glen Chamberlain’s magnetic new stories, “Off the Road: or the Perfect Curve Unfound,” the narrator sets off from Seattle for Michigan, “once again making the decision to leave before being left.” At Three Forks, Montana, a flight of geese take her off the road, into the Crazy Mountains, into a place the Indians consider one of the centers of the world, where she finds her own center. Each of the stories in this irresistible collection inhabits a center of the world, a piece of Montana country that she makes uniquely her own, whether she is writing about rearing Arabian horses, or building the three-generation history of a family around the evolution of hay-stacking, or ice-skating with Kate Brethwaite, the formidable physics teacher at Buckle High School, as she makes her increasingly exhausting journey by way of ice from a community skating place to her locked and forbidding home. Whether the stories are about living, loving or dying they inhabit the essences of their actions and compel the reader to view fresh terrains of the author’s rich and original imagination.

Jane Austen once wrote, “I write about small things because those are all I know.” The stories in this collection are about small things—about things we all know or will quickly learn. They’re about keeping secrets, about having too much pride, about not having enough of it, about running from love, about crashing into it, about being broke, about having the gall to fight even when we’re broke. These small things are set against an iconic landscape—the West—whose backdrop forces what we all know to be simultaneously magnified and diminished.

The stories for this book were collected much like a kid collects the contents of a treasure box: on a winter walk, I saw an imprint  of owl wings in snow, right where the footprints of a vole ended; in a conversation, a young man told me of his dog, lost but then found frozen beneath the ice; in a newspaper article, I read about a cat who identifies the dying  in a nursing home and becomes midwife to their deaths; in my memory an old physics teacher still terrifies and enthralls me.  These images sit in the treasure box just like a petrified rock and a hummingbird’s  feather and the stars off a piece of barbed wire might, waiting for me to turn them with the age-old question: “What if?” And they’re set in the West because stories need a backdrop, and the West is what I know.

• Laura Munson

  “I read these stories at the end of a particularly long, grey, frigid Montana winter, and found myself feeling like a traitor for ever fantasizing an exodus from this rare and sometimes painfully beautiful state I’ve called home for seventeen years. Each word chosen as if a gift from nature, page by page, Chamberlain reintroduced me to this lover of mine in a way that felt so familiar and true that I lost myself in it from the very first paragraph.” 

• Mark Spragg

  “Here are stories composed with spare and lovely and graceful prose, patterned by insight, revelation and passion, and finally wisdom.”