Last Best News (https://montana-mint.com/lastbestnews/author/craig-lancaster/)
My older brother, Keith, would have been 51 years old today, if he’d made it this far. He died exactly two months ago, on Feb. 21. I got the news in a motel room in Minot, N.D., and my emotions splayed out in all directions. Sadness, certainly, for the all-too-short life of someone in my family. Continue Reading →
When I pitched my new novel, “Edward Unspooled,” to the publishing house with which I’ve been in business for five books, I was struck by a profound difference in our focus. I’d followed passion and emotion—that fire to get up every day and dive into the manuscript, maybe the only thing that makes the enterprise bearable. Here it is, I’d said. I wrote my whole heart into this thing. My publisher talked about the numbers. Continue Reading →
Livingston came out for one of its own Thursday night. Richard S. Wheeler, for my money our best living Western writer, had a new novel, “Anything Goes,” to offer, and an overflow crowd of friends, colleagues and admirers filled the upstairs reading room at Elk River Books to hear from him. (more…) Continue Reading →
Ariana Paliobagis, owner of the Country Bookshelf in Bozeman, distilled the feelings of a packed house Tuesday night with one emotion-laden sentence: “I can’t talk about Ivan Doig in the past tense, because that would be like letting him go.” (more…) Continue Reading →
Lay of the Land: A series of essays on the spirit of Montana
I can’t remember when I first came to Billings, but the safe money would put it sometime in the first half of 1970, when I would have been mere weeks or months old. My parents lived in Casper, Wyo., at the time, and we had kin in Billings and Great Falls who were eager to meet me. (more…) Continue Reading →
In 1986, when I was a junior at Richland High School in North Richland Hills, Texas, the local chapter of the NAACP came to my school with a request: It wanted us to drop the Confederate flag from our letterhead, our uniforms, the middle of our gym floor. (more…) Continue Reading →
Nearly 40 years clear of it, I still remember my first visit to a public library. It’s not with the crystal recall I might have boasted 20 years ago, when there was more tread on the tires, but the wonder — at the stacks of books, thousands of them, all there for the claiming — remains fresh, as if it happened yesterday. And in a way, it did. (more…) Continue Reading →
