High Plains BookFest walks on wild side
Published: August 26, 2008
The YMCA Writer's Voice presents the sixth annual High Plains BookFest, “The Call of the Wild,” Oct. 17-19 in Billings.
The 2008 event focus on contemporary regional writers whose works explore the theme of wilderness, both as subject matter and as metaphor. Confirmed participants include Tim Cahill, Pam Houston, Steven Rinella, Pete Fromm, Lois Red Elk, Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs, David Romtvedt, Michael Engelhard, Alan Kesselheim and many other regional writers.
The festival also marks the launch of The Big Read, an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts, designed to restore reading to the center of American culture. The book selected for the reading program is, of course, Jack London's The Call of the Wild.
A highlight of the festival is the High Plains Book Awards, given during a celebration and banquet Oct. 17 at MSU-Billings. Red Lodge author Gary Ferguson has been named the 2008 Emeritus Award Writer.
Sue Hart, MSU Billings English professor, nominated Ferguson for the Emeritus Award. “Gary would be deserving of the High Plains Emeritus Writer Award regardless of the BookFest theme,” Hart said. “But the minute I heard this year’s theme would be ‘The Call of the Wild,’ I thought of all his wonderful books that have the word ‘wild’ in their titles – and how many of those books speak so directly to human interaction with the wild, not just today, but from the first time humans ventured into the western area of the United States.”
Ferguson’s works include Walking Down the Wild, Shouting at the Sky: Troubled Teens and the Promise of the Wild, Decade of the Wolf: Returning the Wild to Yellowstone (the 2005 Montana Book of the Year), Hawks Rest: A Season in the Remote Heart of Yellowstone (winner of the Nonfiction Book of the Year Award from both the Mountains and Plains and the Pacific Northwest book sellers associations), Through the Woods, The Sylvan Path, and The Great Divide: The Rocky Mountains in the American Mind.
Other High Plains Book Awards to be announced at the banquet include winners in Best Fiction, Best Nonfiction and Best First Book categories and the Zonta Woman Writer Award.
The BookFest also includes public readings, panel discussions and hands-on workshops for aspiring writers aimed at engaging new audiences and fostering conversations about how literature addresses the unique challenges, risks and rewards of living in the “wild” west.
For more information, email .
