William Kittredge | The Next Rodeo, New and Selected Essays

Published: August 12, 2008

“All these stories are about a place called Home and a time in which I imagined we owned it all,” writes William Kittredge in the opening essay of his new collection.

Stories, he says later, “are valuable precisely to the degree that they are for the moment useful in our ongoing task of finding coherency in the world.”

This is the mastery the Missoula writer wields: telling stories that help us makes some sense the world we know simply as The West, straddling as he does the old (he was raised on a sprawling cattle ranch in eastern Oregon) and the new (he’s lived for many years in Missoula, where he taught creative writing to generations of students at The University of Montana).

In “How to Love This World,” he describes his first trip to Missoula. “I was looking for what I took to be a genuine world to inhabit. I wanted to be someone that I could understand and stand – a romantic idea that seems commonplace in the West these days.”

That genuine world now seems to inhabit Kittredge’s writing, which is so honest and knowing, that one can’t help but agree with Annie Dillard, who calls him “one of our finest writers.”

The Next Rodeo was published by Gray Wolf Press, St. Paul, MN, and sells for $15 softcover.

– Kristi Niemeyer