Writers Voice

‘Bone Fire’ and ‘Claiming

Ground’ Authors on Tour

The YMCA Writer’s Voice presents two readings in Billings by Wyoming writers, Laura Bell, author of “Claiming Ground,” and Mark Spragg, author of “Bone Fire.” The readings and book signings will be at 7 p.m., Wednesday, March 10, at Barnes and Noble on 24th Street West and noon, Thursday, March 11, at Parmly Billings Library.

Additional appearances by the two writers are March 9, 2-6 p.m., at Thistle Books in Cody, Wyoming, and March 12, at 3-5 p.m. at Red Lodge Books in Red Lodge, Montana. All events are free to the public.

Spragg’s new novel, “Bone Fire,” follows the characters from his previous book, “An Unfinished Life,” a decade later.

Ishawooa, Wyoming, is far from bucolic nowadays. The sheriff, Crane Carlson, needs no reminder of this but gets one anyway when he finds a kid not yet 20, murdered in a meth lab. His other troubles include a wife who’s going off the rails with bourbon and pot, and his own symptoms of the disease that killed his grandfather.

Einar Gilkyson, taking stock at 80, counts among his dead a lifelong friend, a wife and — far too young — their only child. His long-absent sister has lately returned home from Chicago after watching her soul mate die. His granddaughter, Griff, has dropped out of college to look after him, though Einar would rather she continue with her studies and her boyfriend, Paul.

Completing this extended family are Barnum McEban and his ward,

Kenneth, a 10-year-old, whose mother — Paul’s sister — is off marketing spiritual enlightenment.

What these characters have to contend with on a daily basis is bracing enough, involving car accidents, runaway children, strokes and Lou Gehrig’s disease, not to mention the motorcycle rallies and rodeos that flood the tiny local jail.

But as their lives become even more strained, hardship foments exceptional compassion and generosity, and those caught in their own sorrow alleviate the same in others, changing themselves as they do so. In this gripping story, along with harsh truths and difficult consolation, come moments of hilarity and surprise and beauty. Spragg writes compellingly about the modern West, and in “Bone Fire,” he is at the very height of his powers.

Spragg is also the author of “Where Rivers Change Direction,” a memoir that won the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, and “The Fruit of Stone,” a novel. Both were top-ten Book Sense selections and have been translated into seven languages. He lives in Cody, Wyoming, and Red Lodge, Montana.

Quietly profound and moving, astonishing in its honesty, in its deep familiarity with country rarely seen so clearly, and in beauties all its own, Bell’s “Claiming Ground” is a truly singular memoir.

In 1977, Bell, at loose ends after graduating from college, leaves her family home in Kentucky for a wild and unexpected adventure — herding sheep in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin.

Inexorably drawn to this life of solitude and physical toil, a young woman in a man’s world, she is perhaps the strangest member of this beguiling community of drunks and eccentrics.

So begins her search for a place to belong and for the raw materials with which to create a home and family of her own. Yet, only through time and distance does she acquire the wisdom that allows her to see the love she lived through and sometimes left behind.

By turns cattle rancher, forest ranger, outfitter, masseuse, wife and mother, Bell vividly recounts her struggle to find solid earth in which to put down roots. Brimming with careful insight and written in a spare, radiant prose, her story is a heart-wrenching ode to the rough, enormous beauty of the Western landscape. It addresses the peculiar sweetness of hard labor and finding oneself even in isolation, given to a life formed by nature, and to the redemption of love. YMCA Writer’s Voice events are supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Montana Cultural Trust