Whitefish authors part of book featuring state's wild spaces

Montana’s open spaces mean different things to different people.

For some, the state’s lands are a reminder of a childhood spent roaming, and the changing ownership and usage of lands show how quickly things can change.

And for others, they can be a reminder of how people can have entirely different experiences on the same landscapes.

A number of these perspectives are included in “A Million Acres: Montana Writers Reflect on Land and Open Space.” The new collection of essays, stories and poems made by the Montana Land Reliance is in celebration of its millionth protected acre.

The Montana Land Reliance is a nonprofit land trust focused on acquiring and managing lands for conservation in the state.

The book features Whitefish writers Antonia Malchik and Christine Carbo alongside a slew of other Montana-based writers. Both will speak at a book tour event on Monday, Nov. 4 at the Frame of Reference Gallery downtown.

Malchik is a writer who has appeared in The Atlantic, High Country News and other publications alongside her recent book, “A Walking Life.” She focuses her piece, Nothing More Than Everything, on her memories of “the ranch.”

“Each scant member of my family knows what ‘the ranch’ refers to: that spread in the wrinkled draws of eastern Montana where my mother was raised, where she learned to drive an eighteen-wheeler and ride a horse, and to love, under the tutelage of her father, every particle of the block of virgin prairie resting the middle of several thousand acres devoted to wheat and cattle,” she writes.

Malchik reflects on “the ranch” and what purposes land should serve, both in her view and in her mother’s view.

A fifth-generation Montanan born in Bozeman, Malchik grew up experiencing Montana’s open spaces before leaving to live elsewhere upon reaching adulthood. She returned to Montana 20 years later.

Nothing More Than Everything was first published in 2015 for the creative nonfiction 1966 Journal, though Malchik started drafting it years before.

“At the time I wrote it, I was actually living in upstate New York and I was homesick a lot of the time. I spent a lot of time just writing about Montana and the landscape and my connection to it,” she said.

Her piece is a mix of personal sentiments, reflections on her mother’s views concerning land use, and a pondering about her own questions concerning resource use, and Malchik says sometimes there are no right answers.

“I write a lot about how we make choices about how we use resources and what those effects are for generations. Like with the Anaconda Mining Company, you make a choice about jobs and resources and things, and then 100 years later you’re still cleaning it up. How do you balance that?” she said. ”Being a multi-generation Montanan, you know both sides of things and how people view the relationships with the landscape can be very different, but we all have to live in the same place together.”

In her fictional short story, “Surrender,” Whitefish-based novelist Christine Carbo explores a night in a woman’s life and the context in which it happens.

The protagonist is out camping alone, reflecting on her daughter leaving for a far-away college, painful memories in the past, and the looming worry over the two gruff men camping nearby.

“I had intended to camp for two nights, but I realize now that I’m going to pack up and leave before the sun reaches the bottom of the canyon. Despite the fact that I am declaring or reclaiming myself out here, I am the one who will surrender,” Carbo writes. “There’s no point in staying and feeling uneasy around these two men. I will find a different place to camp or simply go home. Old lessons don’t die easily.” Carbo wrote the piece for “A Million Acres” and said she hoped to explore a different side of the outdoor experience within the collection.

“I just felt like there was a space in the book to explore something a little different than people’s ideas about space in terms of just open space and what the land means to them and what it’s like growing up ... I love all that, but I just thought, ‘What would be a different angle on that, something that’s more about me as a woman and how I might experience open space?’” Carbo said.

“A Million Acres” contributors Malchik, Christine Carbo and Alexis Bonogofsky, along with editor Keir Graff, will speak on the book and their work at 7 p.m. at the Frame of Reference Gallery in Whitefish on Monday, Nov. 4.

For more information, visit www.riverbendpublishing.com.