berth PREFACE

Every once in a while, a book comes along that reminds me of how transcendent truly good writing can be, full of wonder and mystery and elegance, against the backdrop of an otherwise cynical age. 

We’re in a muddled, increasingly angry and increasingly anxious time, no doubt. I guess it’s not surprising that much of contemporary creative writing dispenses entirely with old-fashioned notions like Beauty, and Truth, in the interest of substituting unrelenting Gloom for essential Seriousness. So I read the collection you now hold with an ever-increasing relief that a kindred spirit is out there, crafting sinuous lines and gorgeous images in the shadow of the Bighorn Mountains, out of reverence for something bigger and more enduring than our own immediate angst.

I met Megan once, years ago, at an event in Minneapolis for my own first book, a novel which funnily enough is also set in the shadow of the Bighorns. She stuck in my mind because she was kind enough to let me know specifically how much she identified with one of my characters, a young woman of about her own age, heading West to chase a dream. That spot-on gesture meant a lot because it assured me I’d done something right, created a character “out of my lane” that still rang true, to a reader who would know.

Turns out, she herself is also a writer, living now and writing about and yearning to know the same Western landscape that inspires a like reverence in so many of us who have chosen this region as home. She composes lines that tap the rhythm not only of syllables and stresses, but of the seasons and cycles and settings of the natural world we inhabit. She sees rock, river, and soil, meadowlarks and prairie grass, with the eye of a naturalist; she captures wonder with the intuition of a true artist, one who still believes in the sublime notion that both the world and the words to describe it can be beautiful. 

This is not to say that everything here is a hundred-percent hunky-dory—she hints and intimates and sometimes ruminates on helplessness and tragedy and loss, as any honest life must. Even the land itself can seem like the product of great trial and struggle. My how ferocious God seems! she writes, to split the magma and fossil-stones over and over again with thunder…

True enough, and we are indeed at the whims and the caprice of forces totally beyond our control. But if that’s all we were, prisoners of our own trauma, there would be no concept of the sublime or the magical in the first place, no impulse to create and no dreams to follow, no delight at the way words can be crafted into arcs and whorls to flow into something both lovely and true, and so transcend the slings and arrows of merely being alive.

Now here we are, quite a far piece down the road, and I have the honor of cracking the champagne over the bow of this startling, glittering artifact. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Malcolm Brooks

Missoula, Montana