I'm really excited about my current project! I'm at work on a nonfiction book that explores the nuanced history of the Selway-Bitterroot Wildernesses Area, which straddles the Montana-Idaho border in the Northern Rocky Mountains. Part of my process involves fleshing out the lives of several individuals whose destinies intertwine with one another as well as with the larger narrative of place. The book is tentatively titled, Wild Lives: A History of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness.

Moose Creek Ranger Station, Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, Idaho. The first photo is from about 1925. The second from 2005.

Although the Selway-Bitterroot is the third largest wilderness area outside of Alaska and was among the first pieces of land to achieve wilderness status in the U.S., no comprehensive history has yet been written about it. My project uses audio and video recordings, historical and current photography, and three forms writing:

1) Historical Narrative. Through archival sources, I trace the history of the Selway-Bitterroot from the earliest Native American sources, to the letters of Bob Marshall in the 1920s and 30s, to the present day.

2) Interviews. Through audio, video, and written transcription of interviews, I present personal stories from a variety of people who have a deep connection to the Selway-Bitterroot from Nez Perce oral historians, to forest service employees, packers and outfitters, backpackers, bush pilots, and inholders. The historical scholarship will take on an immediacy in the context of individuals whose lives cover themes of loneliness, desire, loss, revenge, tolerance, lust and love against a landscape that is at once strikingly beautiful and unbelievably hostile.

3) Memoir. I write of growing up in close sympathy with my grandmother who lived the first twenty years of her married life in the Selway-Bitterroot as the wife of a Native American homesteader and forest ranger.

My aim in this on-going project is to demonstrate that the Selway-Bitterroot, and by extension all wilderness areas, are living histories. “Living history” is a term used by ethnographers like Dwight Conquerguard, historians such as Raphael Samuel, and artists like Janet Cardiff to describe a collaborative process that melds past and present and privileges contingency, embodied experience, and multiple voices over static, linear narrative.

I'm currently in the process of conducting interviews and visiting archives in Idaho and Montana.