Full Description
An anthology and tribute to a unique independent publisher, Clark City Press.
In 1987, the painter and author and fly fisherman Russell Chatham, renowned for his stunning landscape paintings and his appetite for life, decided to take control of his own career by creating a publishing house in Livingston, Montana.
As one does, at least if they are Russell Chatham. "Control" was probably the wrong concept—for the next five years, Clark City Press was the chaotic home of beautifully produced works by an eclectic, talented collection of writers and artists, many of them given a painting in lieu of a publishing advance. What began as an effort to publish Chatham's own work and that of his friends (a large and varied group) in elegant trade paperbacks morphed into something grander and more wayward.
Chatham could talk almost anyone into anything, and before the press imploded, all sorts of people said yes: Barry Gifford signed on for A Good Man to Know, a fictionalized memoir about his gangster father, Jim Harrison traded paintings for The Theory & Practice of Rivers and Just Before Dark, and Rick Bass wrote about the first wolves to resettle the continental United States in The Ninemile Wolves. Clark City Press published Thomas McGuane on fishing and memory, Guy de la Valdene on hunting woodcock, Richard Hugo's only mystery, James Crumley's short stories, and Peter Stackpole's Life photos from the golden age of Hollywood.
In A River Dream, Clark City's former editor, novelist Jamie Harrison, has collected some of the best of the press's prose, art, and poetry, in a glorious celebration of a small and lost world.
Contents
PREFACE
Jamie Harrison
NONFICTION
Thomas McGuane
"Chatham v. the Facts" from Russell Chatham and "Casting on a Sea of Memories" from Silent Seasons: Twenty-one Fishing Stories
Guy de la Valdène
Chapter from Making Game: An Essay on Woodcock
Russell Chatham
"Hard as a Rock" from The Angler's Coast and "Eating Around" from Dark Waters: Essays, Stories, and Articles
William Hjortsberg
"The Fly Shop" from Silent Seasons: Twenty-one Fishing Stories
Stephen Bodio
Chapter from Querencia
Rick Bass
Chapter from The Ninemile Wolves
Jim Harrison
"Hunger, Real and Unreal" and "Night Walking" from Just Before Dark: Collected Nonfiction
POEMS & FICTION
Jim Harrison
"Homily," "Porpoise," and "Counting Birds" from The Theory & Practice of Rivers and New Poems
Keith Wilson
"XIV: Waterfront Bars," "CXXII: A School of Small Fish," and "CXXIII: The Trey of Spades" from Graves Registry
Greg Keeler
"Salmon Fly Hatch on the Henry's Fork" and "The Ghost of Richard Brautigan on Trail Creek" from Epiphany at Goofy's Gas
Dan Gerber
"Why I Don't Take Naps in the Afternoon" from A Last Bridge Home: New and Selected Poems, chapter from A Voice from the River, and "Yard Sale" from Grass Fires
Richard Currey
Chapter from Crossing Over: The Vietnam Stories
Barry Gifford
"My Mother's People from A Good Man to Know: A Semi-Documentary Fictional Memoir and chapter from New Mysteries of Paris
Richard Hugo
Chapter from Death and the Good Life
James Crumley
The Way of the Road
Chapter from The Muddy Fork & Other Things: Short Stories and Nonfiction
ART & MISCELLANY
Stephen Collector
Excerpt from Law of the Range: Portraits of Old-Time Brand Inspectors
Peter Stackpole
Excerpt from Peter Stackpole: Life in Hollywood, 1936-1952
Diana Guest
Jim Harrison's introductory essay to Stonecarver
THE LAST CATALOGUE
Red & Blue Days by Peter Matthiesen
Sworn Before Cranes by Merrill Gilfillan
The Massacre at Sand Creek by Bruce Cutler
Go by Go by Jon A. Jackson
