THE IRISH CONNECTION: Have you spent enough time in WYO to be declared a bona-fide citizen and not just another transient? There are some telltale signs. First, any accent (foreign or domestic) has been honed by the wind, allowing you to say “crik” with a straight face. Second, if you have kids born and raised Wyomingites, they may have affinities for fishing, hunting, barrel-racing, pick-up truck buying, or some other pastime either rare or unavailable on your native turf. So feel free to consider Casper’s John English a Wyomingite. A native of the Republic of Ireland, his 25 years in the U.S. -- much of it in Wyoming -- has almost totally banished any hint of Dublin from his voice. He and his wife Meg’s 16-year-old son is the reigning state champ in bareback riding. John is an expert in woodworking and has made his living writing about the subject for more than 20 years. He can swap tips about cordless drills and carving knives with any homegrown artisan. His 500-plus articles have appeared in Today’s Woodworker and Woodworker’s Journal. He has written or co-written four books and is editor/publisher of an Internet site, woodezine.com. Whatever he writes, his love for the English language shines through. His latest project is a contemporary thriller entitled “A Terrible Beauty” set in Ireland and the U.S. On Oct. 1, he read the book’s second chapter to a crowd of about 25 souls at the Casper College Literary Conference. He admitted later that he was nervous reading his fiction in public for the first time. An excerpt from the novel won a $3,000 creative writing fellowship from the Wyoming Arts Council. It was the first fiction he had ever submitted to a writing contest. Maybe that’s why he sounded so surprised when I called him with the good news in August. At the Casper conference, John told me that he plans to use the money to borrow some fiction-writing time from his day job profiling workworkers such as Wyoming’s Ellis Hein, Mark Koons, and Dave Freudenthal, a guy who spends his time restoring old sheepwagons when he’s not busy being the state’s governor. And he hopes he gets more occasions to watch his rodeo son defend his title in bareback riding at high school rodeo events.
