NOTES FROM THE MILTON CONFERENCE: I traveled to the John R. Milton Writers’ Conference Oct. 27-29 at University of South Dakota to read my work. The theme was “frontier nostalgia” and writers approached it from a variety of angles. Writers at the fiction reading on Saturday included me, former WYO Poet Laureate Bob Roripaugh, along with USD’s Mary Honerman and Sean Johnston. I read two pieces, one a short-short entitled “How the West Was Won” that imagined settlers of attention deficit disorder traveling the Oregon Trail in Wyoming in 1857. At one of Friday’s readings, John D. Nelson of Dakota State University in Madison read several WYO-based poems. He got to know the state pretty well when he was a grad student at UW in Laramie. In “Moving the Mobile Home,” he recounts the saga of how the constant winds buffeted his ancient trailer parked on Laramie’s western fringe. It’s finally hauled away by the salvage man. Mary Anne Maier, a Torrington native and UW grad who now lives in Longmont, Colo., read essays on the theme of “Interactions with landscape.” Her landscapes included Western Nebraska bluffs, Laramie Peak, and Bear Mountain near Hawk Springs. It also included inner landscapes, including that of her mother in Torrington whose favorite song was “Release Me” by Ray Price. Only later in life did Mary Anne understand the desperate longing that song reflected. South Dakotan Ryan Allen read a story about fishing -- and falling off a cliff – in the Wind River Range. Read more about the conference by going to my web site.
