Powerful Prose Annick Smith’s Writing Brings Out The Character Of Region

“Homestead” by Annick Smith (Milkweed, $19.95, 206 pages)

I’ve quietly admired writer Annick Smith for several years. I knew she’s one of a group of writers who live near Missoula. And the collective work of these Montana writers represents the bulk of the writing that defines the Inland Northwest and the type of people who love it here. I just didn’t often run across her writing, which appeared only occasionally in varied magazines, and never heard anyone else mention her work.

While I gravitate to the work of regional writers, that’s not the lone attraction of Smith’s work, nor even it’s strength. Her writing, like the place that inspires it, is strong and deliberate with sharp edges rounded to insights. Her essays, which I first saw in Outside magazine, flow with well-crafted phrasing and images as clear as a subzero winter night in Montana. Like this passage from “The Rites of Snow”:

When summer ends and the tourists ride off in their motor homes and the highways are slick with black ice, hard-core Montanans begin our six-month winter dances. Bars fill up with blue-lipped men and women in parkas and boots. We drink too much, eat red meat, smoke any weed. We collect unemployment and spend hours jump-starting stalled rigs. We swear we’ll move to Arizona. We pray for snow.

It is this mix of festivity and danger, sparkle and dread that draws me so close to winter, to mountains, to Montana. When you can see your breath, you know you are alive.

For more than three decades Smith has called a ranch in the mountains 20 miles northeast of Missoula home. The nearby Big Blackfoot River, the mountains, the solitude, the expanse provide her with material.

The name Annick Smith was only vaguely familiar when, a year after I read “The Rites of Snow,” Outside published “The Importance of Dunes,” a poetic piece of prose about childhood summers spent on the shore of Lake Michigan. Without looking at the byline, I knew she had written this essay, too. That’s how strong the imagery is in her work.

“All the summers of my childhood, I lived on the beaches of Lake Michigan,” she wrote. “My second-story bedroom faced west, toward the lake. I slept with the sounds of waves lapping or waves crashing, waves roaring in the gusts and thunder of an electrical storm. There were gulls diving, and thin-legged sandpipers on the beach where I stood. When sky drops into lake and waves pull at your toes, any summer child knows she is on the edge - a small person in a great blue world.”

It sent me to the bookstore searching for any books by this talented Northwest writer. I found none but saw evidence of her sense of well-crafted and beautiful writing in “The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology,” which she co-edited with her intimate friend William Kittredge. I was confident, however, that eventually a writer this talented would produce a book.

Now she has. “Homestead,” published with little fanfare this spring, offers readers a collection of Smith’s essays. The thread which runs through most is her love of Montana - the land and the people.

Although many of the selections appeared first in magazines ranging from Big Sky Journal to Travel and Leisure, rereading them is like visiting a friend; they are familiar but there are still nuances and subtleties to be discovered, admired and enjoyed.

Smith is not a slow writer, as a glance at her publication list might at first indicate. Rather, she has utilized her talents over the past four decades in several other venues including film making. She co-produced “A River Runs Through It,” a film inspired by the book of the same name by her friend Norman Maclean, and was executive producer of the feature film “Heartland.” And, perhaps when you are surrounded by the literary giants she claims among her friends, the likes of Kittredge, Maclean and Dick Hugo, it’s easy to appear diminutive as a writer.

Through her early years in Montana, Smith raised four boys after her husband, David Smith, died in his 30s of heart disease. He was lured from Seattle to Missoula by Hugo and taught at the University of Montana.

While it’s clear that grief and the unexpected task of making your way alone, and the challenge of living on a remote ranch with four children, inspired Smith’s writing, it is also her innate sense of place that gives her work depth and power.

Smith is now writing a book about Oklahoma’s tallgrass prairie for the Nature Conservancy. Let’s hope eventually she will come off the prairie and back to the mountains in her writing. For while the Montana literary scene seems thick with men writing about the region, Smith’s work offers a powerful women’s voice to all the writing about this place in which we live.

, DataTimes