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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

A Cowgirl From The Catskills Coeur D’Alene Author Of ‘Manure Happens’ Wants Her Poems To Make A Point

Hilma Volk can’t abide boredom.

She stopped writing a book about her big life adventure, hiking alone from Canada to New Mexico. The story just got boring, she says. Then she wrote a breathless screenplay about exploding volcanoes in Yellowstone National Park.

Seeing that plot played out on a movie screen would be great, but the Coeur d’Alene writer’s more immediate goal seems to be getting recognition as a darned good cowboy poet.

“Some poets describe things,” said Volk. “I like to tell stories. I like to have a punch line, or make a point.

“I appreciate poets who are clever.”

Her cleverness comes across in “Manure Happens,” a self-published collection that Volk signed Saturday at the Bookworm store.

The opening poem, “The Appaloosa Mare,” was inspired by a horse trader who admitted to Volk that he’d sold a blind mare. Its punch line is what he told the enraged customer: “I told ya … she don’t look too good.”

Volk calls herself a cowgal, but isn’t Western-born.

She grew up around horses in the Catskill Mountains of New York, though, and after college trained horses and helped neighbors herd cattle in her spare time. She worked eight years for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a job she quit to take her 135-day hike along the Continental Divide in 1980.

She owned a riding stable in the Catskills for four years. After liability insurance got too costly, she worked with delinquent teenagers on a wagon train, then held a lot of “manure jobs” in various states.

She began writing cowboy poetry during four years she spent wrangling on a Montana guest ranch.

She gave her first reading several years ago, at a Cowboy Poets of Idaho gathering. She sweated like crazy, she said.

But she’s gotten to like audiences, the bigger the better.

“I think of myself more as a performer than a writer,” she said.

Bored by poets who read in a droning monotone, Volk memorizes her work.

“That way I don’t lose contact with the audience. The bad part is if you forget where you were.”

Volk settled south of Coeur d’Alene four years ago because “It was somewhere I hadn’t lived before.” At 46, she works as a massage therapist and free-lance video script writer.

She sells “Manure Happens” bumper stickers, tapes, books and T-shirts in local stores and via her homepage on the Internet.

“There are a few poets who are making a living at it,” she said.

The top entertainers get $6,000 per performance. At this point, Volk is hoping to get on stage in cowboy poetry shows that may come together in Toppenish, Wash.

“That would increase my net worth by $30,” she said with a grin.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo