Having absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into, I left my undergraduate home in
Bozeman, Montana, to get my Ph.D. at the University of Rochester, in Rochester, NY. In what was undoubtedly more sheer luck and unearned White privilege than merit, I returned to
Montana State University’s English Department in Bozeman in 1995. I’m an Associate Professor
and I am honored to teach courses in western American literature, memoir, literary theory,
graphic novels, and LGBTQIA+ literatures. This wonderful gig, where I get to talk about
literature and ideas with students and colleagues, reminds me to stay fundamentally grateful.
In some overarching sense, all of my research has to do with loss. My book, Writing
Together/Writing Apart: Collaboration in Western American Literature (U Nebraska P, 2002), works against ideas of an individual, unified author, and my latest essay, “Ivan Doig’s ‘Geography of Risk’ and Legacies of Selfhood in Contemporary White Western Men’s Memoir,’ (The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West, ed. Susan Bernardin, forthcoming 2021) examines Doig’s struggle with his mother’s death and the impact it made on his sense of identity as a writer, while placing Doig’s search for healing within the larger literary inheritances of western male memoir writing. I am currently working on a memoir entitled To Give Me Good Gifts that weaves together my relationship with my mother with the heterosexist and classist ideologies of rural 1960s-1990s Montana.