"The greatest university of all is a collection of books."

— Thomas Carlyle

The Helena Festival of the Book is a 3-day fall festival celebrating writing, reading, literary and cultural issues, and books of Montana and our region.  The  Festival  is organized and operated solely by local writers, editors, and lovers of literature. It is sponsored by the great organizations listed to the right, and is supported by great friends listed on the “Sponsors” page on this website.

 All our readings and panel discussions are free and open to the public.

We are one of the few book festivals in the region to offer writer’s workshops

to support and encourage the work of local writers.

Please join us!

Events about Thomas Savage (1915-2003)

Thomas Savage was born in Salt Lake City in 1915 and spent his youngest years at his grandparents' sheep and cattle ranch in Lemhi, Idaho. Savage's parents divorced when he was an infant, and when he was five his mother married Charles Brenner, youngest son of the Brenner ranching family in Horse Prairie, Montana. Savage spent his boyhood between these two ranches, on the west and east side of the Continental Divide, and in Dillon, Montana, where he boarded out for school. Savage studied writing under Brassil Fitzgerald at Missoula, and worked at riding academies and a dude ranches in the Pacific Northwest. In 1939 he married Fitzgerald's daughter, Elizabeth (who published 9 novels of her own in her lifetime) and began working on his first novel, The Pass. He published a total of 13 novels, frequently returning to the land and culture of Montana. He taught at Suffolk and Brandeis Universities, won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980, and died in 2003 at the age of eighty-eight.

Women in Montana History

“Few people write,” said historian Henry Glassie. “Everyone makes things.” These books focus on the everyday things women have made—quilts, lives, dreams come true, the best of a bad situation—while making history in Montana. Sarah Carter, historian and professor of Native Studies of the University of Alberta, investigates the stories and experiences of women homesteaders in Montana and north of the Canadian line. Mary Murphy, the Michael P. Malone Professor of History at Montana State University, wrote the introduction to the new book, Border to Border: Quilts and Quiltmakers of Montana. Murphy is author of the beautiful, award-winning book, Hope in Hard Times: New Deal Photographs of Montana, 1936-42. What a joy to get these two knowledgeable minds together in the same room.

 

Our Gala Readings

Everybody loves to be read to. This year we have chosen from among the most noteworthy, intriguing, strongly voiced, or just plain captivating works that we've seen come out of our region. Some you've heard about: Steven Rinella’s new work, American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon, is a thoroughly engaging contemplation of the American bison by one of the most thoughtful storytellers in nonfiction today. (OK, Rinella lives in New York, but he writes about our region and comes here often.) And Wendy Parciak’s novel Requiem for Locusts was an Honor Book in the 2008 MontanaBook Awards.

Some of our authors you may not have read yet, but when you do you’ll be delighted. Sam Ligon writes gripping, compassionate short fiction. His volume of stories called Drift and Swerve shines a poignant light on young adults who have fallen (or dived) through the holes in our culture. Poet Laurie Lamon is a Pushcart Prize winner, a recipient of the Graves Award in the Humanities, and is a beautiful poet. Chris Dombrowski writes graceful, contemplative works, has been called “a damn fine human being” in print, and says “Writing poetry has increased my level of astonishment at the world and my existence here.” Their readings will nourish and delight.

And George Economou—Greek-American Great Falls native who grew up to be one of the shining stars of poetics and poetic translations in America today—is making a special trip to Montana to share some of his poetry, personal stories, and thoughts about translations—as a poet and as a human being. You will not want to miss this visit from a wonderful, engaging, warm-hearted man.

Writer's Workshops - $25 fee

Please register in advance at helenabookfest@gmail.com - or 443-0287

Memoir and Method 

with Fred Haefele

In this class, we’ll  discuss some famous memoirs and autobiographical essays, focusing on the opening pages. We’ll talk about the genre’s beauties and pitfalls; ways to avoid false starts, ways to sustain a book length effort, and some of the critical elements that make a memoir successful. Students engaged in writing memoir are invited to turn in 2-3 page samples a day ahead of class for discussion.   

How to Write a Political Poem – or “This Machine Kills Fascists”

with Chris Dombrowski
Many poets have heard, and perhaps repeated, Auden's famous remark: "Poetry makes nothing happen."  Not as many poets, though, know that Lorca's poems were crucial to Spain's Republican Soldiers in the Spanish Civil War, or that Tsar Alexander allegedly read Turgenev's Sportsman's Sketches just days before emancipating the Surfs, or that Plato, hoping to secure a fairly dogmatic system of government, wanted all poets removed from the political body at the outset.  "The line of poetry has its origins in the plowed field," wrote American poet Norman Dubie.  "Farmers are the natural enemies of the government.  The farmers are all but vanquished.  Poets too."  Are poetry and politics more wedded than we assume?  Should poetry concern itself with politics?  What makes a good political poem, if there is such a thing?  We'll attempt to answer these questions and others, as we examine poems by James Galvin, Lucia Perillo, Yusef Komunyakaa, ML Smoker, Bob Hicok, and others, and embark on a political poem of our own.

 The Short-short Story

with Sam Ligon

 In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust talks about the tyranny of rhyme forcing poets into some of their greatest lines. But prose writers have less experience with formal constraints, like rhyme, to put pressure on lines, and as a means to consider form in general. In this class we’ll be examining the form of the short-short story, how it often works (and doesn’t), as well as how formal constraint can change the way we approach line and story. Because there's so little space in a short-short, evocative outlines, shadows, implication, and suggestion hover at the edges. Short-shorts tend to rely on surprise, a hard, tight turn at the end. They can feel elliptical or fragmented, and are not always concerned with depth and complexity of character as much as with emotional gravity within a moment. Lydia Davis calls the short-short "a nervous form of story." Charles Baxter says the short-short needs "surprise, a quick turning of the wrist toward texture,  something suddenly broken or quickly repaired." Mark Strand says, "Its end is erasure."  

Sherman Alexie in the Classroom: “This is not a silent movie. Our voices will save our lives.”

with Heather E. Bruce 

In this workshop, participants will examine ways in which to teach the multifaceted works of Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene).  Participants will engage in reading and responding to a poem of Alexie’s “Introduction to Native American Literature” from the collection Old Shirts & New Skins as a workshop model for reading all types of literature. Heather Bruce is a Professor at University of Montana, and Director of Montana Writing Project.

Good Words Lecture - by Jim Rains

This year, Humanities Montana chose The Surrounded, the 1978 novel by Salish-Kootenai writer and activist D'Arcy McNickle (1904-1977) as its One Book Montana selection. Jim Rains, professor of Native American studies at MSU-Billings, will give a talk on McNickle's important and captivating work, which is considered one of the best works of fiction about Native American life in its period. Dust off your copy, or get a new one. This is the year we should all read it.

To find out more about Humanities Montana's One Book Montana program, visit:

http://www.humanitiesmontana.org/OneBook/onebook.php