When We Were Wolves: Stories

"In Goya's greatest scenes," wrote Lawrence Ferlinghetti, "we seem to see/the people of the world/exactly at the moment when/they first attained the title of/'suffering humanity.'" In Jon Billman's stories, we find them much later -- trapped, yes, and skating on thin ice, but disillusioned in the best sense, they defy their suffering with a shoulder shrug, a fierce body check, and a line cast prayerfully into the nearest pond. In these stories, we don't find any of those larger-than-life heroes who make readers feel bad about themselves. What kind of heroism is possible in a wild, wild west that has degenerated into a turn-of-the-millenium high-desert wasteland where "the computer had the final word"? In Jon Billman's west, heroism means tanking a baseball game, believing it will bring rain to a drought-ravaged community. It means awakening a sense of the sublime in one's neighbors by spraypainting a naked woman on a water tower. Here, a man sometimes has no recourse but to spray insecticides above the home of the woman who never quite loved him back. Here, a man, if he wants to really be a man, must also be a wild animal, willing to attach a dog sled to his back and run yowling through snow and rabbitbrush. Hams Fork, Wyoming joins Yaknapatawpha County, Winesburg, Ohio, and Raymond Roussel's Africa on the itenary of all who are intent on traveling through what Keats called "realms of gold."

I once saw Jon Billman eat a garlic pancake. I remained his friend despite this, and he has here turned in a great collection of stories about Wyoming and environs. Before I read this book, I thought all western writing had saloons, spurs, buckin' broncs, hats measured by fluid capacity, and sagebrush or tumbleweeds or other non-leafy plant things. Jon's book has all of those, but it also has uranium prospecting, mural painting, prison hockey, firefighting, and several mentions of George Armstrong Custer. If you like these things, get this book and read it. There is also garlic.

Since Jon's early years -- from coloring Santa Claus with a black beard on a plastic dinner plate to claiming in 1980 that "cassette tapes won't last, 8-tracks will be around forever" -- my brother has never really had his finger planted firmly on the pulse of Americana. Luckily, When We Were Wolves shows that he finally got his act together. I can't wait to read what he does next.Good stuff, bro.

Jon Billman's collection of stories is a joy to read, and it resonates with an authenticity that makes a reader want to believe it all. Billman's characters are marginal and marginalized, caught in a range war between the the herd-fear of conformity and a place that demands robust individuality. People molded by their surroundings, both geographic and spiritual. As a Wyoming writer, I found its tone pitch-perfect. Recommended.

I WAS GIVEN THE BOOK AS A GIFT AND I HIGHLY PRAISE THE STORIES AND THE WRITING STYLE. I AM A BIG FAN OF SHORT STORIES AND JON BILLMAN WILL BE HEARD FROM AGAIN.