Todd Goddard & Jamie Harrison, DEVOURING TIME & A RIVER DREAM

Todd Goddard and Jamie Harrison visit the store to discuss their books Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life and A River Dream: The Writing and Art of Russell Chatham’s Clark City Press.

Based on more than one hundred original interviews and drawing upon Harrison’s collected papers, Devouring Time is the first and only literary biography of this beloved author, whose playful, irreverent, and spiritual work continues to find and delight new readers. In A River Dream, Clark City’s former editor, novelist Jamie Harrison, daughter of Jim Harrison, has collected some of the best of the press’s prose, art, and poetry, in a glorious celebration of a small and lost world.

About Devouring Time

Jim Harrison (1937–2016) was widely considered one of the finest voices of his generation. His twenty-one books of fiction and fourteen books of poetry influenced a generation of writers. Harrison helped to shape the course of contemporary American literature, revitalizing in particular the novella form, of which he was a recognized master.

Harrison’s literary achievements were matched only by the literary persona that he cultivated during a fecund time in American letters and in the company of a remarkable cohort of friends, writers, actors, and artists, including Thomas McGuane, Peter Matthiessen, Jimmy Buffett, and Jack Nicholson. His articles for such magazines as Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Esquire, and Outside in the 1970s won him a loyal readership who reveled in his high spirits and prodigious appetites.

For all his notoriety as a writer of prose, however, poetry remained his first and longest-abiding love. He cherished his geographic remoteness from what he called the “dream coasts” of New York City and Los Angeles, preferring to hunt, fish, and drink in the backwoods bars of Michigan, Arizona, and Montana.

Based on more than one hundred original interviews and drawing upon Harrison’s collected papers, Devouring Time is the first and only literary biography of this beloved author, whose playful, irreverent, and spiritual work continues to find and delight new readers.

About A River Dream

An anthology and tribute to a unique independent publisher, Clark City Press.

In 1987, the painter and author and fly fisherman Russell Chatham, renowned for his stunning landscape paintings and his appetite for life, decided to take control of his own career by creating a publishing house in Livingston, Montana.

As one does, at least if they are Russell Chatham. “Control” was probably the wrong concept—for the next five years, Clark City Press was the chaotic home of beautifully produced works by an eclectic, talented collection of writers and artists, many of them given a painting in lieu of a publishing advance. What began as an effort to publish Chatham’s own work and that of his friends (a large and varied group) in elegant trade paperbacks morphed into something grander and more wayward.

Chatham could talk almost anyone into anything, and before the press imploded, all sorts of people said yes: Barry Gifford signed on for A Good Man to Know, a fictionalized memoir about his gangster father, Jim Harrison traded paintings for The Theory & Practice of Rivers and Just Before Dark, and Rick Bass wrote about the first wolves to resettle the continental United States in The Ninemile Wolves. Clark City Press published Thomas McGuane on fishing and memory, Guy de la Valdene on hunting woodcock, Richard Hugo’s only mystery, James Crumley’s short stories, and Peter Stackpole’s Life photos from the golden age of Hollywood.

Todd Goddard is an associate professor of literary studies at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. He received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work has been funded by the Mellon Foundation and a Bordin-Gillette Fellowship from the University of Michigan. He lives in Salt Lake City.

Jamie Harrison is the author of seven novels, including the Jules Clement series, The Center of Everything, and The Widow Nash, and recently published A River Dream, an anthology celebrating Clark City Press, where she was once the editor. She lives in Livingston, Montana.

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