Plains inspire unique book

By Jenny Shank , Special to the Rocky

Published March 7, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

Text size

Peter Brown, left, and Kent Haruf collaborated on the book, mingling Brown's photographs with Haruf's brief writings about the high plains.

More Books

More stories »

Kent Haruf and Peter Brown take the high plains as their muse. Nowhere is that more evident than in their new book, West of Last Chance (Norton, $49.95), a unique collaboration mingling Brown's evocative photographs with Haruf's brief writings depicting life on the high plains.

Brown, a teacher, author and award-winning artist, has been photographing the plains for more than 25 years. Haruf is the acclaimed author of Plainsong, Eventide and other novels set in fictional Holt, based on the eastern Colorado towns where he grew up.

The two met at a reading Haruf gave in Houston in 1999 when Brown presented the author with a copy of his book of photography, On the Plains. Haruf later wrote that he "was so taken by the beauty and clarity of the photographs that I asked my publisher to hire him to take a photograph for the cover of my next book." The men soon forged a friendship.

They spoke to the Rocky in advance of several book-signings. (The interview has been edited for space reasons.)

Can you explain the themes of each section in West of Last Chance?

Haruf: There's a narrative arc to this book. It begins with the land and the landscape, and as I write, "You have to know how to look at this country. You have to slow down. It isn't pretty, but it's beautiful."

Every article I've read about this book has quoted that line.

Haruf: Well, it's true. You can't see it unless you slow down. You have to change the way you look at the land.

If you're expecting to see aspen or Longs Peak or something, that's not what this book is about. The book is about slowing down and finding what is of value and significance once you've done that. So it begins with the land, then it moves into Native Americans. We start with the massacre at Sand Creek, and the beautiful photographs give a kind of modern uptake on that . . .

(Then) it touches on some of the devastation that has been done to the land, and then there's a sort of lyrical entry into towns. It's as if we were coming in from outside into the town, what that looks like from a distance . . . It closes by going to church, talking about church suppers. We thought it would be too soft and sentimental to end in church, so it pulls away from that and ends back on the land. There's an arc, but there's also kind of a circle.

Why did you decide not to make that narrative explicit?

Haruf: We wanted to see if people like you would figure it out. We had talked about having an introduction, but we gave up that idea because we decided it was unnecessary and intrusive.

What did you tell the people you photographed?

Brown: Generally I just show up with this big camera. This is an old, wooden Deardorff camera made in 1951, which is an attraction in itself. So they're interested in that, and I just talk to them about what I'm up to, and it follows from there.

When you go to an area to photograph, do you have a plan?

Brown: A lot of it is intuitive. That's one of the things I like best about photography, that it's a process of discovery. When I meet people, I usually ask them if there's some place that would be interesting to photograph. I arrive at a little town or someplace in the plains, and someone will come up and start talking, and they will direct me. Half of the time I won't be able to find wherever it is that they are suggesting, but in that process I will find something else. Then I worked with Kent and tried to put the photographs and the text together. While I was photographing, I also had Kent's texts quite often in the back of my mind.

It must have been fun to write these pieces - they're so free.

Haruf: I don't know if I'd use the word fun, but they were a very different kind of writing than what I normally do when I'm writing a novel. I would get up in the morning sometimes in a pre-waking state, and some of these images and thoughts would come to me and I would write them down. A few of them came that way. Others I did in a more deliberate way.

But I guess I'd have to say it was an easier kind of writing for me to do than to write concentrated fiction, something that resembles literature.

There's an empty feeling to a lot of what you depict - many of the buildings on main streets are shuttered. Does that reflect what you perceived, or are there places where the population is returning?

Brown: My sense of the plains is that there are towns that will continue to do well, but most of those little towns are fairly shuttered up and the population is moving away. I think there are people who are coming in, but it's a hard life out there, no question about it.

What do you think will happen to these little towns?

Haruf: I don't know if I can make a generalization about that, but I know that some towns are decreasing in population because the farms are getting larger, and so it requires fewer people to farm them. . . . Also, if a community loses its high school, that town is going to dry up pretty quickly. High schools are what keep these communities going. They rally around their high schools, and that's part of why athletics are so important in these little towns.

In this book there is a section about a football game, and that's not by accident. That's an attempt on our part to suggest the importance of high schools and athletics to small towns. It's very easy to be cynical about that, but on the other hand, if something brings a community together and unites them in any fashion that's not destructive or violent, that's a good thing, that's a virtue. And that's what happens in these little towns.

What's also happening in agriculture generally, and is certainly true in eastern Colorado, is big feed lots are being developed, big dairies, huge confined hog operations. Those are not, in my view, healthy changes.

Working in those places, like confined hog operations - that job is incredibly awful. The stench to begin with, the working conditions, what you're doing to animals. All those things are horrific. Most Caucasian Americans don't want to do that kind of work. So that's attracted a number of people from Mexico, some of them legal, some of them not. I'm not saying immigration is bad; I feel just the opposite. But it's still horrific to think that anybody is going to have to work in those kind of conditions . . .

Also, gasohol is now a big deal out there. It's increased the depletion of the aquifer because it takes water to grow corn to make gasohol. So there are these kinds of environmental and ecological changes occurring on the plains that are not helping, in my view.

Have you two influenced each other's art?

Brown: I don't presume to influence Kent. He is one of the most visual novelists - it's just incredible. I don't read anyone any more slowly than I do Kent. I savor every word, and each phrase sparks up a more complex set of visions.

Haruf: For me, the visual details are the most important. So I recognized immediately the quality of Peter's photographs, and the clarity and absence of sentimentality that I see too often in photographs. . . I don't know if we've been influential to each other or not, but I certainly admire the quality of his photographs.

Jenny Shank is a Boulder author who writes about books for NewWest.net. Her novel "Mile High" was a semifinalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition.

Kent Haruf and Peter Brown

* What: Appear at 7:30 p.m. today at the Tattered Cover in LoDo, 1628 16th St., and 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Boulder Book Store, 1107 Pearl St.

* Cost: Free

* Information: 303-436-1070 for Tattered Cover; 303-447-2074 for Boulder Book Store.

* The public is also invited to a free hour of drinks and snacks at Rockmount Ranch Wear, 1626 Wazee, at 5 p.m. today, prior to the Tattered Cover event.

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News