When Wyoming is in your soul, what art does it produce?
That was the question posed at the beginning of a Friday night panel with Wyoming writers Nicholas Trandahl, Maria Kelson and K.J. Gillenwater in Lander.
The answer, it turns out, is as expansive as the state’s skyline. What comes from the minds of these wordsmiths is everything from a thriller set in the damp redwood country to a science fiction world inhabited by robots and abstract architectural poetry for healing.
The panel marked the culmination of a “Meet the Authors” program hosted by Lander’s Bookmarked Literary Arts Festival, which puts on a festival each October. Festival organizers secured a Wyoming Humanities grant for this program, which entailed distributing copies of the authors’ books to local libraries to give away for free, and then making the authors available to local students, book club participants and others to discuss their processes.
Though they have the home state of Wyoming in common, each author’s work is wholly distinct.
Trandahl is a U.S. Army veteran, poet, newspaper journalist and father of three. He is the mayor of Upton and assistant publisher and editor of the Weston County Gazette. For him, poetry serves as a way to process and work through the trauma he experienced in the military, he said. His poems, many of which emerge from Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy sessions, are “architectural” works that he likened to abstract art.
“In my efforts to break language, creating a concrete visual representation of what I’m feeling as I’m writing these poems matters just as much as the content that’s in it,” Trandahl said.
Thermopolis writer Kelson is also a poet, but she recently released her debut novel, “Not the Killing Kind,” a crime thriller that takes place in Humboldt County, California. In place of the hard-bitten and hard-drinking male so often at the center of the genre’s tales, her protagonist is a Mexican American mother and educator trying to solve a murder in order to exculpate her falsely accused son. The novel took Kelson 12 years and eight drafts to finish, she told the audience, and her research entailed traveling to Humboldt County to interview local experts about issues like crime and immigration.
Cody author Gillenwater is prolific, with more than 20 books to her name. The former U.S. Navy linguist, who has written novels in genres spanning young adult fiction, science fiction, romance and supernatural, says she gets inspiration from the fascinating tidbits of life she comes across. An obsession with gold-mining shows on the Discovery Channel, for example, helped inspire her “Aurora” series, which follows a female underwater dredge miner in Alaska.
Along with sharing their muses and strategies for getting words onto the page, all three shared encouragement to anyone interested in penning their own novel, memoir or poetry collection.
“Just do it,” Gillenwater said.
