1. Can you let us know a little about you? How did you come to writing, or it to you? Where you've lived?

I've always been a writer, from the time I could write I was penning stories. As an avid reader, I'd become so engaged with the characters that the endings were like losing good friends. So I'd take up where the book left off and write them back to life. Which led, of course, to discovering I could also create original characters. I was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin&emdash;long winters, highly conducive to quiet time and introspection. Then, as a young married woman, I moved to a small mini-farm just outside of Milwaukee, where my husband and I raised horses, geese, bees, had a small orchard and crops for canning which kept me too busy to write, but in my mid-thirties, I returned to that earliest passion and went back to writing.

2. "Winter Range" is an excellent novel, spare and eloquent. It's not easily classifiable, in genre terms, but it's a story of community, isn't it?

Winter Range is a story of community. Certainly it has to do with the desire and need to belong to a society of people, particularly in those harsh conditions where survival can depend on that interconnectedness, but it's also about our responsibility&emdash;the heart of community&emdash;and our need to reconsider what community is in its broadest possible terms: our relationship to the land, its animals and the welfare of that larger community in which we are integrally a part.

3. I heard that Chas Stubblefield's sotry is based on a true incident. Is that so?

Chas Stubblefield is an absolute fiction. The act of abuse unfortunately isn't. I was in graduate school in Montana when a particularly ugly case of abuse was prosecuted in the eastern part of the state. It was a couple who, it turned out, had a history of starving their horse herds. It started me thinking about who would do such a thing, and what the reaction would be in a community so invested in the idea of independence and personal property. And what if someone "outside" of that community was faced with the dilemma. That's the way these pieces come together&emdash;a string of what-ifs, and a curiosity about the choices we make,our basis for those choices, the consequences of free will.

4. The landscape has a lot to do with any Montana writing. How does it affect your story?

Landscape doesn't just affect the stories I write (though it's a central element in all of my writing) it also affects the way I see and act within the world. I'm convinced that's true of all of us. We are not separate from the natural world, but are shaped and altered by its terrain as much as the terrain is altered by rain, wind and circumstances. When I first came west, I couldn't bear to stand on the side of a mountain. My arms would windmill and I'd get struck with vertigo. I was, by long association, a flatlander, and my psychology, my expectations and experiences were defined by the fact that my two feet had always been solidly and evenly planted beneath me. That undoubtedly had a lot to do with the formation of my practical nature. It's been extremely interesting to see how the rootedness of my midwestern history has adapted over the last fifteen years to a compromise with a more western "life on the edge."

5. What and who are the main influences on your work?

Main influences. Goodness. There are so many, but I'd have to say Jack London in my earliest years (he really started me writing). Faulkner and D.H. Lawrence as a teenager (yes, I know, a rather unlikely combination) and most recently William Kittredge, Mary Clearman Blew, Kim Barnes, Cormac McCarthy, Andre Dubus, Flannery O'Connor. Poets Robert Wrigley, Dylan Thomas, Pattiann Rogers, Mary Oliver, Richard Hugo.

6. As independent booksellers, you know we'd love to hear what you've been reading lately.

I'm working on a new novel right now, Black Dogs, set in contemporary Idaho, Lewiston and Hells Canyon specifically. It's set in summer (spare me another winter landscape!) and the central characters are a woman nicknamed Sailor and her husband. One recent discovery is that she's a herpetologist (studies snakes, specifically rattlesnakes) who is obsessed with risk and her need to control danger by confronting it. I'm also working on a collection of nonfiction essays called Flying Changes: Menopause on Horseback. It's about mid life and my return to working with horses as a means to cope with the physical, emotional and intellectual changes in this time of life&emdash;the pride of competence, the regrets for past mistakes, the joy of seeing our children come of age, and the grief of losing loved ones. What a tumultuous time. Just when we thought we had it made. I'm also starting a new collection of short stories.

There's a lot of things I miss about being a bookseller (I mean that sincerely) but one of the things I miss most is feeling so well connected to the larger literary world&emdash;knowing who's writing what, and when it's coming out. I miss the excitement, the buzz of books. These days, I'm knee deep in research (rattlesnakes for goodness sake) and exploring the history and mythologies of the West. Between that and preparing for classes, the stack of bedside books just gets larger, but it includes Michael Ondaatje, Charles Baxter, Alice Munro, Michael Cunningham. Just finished some advance readers copies (a perk, I get to read and sometimes blurb books) including Duff Brenna's The Altar of the Body and J. Robert Lennon's On the Night Plain. Wonderful books both of them. What a pleasure.

8. What does winning the PNBA award mean to you?

I remember working in Fact & Fiction Bookstore and posting the annual PNBA winners. This had followed weeks of debating who would win and the requisite "I told you" sos afterward. But what it really exemplified was how completely we were absorbed by the work of our contemporaries, how much we believed in the writer and her or his work, and the excitement that work brought to our lives and the lives of our reading customers. That's some pretty heady stuff. And that's what this award means to me&emdash;the faith of the people who know what the work of literature is really about. It tends to humble a person.