John Clayton's Blog

To kick off the week before publication of my book Wonderlandscape: Yellowstone National Park and the Evolution of an American Cultural Icon, I’m celebrating some other great books that are currently on my mind.

First is the war novel Brave Deeds by my friend David Abrams. David has lots of friends, because he's a hard-working “book evangelist” and incredibly insightful reviewer. His previous novel, Fobbit, got well-deserved praise for being one of the first novels to tackle the Iraq war on a comic level. "Fobbits" were the employees of forward operating bases (FOBs), and David’s tale of their travails was a 21st century combination of Catch-22 and Office Space. Brave Deeds covers more-conventional soldiering--six AWOL combatants crossing war-torn Baghdad. Although I haven’t yet had a chance to read it (because its pub date is one week before mine: August 1!), the reviews are coming in very favorably.

At a journalism conference back in 2001, I met a smart, talented writer named Jessica DuLong--also one of the world's only female fireboat engineers. A few years later I was excited to see the New Yorker writing up her memoir of that experience, My River Chronicles. Now she's got a follow-up, Dust to Deliverance: Untold Stories from the Maritime Evacuation on September 11. Giving it a great blurb--"A waterborne evacuation larger than Dunkirk--in New York Harbor? How come we barely noticed this at the time, and have largely forgotten about it since?"--is Adam Hochschild, the magnificent author who was addressing the conference when she and I met.

Just before Montana's special Congressional election in May, a BuzzFeed article previewing the election was all over my social media. Unlike so many national journalists, Anne Helen Petersen painted a picture of the real state I actually know. She captured what Montana voters wanted—in my opinion, far better than either party did! So I went out and bought her just-released book, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, and wow. It’s smart, of-the-moment, easy to read, and informative. Most surprising to me was its similarity to my book: ten chapters, each exploring an aspect of Yellowstone/celebrity as a representation of wider cultural values.

Todd Wilkinson's Last Stand, about the environmentalist billionaire Ted Turner, has been on my to-read-soon list since it came out a few years ago. Finally this summer became “soon.” Was I surprised that a hard-hitting journalist could do an independent investigation of a billionaire, and end up liking him? No, as a longtime fan of Todd's work, that’s what I expected. What really surprised me was learning how Turner applied his business smarts--building the brand of "bison"--to his ranching/environmental work.

I had just reached a point of no return on Wonderlandscape when I learned that noted journalist and author George Black was about to publish Empire of Shadows: The Epic Story of Yellowstone. It made me nervous. Luckily I can report that Empire of Shadows is both a very different book than mine, and a complementary one. Black really wants to talk about the Indian wars that preceded the founding of Yellowstone, the ones that made Montana "safe" enough for the world’s first national park. Sadly, they involved less-well-known versions of the same types of atrocities that have been condemned elsewhere in the Indian wars--which were committed by some of the same people we now laud as Yellowstone’s founders.

Among my initial hesitations in writing Wonderlandscape was that my good friend Gary Ferguson has already written so many great books about Yellowstone. How could I compete? Eventually I came up with what I see as a unique angle on Yellowstone’s history, and of course Gary was very supportive. Meanwhile his new book Land on Fire provides easy-to-understand explanations of a key issue that my final chapter could only briefly address: why wildfires have gotten so much bigger in recent years.

Jordan Fisher Smith's Engineering Eden was a valuable source for me, a deep exploration of federal wildlife policies wrapped inside a dramatic wrongful-death lawsuit that I’d already identified as a key moment in Yellowstone history. Recently I went back to enjoy Smith's previous book, Nature Noir, an amiable memoir of his career as a ranger at an obscure, violent, and doomed park in California. Smith has a great knack for shining light on our relationship to nature from unexpected angles.

I still remember the moment when I started the actual writing of Wonderlandscape. I was reading Philip Fradkin's Sagebrush Country, and I suddenly set it down and started scrawling what I knew would be the opening lines of my book. What's left of that text is now buried toward the end of chapter 4, but I had indeed found my voice. It was a powerful moment, and some of the credit should go to the often-underappreciated, now-deceased Fradkin, whose smooth, informed prose did so much to unlock my own.