Robert Meyerowitz is the editor of the Missoula Independent, an award-winning weekly paper in Missoula, Montana. He was the longtime editor of the Anchorage Press, in Anchorage, Alaska, and has also edited newspapers in South Florida and Honolulu, as well as serving as a foreign correspondent in Central America and the Middle East. He’s the author of numerous columns, articles, and essays.“Mars, the stars, the bird, the mountains—any one of these radically shrinks all the quotidian issues raised by the news. And I love that.” ~ Robert Meyerowitz
When we were talking about doing this interview, you said you’d like to talk about hope and the West. Why? What draws you to this subject?
I moved to Montana a year and a half ago imbued with hopefulness—my life will be better! The air will be clean! There’ll be cowboys and cowgirls and wildlife! Of course, you get to the promised land and discover you brought your same problems along with your clothes and books, but that’s another story.
At the time, I was coming from brief sojourns in Missouri and on the East Coast; before that, I’d lived in Alaska for 15 years, and briefly in Hawai’i—and I should say, I consider those places the West, too. I’d driven back and forth across the continent, horizontally, diagonally, and one of the things I felt distinctly traveling from the West to the Midwest to the East Coast is the way the built environment takes over from the natural landscape, enclosing me; so in a literal sense, the West feels more open, and more things seem possible. In particular, there’s the much greater possibility of being awed and humbled by nature. It’s that sense of the sublime, the same thing that Hudson River School painters such as Albert Bierstadt saw in the West in the 19th century and took back to the east on their canvases—what I’d challenge anyone not to feel as they drive south today from Anchorage down Turnagain Arm; “Look,” you think, “it’s the land that time forgot.”
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| Albert Bierstadt's Mount Ranier (via) |
Now, people will line up for the opening of a new chain restaurant in Anchorage. But I think we also long to see the earth unaltered by our hands.
I felt that just last night, in fact, not long after dark, when I looked up at the stars from the deck of my house above Missoula, watching for meteors. I felt it when I watched the Mars rover landing a few weeks ago, marveling not just at our technology but at the otherness of Mars, and I feel it nearly every day these days when this one particular bird comes to visit me. Mars, the stars, the bird, the mountains—any one of these radically shrinks all the quotidian issues raised by the news. And I love that.
Do you know Frederick Turner’s Frontier Thesis, “the origin of the distinctive egalitarian, democratic, aggressive, and innovative features of the American character has been the American frontier experience. He stressed the process—the moving frontier line—and the impact it had on pioneers going through the process” (source: Wikipedia). It’s been critiqued since its presentation in 1893, but do you think this idea of frontier is still in effect today? How does it relate to hope?
Already, at the end of the 19th century, Turner was talking about the closing of the frontier, I believe, so by his lights, the frontier experience was all but over more than a hundred years ago. But that wasn’t quite true. Alaska came into its own in many ways in the 20th century and still thinks of itself as the last frontier. And Montana, for one, isn’t altogether settled still, in the sense that there’s a very real and unsettled debate about the use of its vast public lands. One way that you can see striking differences between the East and the West is by looking at a map of federal lands by state, like this:
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More figuratively, Alaska is still a place where people go to reinvent themselves, and I think that also still happens to a slightly lesser extent in Montana and the West. I say “lesser extent” because Alaska is still at least physically remote. In the continental U.S., one of the signal qualities of frontier life was its remoteness. Lighting out for the territories then was almost like going to the Moon today. But today, people in Montana and Wyoming and the Dakotas are connected to the same internet as everyone else. You can’t outrun your past.
Yet the West is still being made. Compare that to, say, St. Louis, where people are fixated on where you went to high school, assuming you’ve lived your whole life there; the emphasis is on lineage and stasis and a kind of insider-versus-outsider debate. At one time, say, on the verge of Lewis and Clark’s departure from there, St. Louis was the most heterogeneous of cities. It was thriving and had no second-generation residents.
In the West, I think, people are less likely to discriminate that way. They can’t afford to, when so many of us are from somewhere else. We’re still more actively engaged in making a community from disparate parts.
The Wallace Stegner quote from which the title of the blog comes is “One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.” Stegner viewed hope as relating to society and cooperation, the opposite in his view of rugged individualism. Do you think his vision is true? What does that mean for today’s West?
It’s funny, that’s the second time I’ve heard that quote recently. The first time, it came from an aide to a Democratic congressman, who was explaining why compromise on legislation is in the Western tradition, contrary to the claims of a somewhat extreme environmentalist group, which labeled such action “collaboration,” and not in a good way.
I think Stegner was being wishful as well as descriptive there. I think it’s half true. In Montana as in Alaska, people like to say it’s the state’s way for people to help one another, because your neighbor is often the only one you can turn to when it’s 40 below and your truck won’t start, or your cows escaped the pasture. On an individual level, I think there’s something to that, although I’m fearful of claiming that folks are more neighborly in one geographic area than another. And in the West, the pull of individualism is equally strong. There’s a resentment of the federal government—of union—that smolders as it once did in the South, for a variety of reasons, and libertarianism is a potent political force, which is perhaps the opposite of Stegner’s ideal.
The West has a heavy literary burden, or boon, which is the Western. What is your view of the Western? Is it a thing of the past? Or would you expect its popularity to cycle with the times? What do you think is the legacy of the Western on modern writers of the American West?
When I read about Teddy Roosevelt in the Badlands, which I just did recently, again, in Roger di Silvestro’s book, I can see many of those legends being born and reified. But in some ways I think they’re bunk. They represent an effort to whitewash the past, and the truth, which is, for example, that many of the cowboys in fact were vaqueros, what today we’d call Chicanos, and they were looked down upon, just as the Indians in Westerns were stock characters and the cowboys and frontiersman were heroes, even as the frontiersman were taking the Indians’ land and doing much worse things to them. To be sure, there were atrocities on both sides, as, say, S.C. Gwynne makes clear in his wonderful account of the rise and fall of the Comanche nation in Empire of the Summer Moon. The truth, for me, so far as I can discover it, is much more interesting than the Western; the Western is a false-front house, and I need to tear it down to really see the continuous history of the places and the land. As for its legacy and influence, I think it’s in decline. It’s in the kitsch stage now. Which doesn’t mean I wouldn’t wear a good pair of Tony Llamas. I’d draw a line at the hat, though.
“The truth, for me, so far as I can discover it, is much more interesting than the Western; the Western is a false-front house, and I need to tear it down to really see the continuous history of the places and the land.”
You’re an adventurer, and you lived and worked all over the world. How does that contribute to your view of the West?
I was a war correspondent once upon a time, a foreign reporter, and that greatly shaped my view of the U.S. Before that I was sort of a reflexive leftist, subscribing to this totalizing, adolescent critique that the U.S. is evil and causes most of the evil in the world. But the truth as I discovered it was that many people can do bad all by themselves, and the U.S. remains a haven and an aspiration for many people in other countries, particularly in the kinds of places where I lived and worked in Central America and the Middle East. So I came back from abroad with a renewed appreciation of this country. It’s a subtle and profound thing, for me. Many more overt and public displays of patriotism make me cringe, but then, I’m a journalist. We shouldn’t be flag-wavers.
The West in particular is a mythic place for people from Jerusalem to Jakarta. In fact, the farther one gets from it, the greater its power that way, I suspect. I remember watching Dances With Wolves, which I thought was a silly, mythologizing movie, in the small Israeli community of Arad one evening during the first Gulf War. When I walked out with a group of Israelis, they told me they loved it, just loved it. How could they relate to it, I wondered? “Don’t you see?” one of them said. “We’re the Indians.” Oh. And then, I recall sitting with an old gentleman in his modest house in southern Spain, on the Mediterranean, where he had a black-velvet painting of a majestic moose, an animal I know so well from Alaska, which to him might as well have been a unicorn. I’ve heard cab drivers all over the world rhapsodize about Alaska when they learned I’d come from there, even though they’d never seen it. Their fascination reifies mine.
You’re a writer and a newspaper editor, which means you are on top of current events in a way most people aren’t. Do you think this makes you more optimistic and hopeful about the future of the West? Or does it make you more realistic, possibly pessimistic?
As journalists, our role is to be spectators at the pageant of what’s often folly. I don’t think our work typically gives us cause for hopefulness. Too much news in the conventional sense tends to make anyone pessimistic; if anything, it’s also our job to try to guard against that. Yet I’m optimistic nonetheless, because I think so many of the things I value about the West—the land and the wildlife—also constitute some of its capital, in tourism, and its drawing power.
Shifting gears, how do you balance being a writer with what must be a demanding schedule as an editor? How do you get your writing done?
Ha. I do it by saying to reporters, “Not now, I’m in the middle of a sentence!” But seriously, ultimately, my first obligation is to the reporters and writers I edit. I’m fortunate that I also enjoy writing, so I’m motivated to make time for it. And writing is a wholly different endeavor than editing. It’s not collaborative. It requires sustained focus. It gives me nourishment and joy. It’s kind of like tennis that way, for me—something else I make time for.
How do feature writing and journalism contribute to your other projects?
I think everything I do—and I only do non-fiction, for the most part—is no more elevated than feature writing or journalism. But then, I have a very high opinion of good feature writing and journalism.
May I ask what you’re working on?
I have two longer, simmering things, one about my time in Morocco long ago, when I was young and foolish and ended up in prison, and one about my collie Sally, who died last winter, and was my boon companion. I know, another dog book! Just what the world needs. But I do think there was something unusual about the way that dog and I blossomed together. And we explored the West together. In fact, moving to Montana was her idea. We’d drive through the state coming down from Alaska and she’d look at me with that unmistakable question: Can we stay here?
Talk about writers’ block. Is there such a thing? How do you get unstuck?
I don’t know. I’ve never had it. And the writers I work with can’t afford to have it.
Most writers have a couple of subjects they address over and over. What are yours? Why, do you think?
Other animals and history, to speak very broadly. Animals because almost all animal stories are about the hitherto-unsuspected powers of other animals, which is always exciting. This is true because we began by crediting them with nothing, and slowly have whittled away our definition of what’s uniquely human. There’s not much left. And I always like writing about something that’s known, yet isn’t, so that perhaps tomorrow a reader will see the same deer or wolf in a new light. History, because it always lend itself to narrative and reconstruction—to storytelling—and because the past is perhaps the real last frontier, constantly yielding new information.
What are you passionate about? What do you love?
According to YouTube, I’m passionate about ravens, collies, Aretha Franklin, Kate Nash, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Christopher Hitchens, Al Green, and Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. If you looked at my bookshelves they’d tell only a slightly different story—more history, fiction and poetry, primarily. But all of these things are just cultural artifacts, right? I’m passionate about reading and writing and talking and serendipitous sightings of wildlife, and mid-priced vodka. I like people. I’m really lucky in that I get to work with smart, clever, imaginative people every day.
“I like people. I’m really lucky in that I get to work with smart, clever, imaginative people every day.”
Do we have reason to be hopeful here in the American West?
Yes. There’s always reason to be hopeful.
Hope is something you choose.
Choose hope.
Thank you so much for your time and generosity, Robert!
(This interview was conducted via email.)
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