interested in those questions. The West, of course, is also haunted by the removal/extermination of the indigenous people who were here before those of us who hail from Europe became so interested in gold or cheap land or “clean slates.” I’ve been told a lot of ghost stories that link American Indian and settler communities. Why are those stories handed down and preserved? What are the lessons there? MM: In “How Bitter the Weather” a character observes her police officer friend: “there are crescent bruises under Cole’s hazel eyes. They’ve been there since a gay man was pistol-whipped to death on the prairie outside town.” Is this your response to the Matthew Shepard murder and its farreaching effects on Wyoming and the entire country? AH: Yes. I wanted to write a story set in Laramie during the gloomy aftermath of Matt Shepard’s murder. I couldn’t find a way to write about the murder directly. And it didn’t seem like a story that was mine to tell. But a friend of mine said that she thought that Westerners were actually harder on outsiders or strangers than they claimed to be, that Matt was the kind of man who was easily marginalized in this part of the country. I began to think about the other unmoored, unsupported men I’d seen in Wyoming, and I started to think about small town hospitality, whether it was a myth or not. There aren’t easy answers to my questions, of course. But writing about Armand allowed me to think about how we often miss opportunities to care for one another. There is a lot of suicide in the West. We let too many folks slip through the cracks. And the cracks are big ones. MM: Some of the impressions of rural Wyoming seem to be snapshots of America at large: one of the characters enviously describes those “whom have moved on to towns with better football teams and restaurants.” Do you see American regionalism as a wholly unique experience, or is the country becoming more homogenized? AH: The country is much more homogenized than it was 40 years ago, or even 10 years ago. The way we link ourselves together is shared and universal in many, many ways. But there are some things you can’t change. You can’t make the high plains any wetter or less wind-whipped. You can’t lower the mountain passes. You can’t keep hurricanes from slamming islands and coastal regions on the continent. You can’t make every place on the continent easy to live in. The cities in this region—Albuquerque, Denver, Salt Lake, Boise—are all dynamic and interesting places, and perhaps they are starting to look more like Dallas or Sacramento or Pittsburgh than they used to. But those cities are changing as they have always changed, via immigration. So new regional flavors are being developed. Always. There are still many places in America where landscape and weather have an upper hand, I think. And there’s still a lot of theMeadow 75
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