© 2023 Elise Atchison
CRAZY MOUNTAIN
novel
Sowilo
Press
Artists Field Guide to Greater
Yellowstone
anthology
Trinity University
Press
Unearthing Paradise:
Montana Writers in Defense of Paradise
anthology
Elk River
Books Press
An Elk River
Books Reader: Livingston and Billings Area Writers
anthology
Bangtail Press
Montana Quarterly
Elk River Arts &
Lectures
Montana
Indie Bookstores:
Elk
River Books,
Livingston
Fact and
Fiction,
Missoula
Country Bookshelf,
Bozeman
This House of Books,
Billings
Montana Book Company,
Helena
Cassiopeia Books,
Great Falls
Isle of Books,
Butte
Shakespeare & Co.
Missoula
Chapter One Book Store,
Hamilton
Tumbleweed Bookstore,
Gardiner
Wheatgrass,
Livingston
Conley’s Books & Music,
Livingston
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CRAZY MOUNTAIN
Elise
Atchison
Winner Eludia Book Award
Recipient
Barbara Deming Award
Current
Finalist High Plains Book Award
Sowilo
Press/Hidden River Arts, 2022
Watch Crazy
Mountain Book Trailer created by Craig Lancaster.
Crazy Mountain chronicles a rapidly changing place
and community through the diverse and conflicting stories of the people who
live in a fictional mountain valley in Montana
over nearly half a century (1970-2015). As newly built roads carve through
the primal wild, and the rural landscape transforms into subdivisions and McMansions and resorts, conflicts escalate between locals
and newcomers, developers and environmentalists, the wealthy and the
homeless. Through multiple perspectives we hear the voices of ranchers, real
estate agents, carpenters, artists, New Agers,
Native American activists, landscapers, movie stars, musicians, pizza
delivery drivers, gun-toting fundamentalists, and others including Kate, a
troubled young woman who becomes homeless over the course of the book and
whose own story in many ways mirrors the destruction and resurrection of the
land. These varied threads weave together into a rich tapestry of place,
exploring timely themes of housing booms and homelessness, loss of open land
to development, cultural clashes, and the correlation between how we treat
the natural world and how we treat each other, especially the most vulnerable
among us. What does it mean to lose a place we love, and what does it mean to
gain from it? Perhaps it depends on perspective.
BOOK REVIEWS & INTERVIEWS:
The Open Mic Interview:
Richard Ehisen interviews
Elise Atchison
about Crazy Mountain, rebel writers,
and Georgia O’Keeffe.
Kirkus Reviews Book Review:
“The author’s
observant eye for nature makes her an especially adept chronicler … Each tale
takes on a new character’s perspective, leaving the valley itself to serve as
the book’s true protagonist. ... An elegant, eco-minded collection of tales
set in a Montana
valley.”
Big Sky Journal Book Review:
“Who owns the land? ... This question is often debated in
the Northern Rockies at bars, cafes, and,
most aggressively, on social media sites. It’s also the question posed with
fervor and precision in Elise Atchison’s debut novel Crazy Mountain.
Atchison’s story delves into a disparate
community that sits in the shadow of Crazy
Mountain, a jagged, snow-covered
peak in Montana
that, throughout the book, is increasingly filled in with development — from
a trailer park to tract houses to “McMansions” to a
sprawling all-inclusive resort. The result is viewed as either progress or
desecration, depending on who’s telling the story. And, who’s telling the
story is one of the most compelling aspects of this novel. With each chapter,
the point of view shifts to another character, and the reader sees Crazy Mountain — and all that befalls it —
from their eyes. ... Each of them speaks their truth, often at odds with
another’s, in a swirl of voices that builds to a symphony of soul-stirring
humanity.” – Marc Beaudin
Breakfast
in Montana
Interview:
Russell Rowland and Aaron
Parrett interview Elise Atchison and discuss Crazy
Mountain and Tom McGuane’s Panama.
Montana Quarterly Book
Review:
“The plotline is enveloped in the magnificence of a
fictional rugged valley 40 miles from town that changes over half a century into
a valley dotted with McMansions and resorts and
subdivisions. Such big intrusions bring on a complex case of culture shock
for newcomers and locals. Not only the land is
transformed. Atchison’s
well-thought-out characters ... go through a metamorphosis as their valley
becomes unrecognizable. ... And we see what it means to witness the vanishing
of what once was cherished. With telling, true-to-the-West
descriptions, Atchison’s
moving story sits heavy with a deep love for wild open spaces.” – Jennifer Bisbing
Mountain
Journal Interview:
Todd Wilkinson interviews Elise Atchison.
“We Homo sapiens
have a huge task ahead of us. I think we need a major shift in the way we
view our place in the larger world. It boils down to respect for the
intrinsic value and rights of those outside ourselves, including vulnerable
people in our community as well as other species and the natural world. The
opposite viewpoint is seeing ourselves as the center of everything, which
leads to transactional relationships with the world around us—a “what do I
get out it?” attitude. Do we care that gentrification leads to homelessness?
Do we care that the resort we want to build will wipe out wolverine habitat?
The only way forward is to see ourselves as responsible parts of a larger
community and act accordingly. Perhaps stories will help us get there.”
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PRAISE FOR
CRAZY MOUNTAIN:
“Crazy Mountain
is a powerful story
about possession and dispossession. Gritty and tough and gut wrenching, Atchison shows us how the
West continues to be an explosive and embittered battleground, both sh*t show and love story. Crazy Mountain
ignites a firestorm.”
– Debra Magpie Earling,
author of Perma Red and The Lost
Journals of Sacajewea
“Crazy
Mountain is a grand
tale of the power of wilderness to heal wounds—scars on the land and the
troubled humans who live in it. ... This is a crazy and wonderful
book.”
– Doug Peacock, author of Grizzly Years and
Was It Worth It, filmmaker, Disabled Veteran
“I absolutely love this kind of storytelling. Reminiscent
of Winesburg,
Ohio and Olive Kitteridge,
this collection blooms from the diverse points of view held within Crazy Mountain’s boundaries. And the stories
are the real thing—complex, sophisticated stories of the American West,
not the tired mythologies that sadly continue to prevail. From subdivisions
to resorts to the homeless, from wilderness to ski slopes to private land, we
find an accurate, sensitive, and nuanced view of rural Montana.”
– Laura Pritchett, winner of PEN USA and author of The Blue
Hour and Stars Go Blue
“In the Mountain West, the landscape is a constant. It’s
the people who change. Ranchers, realtors, carpenters, painters,
archeologists, bad-ass baristas … in this artful, lyrical, deeply moving
novel, Elise Atchison follows a piece of landscape through several lifetimes,
capturing the dramatic complexity of the disrupted West through a full cast
of characters, one lens after another. It’s a full time job, trying to make
sense of the West these days. I find that this extraordinary book helps make
that job a little easier.”
– Allen Morris Jones, author of A Bloom of
Bones and Sweeney on the Rocks
“In Crazy Mountain the lives of those who
people landscapes of beauty and despair are multilayered, evocative, and rich
with unforeseen mystery. Elise Atchison's prose is a vessel of precision and
depth, unafraid to draw the reader into the more shadowed crucibles of life
and help us emerge with light in our hands. In stories that cover nearly five
decades in the life of a mountain and its residents, there is the wildness of
the human heart shaped by the wildness that surrounds us. May you take this
book home, cherish it as I did, and find in it the treasure it gives without
measure . . . that of ‘the wildland that has been
lost, and all that remains.’”
– Shann Ray,
author of American Copper and Sweetclover
“With great insight, intelligence, and intimacy, Elise
Atchison explores a singular dilemma: How do we live in paradise without
destroying the very thing we love? Set in a place changing so rapidly that
its inhabitants no longer recognize the landscape, one another, or even
themselves, these individual narratives of love and loss, celebration and
lament, interweave as the dreams of one generation give way to the
disillusionment of the next. A story of human intrusion and intervention, in
which moments of brutality give way to gestures of charity, Crazy Mountain
serves as a reminder that what we think we own may not be ours after all.”
– Kim Barnes, author of In the Kingdom of Men and In the
Wilderness
“I am blown away by Crazy Mountain.
I knew I would like it, but I didn’t know I’d be staying up late because I
can’t put it down-kind of like it. Bravo!”
– Andrea Peacock, author of Libby, Montana:
Asbestos and the Deadly Silence of an American Corporation and owner
of Elk River Books
Crazy Mountain “tells the
story of changes to a cherished place through interlinked stories of
individuals attempting to claim the land over several generations. She has an
uncommon feel for landscape and shows how human beings deform a place through
greed, narcissism, and indifference to the past. She accomplishes with
subtlety and engaging prose what the melodramatic series "Yellowstone" can only dream of. Required reading
for all Westerners (and those who dream of becoming one).”
– Ken Egan, author of
Montana 1889 and former director of
Humanities Montana
CRAZY MOUNTAIN by Elise Atchison
Sowilo Press/Hidden River Arts, 2022
Softcover, 268 pages
ISBN# 979-8985431711
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