You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

This is Michael Sulfrablatt.

Today my guest is William Kittridge.

He's the author most recently of a book from Mercury House called Who Owns the West?

It's a book of personal essays about the West.

He's the author as well of Hole in the Sky, a memoir, owning it all,

and a book of short stories called We Are Not in This Together,

and co-editor of a book of Montana writing, a great big anthology. William Kittridge, to my mind,

is a miracle that has been happening for some time and waiting to happen in public, in a sense.

His writing is miraculous.

He is the one-man band creating the new personal essay in America.

That is to say, the essay, the nonfiction essay, written with all of the resources

and sensuality and wildness of fiction, but about personal experience. It seems in a certain

sense that his life, he lives in Montana, is too big for the fictional spectrum and needs, in

the sense, another form, the personal essay, which he has helped to reinvent for our age.

I won't be, you know, dissimulating here.

Obviously, John McPhee writes a beautiful essay, but it's not, by and large,

a personal essay. There are vestiges here of Hougland and other terrific naturalists,

...