Elise Atchison’s Crazy Mountain

May 27, 2022 | Events

Award-winning Livingston author Elise Atchison will officially launch her debut novel, Crazy Mountain, with a reading at Livingston’s Elk River Books, on Thursday, June 23.

According to the publisher, “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. Crazy Mountain is the epicenter of New West controversies, a place where the primal wild bumps up against newly built roads, ranchettes and resorts. As the rural landscape transforms into subdivisions and McMansions, conflicts escalate between locals and newcomers, developers and environmentalists, the wealthy and the homeless.”

Crazy Mountain is a powerful story about possession and dispossession,” writes Debra Magpie Earling, author of Perma Red and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. “Gritty and tough and gut wrenching … Crazy Mountain ignites a firestorm.”

Atchison has lived most of her life in an off-the-grid cabin on the edge of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness in Montana. She is the recipient of the Eludia Book Award and the Barbara Deming Award. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals, anthologies, and radio, including Montana Quarterly, Silk Road Review, Cutthroat Journal, South Dakota Review, Terrain Magazine, and Owen Wister Review.

Much of her work focuses on the changing Western landscape and how those changes affect the land and the people who live there. She is interested in exploring the many ways we relate to the natural world, the many ways we relate to each other, and how the two are fundamentally intertwined. More information is at eliseatchison.com.

The free event takes place at 122 S. 2nd St., beginning at 7 p.m., with a book signing and reception to follow.

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