A native Montanan and an applauded novelist, Russell Rowland spent the better part of a year studying and traveling around his beloved home state, from the mines of Butte to the pine forests of the Northwest, from the stark, wind-scrubbed badlands of the East to the tourist-driven economies of the West. Along the way, he considered our state’s essential character, where we came from, and, most of all, what we might be in the process of becoming.

Russell Rowland is the highly-applauded author of three novels set in Montana—High and Inside, Open Spaces, and The Watershed Years—as well as co-editor of an anthology, West of 98: Living and Writing the New American West. He lives in Billings, Montana.