Brown Dog of the Yaak: Essays on Art and Activism

by Rick Bass, Scott Slovic (Contributor)

Essays explore the author's relationship with his dog, Colter, and how it has helped him to understand intuition

Genres: Essays, Art, Nature, Nonfiction

150 pages, Hardcover

First published July 28, 1999

About the author

Rick Bass was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in Houston, the son of a geologist. He studied petroleum geology at Utah State University and while working as a petroleum geologist in Jackson, Mississippi, began writing short stories on his lunch breaks. In 1987, he moved with his wife, the artist Elizabeth Hughes Bass, to Montana’s remote Yaak Valley and became an active environmentalist, working to protect his adopted home from the destructive encroachment of roads and logging. He serves on the board of both the Yaak Valley Forest Council and Round River Conservation Studies and continues to live with his family on a ranch in Montana, actively engaged in saving the American wilderness.

Bass received the PEN/Nelson Algren Award in 1988 for his first short story, “The Watch,” and won the James Jones Fellowship Award for his novel Where the Sea Used To Be. His novel The Hermit’s Story was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year in 2000. The Lives of Rocks was a finalist for the Story Prize and was chosen as a Best Book of the Year in 2006 by the Rocky Mountain News. Bass’s stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories.

Reviews

[Charles]

This is the third Bass I've read. The first nonfiction. I liked it better than the fiction. The book is written in four sections. First is Colter (about his dog). Then comes The Yaak (a valley where he lives in northern Montana). Finally we have Activism and Art. The whole of the book is about trying to save his roadless valley from loggers and to preserve it as it is.

The first three sections of the book are good and even entertaining. There is no way you can mistake where he's going. You're reading to see how he gets there. Then it becomes exciting and you know that no matter how passionate his activism is, it's his art that makes this man go. Somehow he brings the topics of the book full circle and all four of them inform us about each other. Even the dog has left it's imprint on the soil of the Yaak. It too is portrayed as an activist dependent on this special place for its own exceptionalism.

[Peter]

One of my all-time favorite books, a pleasure to read from page to page, thank you.

[Lydia]

Moments of beautiful writing but also felt like a dad leaving a winding long strange voicemail lol

[Jason]

Visited the Yaak river earlier this year, then started reading this shortly thereafter, though it had already been sitting on my shelf for several years. What on earth am I doing with my life not reading more Rick Bass? It's been years since I've picked up one of his slim, but eloquent volumes.

"We are so used to viewing the land and its resources as raw materials, and ourselves as the tools, the machines, the sculptors, that we have forgotten how it used to be the other way around... We are soft, pink, almost hairless—more malleable than clay, and as adaptable, almost, as bacteria. The landscape carves at us with wild abandon, artistic glee, even if we do not notice."

[David]

Interesting series of essays about the Yaak Valley of northwest Montana, a location of beauty, poverty, and a real danger of environmental degradation. Bass has long been a champion of using but conserving the land.

[Jodee]

Beutiful observations on the woods, dogs, the creative process and what it means to truly live in tune with the true nature of life.