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When We Were Wolves: Stories
"If you could have been around a hundred and fifty years ago, and passed through the landscape as a beaver-trapping tough with Jim Bridger or Jedediah Smith, before coal barons, before soda ash and oil, before Mormons, before you could stand outside and watch satellites pass through the night sky or silhouettes kissing in warm apartment windows, when this history was wild and new, you could have just pointed and named something of permanence, a mountain, a river--at least a creek--after yourself. Or they would have named it for you, a permanent mark, just for being here."
From a new talent that Annie Proulx has called an "important emerging writer" comes a surprising and expansive collection of stories, steeped in the lore of the frontier but unmistakably fresh and of our time.
When We Were Wolves roams over a West we never knew existed--colonized by rogues and tricksters, Custer impersonators, firefighters with a weakness for arson, and the other rootless folk who come to rest under the vast and forgiving desert sky. Jon Billman writes about accidental people who are trapped in unsuitable marriages, impossible situations, but who handle them with the odd grace of those who are determined to live by their own strange code. He mingles the skewed humor of David Sedaris with the loping, rough-edged appeal of Tom McGuane. This is a beguiling new entry on the map of American fiction.
From a new talent that Annie Proulx has called an "important emerging writer" comes a surprising and expansive collection of stories, steeped in the lore of the frontier but unmistakably fresh and of our time.
When We Were Wolves roams over a West we never knew existed--colonized by rogues and tricksters, Custer impersonators, firefighters with a weakness for arson, and the other rootless folk who come to rest under the vast and forgiving desert sky. Jon Billman writes about accidental people who are trapped in unsuitable marriages, impossible situations, but who handle them with the odd grace of those who are determined to live by their own strange code. He mingles the skewed humor of David Sedaris with the loping, rough-edged appeal of Tom McGuane. This is a beguiling new entry on the map of American fiction.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
July 28, 2015
For me, Billman’s When We Were Wolves somehow got lost after Y2K, the dawn of a new millennium, 9/11, or perhaps the distractions that pulled us all away from literature toward YouTube, mashups, Napster, and Googling ourselves. It was a good run too, all that titillation, the echo chamber kinships. I certainly consumed some goods too, but it’s been a few years since 1999 (the release date for Wolves). Since, I’ve become a little bored with the internet's defaults toward consumption and arguing, but not so much regarding the mass and density bound into good literature.
Billman’s superb collection proves to me it wasn’t literature’s fault--solid writers have still been doing what it is they do these past 20 years. That’s why unearthing this collection of 13 fine-wrought stories nearly 20 years after their initial publication, each one set with such grace and poetry of language in the heart of the American West (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Montana, and the Western Dakotas) is like showing up to a fancy California dude ranch thinking “tourist” and looking for good cellular reception, then being kicked square in the head by a mule. When We Were Wolves packs that kind of surprise and stunning force within each story. None of them are predictable, and at the same time each of them feels very familiar. It's probably because Billman has captured each character with the kind of rough elegance you’d notice on saddle stitching even if you’ve never rode a horse.
The book is quirky, yes; each of its main characters are oddities, yes; screw-ups, yes; jerks, some of them. The same can be said for the minor characters and the sidekicks and the hangers-on. The plots as well! Oddity abounds in what you might expect to be a straightforward book about cowboys and their ilk. The real joy of the book isn’t the strangeness of the land though, it's the meaty prose that moves alongside the masterful demonstration of technical craft savvy. Billman sometimes seems like one of his crop-duster pilots, making loop-to-loops and flying under telephone wires look like a minimum wage gig that anyone can do. They can't. This book is like chili, cooked from scratch in a Dutch oven over a flame, with buttes and snakes marking the day’s passage. It’s hearty, substantial, stick-to-your-ribs, yet layered with favor and spice.
From dog sled romances, to dreadful inmates skating for God and prison, to barnstorming baseball Indians, to public art cowboys, arsonists, Custer impersonators, the characters in these stories, both minor and major, have so much depth and breadth, that Wolves almost forces itself into the canon of the contemporary books on the American West with a model 94. Set aside your McCarthy, your McMurty, and your Proulx for a moment, so that you can discover this book. I’m terrified to think that I almost worked on my Facebook FarmVille instead of reading this important piece of literature.
Billman’s superb collection proves to me it wasn’t literature’s fault--solid writers have still been doing what it is they do these past 20 years. That’s why unearthing this collection of 13 fine-wrought stories nearly 20 years after their initial publication, each one set with such grace and poetry of language in the heart of the American West (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Montana, and the Western Dakotas) is like showing up to a fancy California dude ranch thinking “tourist” and looking for good cellular reception, then being kicked square in the head by a mule. When We Were Wolves packs that kind of surprise and stunning force within each story. None of them are predictable, and at the same time each of them feels very familiar. It's probably because Billman has captured each character with the kind of rough elegance you’d notice on saddle stitching even if you’ve never rode a horse.
The book is quirky, yes; each of its main characters are oddities, yes; screw-ups, yes; jerks, some of them. The same can be said for the minor characters and the sidekicks and the hangers-on. The plots as well! Oddity abounds in what you might expect to be a straightforward book about cowboys and their ilk. The real joy of the book isn’t the strangeness of the land though, it's the meaty prose that moves alongside the masterful demonstration of technical craft savvy. Billman sometimes seems like one of his crop-duster pilots, making loop-to-loops and flying under telephone wires look like a minimum wage gig that anyone can do. They can't. This book is like chili, cooked from scratch in a Dutch oven over a flame, with buttes and snakes marking the day’s passage. It’s hearty, substantial, stick-to-your-ribs, yet layered with favor and spice.
From dog sled romances, to dreadful inmates skating for God and prison, to barnstorming baseball Indians, to public art cowboys, arsonists, Custer impersonators, the characters in these stories, both minor and major, have so much depth and breadth, that Wolves almost forces itself into the canon of the contemporary books on the American West with a model 94. Set aside your McCarthy, your McMurty, and your Proulx for a moment, so that you can discover this book. I’m terrified to think that I almost worked on my Facebook FarmVille instead of reading this important piece of literature.
January 6, 2011
In the "Wyoming is full of wacky characters" short story genre, Billman outwrites Annie Proulx. His depictions are less manufactured, more complete, and fully realized, all done with minimal words. Plus Mormons. Sneakily smart.
April 8, 2012
I loved this wonderful collection of short stories, all of them set in the rural West and mostly in Wyoming. It is a comic world where men are men and, consequently, the women have a monopoly on intelligence. These guys hunt, they fish, they drink beer, and remain faithful to an adolescent desregard for law and order, taking delight in irritating their conventional, godfearing neighbors and giving themselves to amusements like Little Bighorn reenactments.
My favorite is the title story about an ice hocky team from the state pen, who love the fierce brutality of the sport more than scoring. Close seconds are a series of stories about two buddies in Hams Fork (a fictional stand-in for the author's home, Kemmerer), Wyoming. One is a vaguely disgruntled history teacher and the other a painter, who decorates the town water tower one night and, immobilized by a ruptured disk while playing golf, has a close encounter with hypothermia.
Most of the women involved with the men in these well written stories make only brief appearances, because they're either long-suffering or in possession of the good sense to move on. Also recommended: Dave Hickey's "Prior Convictions," William Hauptman's "Good Rockin' Tonight," and of course Annie Proulx' "Close Range" and "Bad Dirt."
My favorite is the title story about an ice hocky team from the state pen, who love the fierce brutality of the sport more than scoring. Close seconds are a series of stories about two buddies in Hams Fork (a fictional stand-in for the author's home, Kemmerer), Wyoming. One is a vaguely disgruntled history teacher and the other a painter, who decorates the town water tower one night and, immobilized by a ruptured disk while playing golf, has a close encounter with hypothermia.
Most of the women involved with the men in these well written stories make only brief appearances, because they're either long-suffering or in possession of the good sense to move on. Also recommended: Dave Hickey's "Prior Convictions," William Hauptman's "Good Rockin' Tonight," and of course Annie Proulx' "Close Range" and "Bad Dirt."
March 18, 2016
After seeing this book pop up on a list of books set in Wyoming, I thought it’d be neat to read this book for a trip I was taking there. After reading the first four stories and “Atomic Bar,” I’ve given up on this collection. In terms of short stories, it’s just not up my literary alley (so to speak). Although they’re well-written, a bit bizarre in the good way and occasionally peppered with some absurd humor that I dug, these stories simply lacked plot or anything resembling tension or suspense. And so, I continually had this "And so what…" or "So what’s the point?" ping-ponging through my head while I read each of these stories. I guess I’ve been conditioned as a reader and filmgoer to expect at least one of those narrative hooks to keep turning the page.
February 7, 2020
These stories are full of humor and grit and isolation and failed-connection. The landscape in which they occur is very familiar to me, but Billman pushes all his stories into a moving, unfamiliar space, much like Annie Proulx in stories like “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World.” I’ve seen several reviews that suggest these stories don’t go “quite deep enough,” but the smart inclusion of detail, humor, and powerful landscape move these stories into a very human place that I believe is, in fact, deep enough. They have the weirdness of Proulx’s fiction, the depth of landscape found in Claire Vaye Watkins’ work, and characters that are voicey and sincere, like something out of the Southern Gothic tradition. These are great stories that I would highly recommend.
July 10, 2009
gritty wyoming stories, lots of trailer trash, fucked up school teachers, and sad cowboys. billman is a good writer for what he is doing.
April 22, 2024
Great set of stories. Funny, sad, bewildering. His characters are misfits of the west, the stories mainly centered around Hams Fork Wyoming. His style reminds me of Tom McGuane, one of my favorites. This collection has so much of what I love: fishing, dogs, crazy women, civil disobedience, nature, loners, booze, hockey.
One of my favorites is about a penal hockey team whose main objective when playing hockey is to simply check the other team's players because they can't skate well. Hilarious! Another story I loved is about a whacky artist (reoccurring character) who busts his back practicing golf and starts hallucinated because of hypothermia. His wayward dogs come to the rescue surrounding him with warmth and a dead mouse for a snack before help arrives.
“She ain’t much to look at, but I have learned that it’s better to dwell in the wilderness than with a contentious and angry woman.”
“today was so hot, I saw a coyote chasin’ a jackrabbit and they was both walkin’.”
"Sell everything, flee Boise, get married, and find true happiness in living like coyotes. Hunter-gatherers."
"In the days of the Norsemen, when great men were made from the spit of gods, dwarfs brewed a magic mead from the blood of a poet. The dwarfs lured the poet into their caverns and ran him through with swords. They poured his blood into three jars and mixed it with honey. From this wort they brewed the magic mead. Anyone who drank the mead could have wisdom."
One of my favorites is about a penal hockey team whose main objective when playing hockey is to simply check the other team's players because they can't skate well. Hilarious! Another story I loved is about a whacky artist (reoccurring character) who busts his back practicing golf and starts hallucinated because of hypothermia. His wayward dogs come to the rescue surrounding him with warmth and a dead mouse for a snack before help arrives.
“She ain’t much to look at, but I have learned that it’s better to dwell in the wilderness than with a contentious and angry woman.”
“today was so hot, I saw a coyote chasin’ a jackrabbit and they was both walkin’.”
"Sell everything, flee Boise, get married, and find true happiness in living like coyotes. Hunter-gatherers."
"In the days of the Norsemen, when great men were made from the spit of gods, dwarfs brewed a magic mead from the blood of a poet. The dwarfs lured the poet into their caverns and ran him through with swords. They poured his blood into three jars and mixed it with honey. From this wort they brewed the magic mead. Anyone who drank the mead could have wisdom."
August 10, 2020
A beautiful collection that explores and captures subtleties and realities of life in the west. Well-written, his stories are not full of intricate plots or twists and turns, but beautiful often solemn tales of daily life in the American west. A classic writer
January 6, 2017
Jon Billman is a funny dude.
March 2, 2017
Western stories packed with grit, hardened characters, and witty humor. This is a collection of stories I'll be revisiting for years to come.
January 2, 2015
Great collection of short stories. Interesting to read, great characters. The imagery and is well-done: gritty and real. My only "negative" comment is that when I read these "slice of life" stories, with these well-rounded characters, I so very much want the stories to go on, so I know what happened to them.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews