James Welch Quotes

To receive this award from an organization I admire so much makes me totally happy and grateful.

The townspeople outside the reservations had a very superior attitude toward Indians, which was kind of funny, because they weren’t very wealthy; they were on the fringes of society themselves.

The title of the poems was The Only Bar in Dixon. We sent it out to The New Yorker on a fluke, and they took them and printed all three in the same issue.

The economic piece is still missing, since it’s so hard to attract industry to reservations, but spiritually and educationally, they’re doing just fine. Each tribe has a community college now, and they teach the language, they teach the traditions.

Richard Hugo taught me that anyone with a desire to write, an ear for language and a bit of imagination could become a writer. He also, in a way, gave me permission to write about northern Montana.