Spring's Edge: A Ranch
Wife's Chronicles
by Laurie Wagner Buyer
Buy this book
via Amazon.com

Laurie discusses her years as a ranch wife, her writing life,
and the 10-year process of getting Spring’s Edge, her new memoir, into print.

Read even just a little of Laurie Wagner Buyer’s writing, and you’ll sense one thing right away: she isn’t just fond of the West and its landscape­--she’s passionately in love with it. Buyer has etched out a writing career from the hardscrabble life of ranching, and the rise of that writing career has changed her course and her life. In the midst of that sometimes-painful change, she’s found her voice, and her place.

“As a career, it’s probably only been the last 10 years,” she says. “Before that . . . it was never really much of a career because I didn’t have the time to devote to it.”
  
Spring’s Edge won the Beryl Markham Prize for creative non-fiction from Story Line Press. In addition to Spring’s Edge, her prose and other poetry collections have won numerous awards including the Western Writers of America’s SPUR Award for Best Poetry (2007) for Across the High Divide. That same book was also a Finalist for the Women Writing the West WILLA Award. Buyer’s first novel, Side Canyons, (Five-Star, 2004), a visionary blending of poetry and prose, was hailed by Booklist as “a spiritually angled tour of a reverent place.” Her other works include Open Range: Poetry of the Re-imagined West (in conjunction with W.C. Jameson), Red Colt Canyon, and Glass-eyed Paint in the Rain.

You’d think Buyer had been born and raised in the West by the abiding love affair she has with the land. But she is a transplant in fact only. Buyer realized early on that the life she was living as a college student in Chicago just wasn’t what she wanted. “I started writing when I came West at the age of 20 just to try to capture my experiences. I lived in very remote location on the North Fork of the Flathead River in Montana, 86 miles from town, no electricity, no near neighbors.” That’s a pretty far cry from life as an urban college student, and the “how” of it is as interesting as the “why.”
 

She had planned to get a Ph.D. and teach, but “I was overwhelmed and overloaded,” she says. Because her family had military connections, she had been exposed to the West. That exposure lodged itself into her subconscious like a cactus thorn in a boot heel. By her college days, the thorn had worked its way into her heart.
   
“I heard about a man who lived in the wilderness of Montana. A friend brought me a letter that he had written. I was so intrigued by the fact that he lived off the land. He’d come back from Vietnam and decided to sequester himself in the deepest wilderness he could find.” Buyer corresponded with the man for a time, and then she went to visit him. “I quit school, collected a little scholarship money, and bought a one-way ticket and got on a train and headed West. . . . I had fallen in love with the land through this man who lived close to it, but I was as green a greenhorn as ever walked the face of the earth. Little did I know!” She laughs, then adds, “I fell in love with the man, first, but that didn’t last. But the love of the land just kept growing and becoming deeper and more intimate and special.”
   
It was then that she began expressing this other, newfound relationship through the written word. Buyer began journaling and writing poems about the transformation the West was beginning in her soul. Now, after 2 ½ years of working to place that manuscript, the University of Oklahoma has just picked up another memoir, When I Came West, of those early days in Montana.
   

Buyer also gained some early exposure from the cowboy poetry movement, which kicked open the doors for her to do readings and broaden her contacts. “For quite a few years, [my writing concerned] the ranch and cowboy poetry-related things. Even though I was writing other things, I didn’t have an outlet for [those other writings].”
   
Buyer met and married a rancher near Fairplay, Colorado, out in the South Park area (yes, the region of the same-named TV show). The land’s wide-open spaces, harsh climate, and stark beauty continued to feed her deeply. But the demands of ranch life pulled her in other directions. So she managed a nearby ranch’s fly-fishing business, wrote lots of freelance articles for agriculture and ranching magazines, and tried her best to balance the two conflicting interests. Then, in the mid-to-late 90s, the bottom dropped out of the cattle market, and other agriculture-based markets followed. It was out of this hardship that Spring’s Edge came into being on February 15, 1997.
   
At the end of that particularly sad day, Buyer sat down to write a letter to a friend about the trials of just one day’s ranch life. Her husband had just been forced to sell most of their livestock just to buy hay for those remaining. “It was so healing and comforting for me just to tell the story that the next evening I sat down with a yellow legal by the fire and told what happened that day. Pretty soon, I got in the habit every evening of sitting down and telling the day’s events. . . . When I stopped writing on June 1, I had 16 legal pads.” 

“I tried to figure out more ways to make this a career and bring in some income... ”
—BUYER

A friend who was visiting the nearby ranch’s fly fishing resort stopped by one day to ask her what she’d been doing all winter. Buyer showed her the legal pads. Her astounded friend made sure Buyer got and used a computer from then on, and the book began to take shape.
   
And, predictably, a certain tension began to build between her and her husband. “It was the beginning of the end,” she says. As the writing grew, so, too did her desire to pursue it as a career. She realized, too, that the ranch would ultimately be left to her husband’s children, so Buyer set out to build her own future. 
   
“It wasn’t until my last years on the ranch, after I did my MFA work, that I tried to figure out more ways to make this a career and bring in some income,” she says. Meanwhile, the ranch and the relationship continued to struggle.

“I locked myself in my mother's guest room, and in 5 days, I cut 40,000 words from the
manuscript. ”
—BUYER

Buyer took a portion of those longhand notes and arranged them into a manuscript, which won a Literature Artist’s Fellowship from the Colorado Council on the Arts­--“my first really big award,” she says. Based on positive reader and reviewer comments, she then completed Spring’s Edge and submitted it for the Beryl Markham prize at Storyline Press. But even though it won, Story Line Press also had fallen on hard financial times; the manuscript was stalled for 5 years. It was ready for production, but it was never printed.
   
Enter Luther Wilson, the director of University of New Mexico Press. Wilson urged her to reclaim the rights in case Story Line ended up in court for bankruptcy; the manuscript could be tied up for years. Buyer contacted Story Line, which gladly returned rights to her. Then Wilson, whom Laurie says has since become “a stalwart champion of my work,” asked to see the manuscript.
   
“It’s the same, with the exception that one of the readers at UMN Press loved the story but felt that it was repetitious. [He said,] ‘Laurie, you need to cut the crap.’ It irritated me at the time, but it really helped in the end. So once I settled down and got over having my feelings hurt, I locked myself in my mother’s guest room, and in 5 days, I cut 40,000 words from the manuscript.” The result is a tighter, more focused, potent account of the joys and brutalities of ranch life­--and all of it imbued with Buyer’s lyric, sensual, and compassionate portrayals of the people, animals, and the place.
   
“It’s set up like journal or diary, and it takes you through a day-by-day journey … Maybe it would not have been that interesting of a story, except that the cattle market and agriculture lifestyle right at that point in time was just horrible.”
   
“My ex-husband was a 4th-generation cattle rancher, born and raised in Colorado. So a lot of the book is history and heritage. A lot of the book is dedicated to talking about people who homesteaded the area and how much struggle went in to preserving the land and keeping the land in the family and why that is so important.”

In addition to their struggling ranch and strained relationship, Buyer also had to deal with her father’s struggle with esophageal cancer. “It was just a crazy, transitional time in my life. I knew things were failing, and I didn’t know how to keep it together. And the truth is, you never can.”
   
So, you may be wondering, how does it feel to write a book about not only a way of life you deliberately chose to leave, but also a marriage you left behind? Is it scary for Buyer? No.
   
“When I first wrote this story, I was very nervous that my ex-husband might come across as the bad guy… and I didn’t want to portray him in black or dark way. I wanted him to be authentic and genuine. And almost everyone has said to me, ‘Are you kidding? He comes across as the hero in this book.’ So how could you complain if you’re portrayed as a hero?”

Buyer is still in contact with and close to some members of her ex-husband’s family. She feels a certain kinship with them, still, and with those whose lives she portrays alongside her own in Spring’s Edge. “I think it’s a story with a great deal of love in it: a love for the land, a love for the man, for the marriage, a love for the animals, both wild and domestic, and a love for the agricultural community that was just struggling to keep its feet and to keep going. In an area of the country where everything was going to tourism and recreation, how do you hang on to the ranchland? How do you hang on to the open spaces that provide sanctuary for all the wild animals as well?” It’s an answer she’s still searching for.
   
“One thing as a writer that has always calmed me is things happen when the time is right.  With Spring’s Edge . . . I realize now, this book could not have come out while I was still in that marriage. I didn’t know I was getting out of that marriage at the time I wrote the story; I thought I was going to stay in it forever, but it didn’t work out that way. Once that marriage was over and I devoted everything to my writing career, then things took off like a house afire. That’s the right timing for this story.”
   
Lest you think Buyer is an “all about me” kind of writer, nothing could be further from the truth. In addition to her current stable of works, she’s also written three other novels that have nothing to do with her. Two of the three are now circulating through her agent, Elizabeth Trupin-Pulli, of Jet Literary Agency. One of the three is a complete departure for Buyer and came from “a voice I’d been hearing in my head for about 10 years. She was a woman I did not like! But when I finally paid attention to that voice and said, ‘Okay, I’ll listen,’ a whole story set in Celtic Britain in 80 AD came forth. It’s such a shift from anything I’ve ever written about.”

Another side of Buyer is her big-hearted response to other writers. In addition to presenting at 6-8 writer’s workshops every year, she also has a bustling small business, Creative Adventures, which is a writing service for other writers. “Every writer I help helps me be a better writer,” she says. “Sometimes I learn so much from the writers I work with. They’re teaching me all the time things they know that I have not yet learned. And [there’s] the whole notion of helping someone else find his or her way because so many other people helped me. So that’s what I want to do with this small business­to give something back.”
   
Buyer is never too far from remembering her journey, and she’s quick to encourage other writers. “I tell all the people I work with through Creative Adventure, ‘Passion, patience, and persistence.’”
   
Persistence is something she and her husband, W.C. Jameson, himself a well-known author and musician, are no strangers to. Last year, Buyer calculates they spent 280 days on the road. That’s a lot of miles.

Among many other dates this year, Laurie Wagner Buyer will present/teach at Writing the Rockies at Western State College in Gunnison, CO, the Women Writing the West Conference in San Antonio, TX, and the Ozark Creative Writer’s Conference, where she’ll teach a poetry workshop this fall. She’ll also be reading/performing with W.C. Jameson in Texas during the summer.
   
If you’d like to see more workshop dates and keep up with the many projects Buyer is doing (some in conjunction with her writer/musician husband W.C. Jameson) visit her Web site at http://www.lauriewagnerbuyer.com/ 

Karen Heise has edited online and print media and published fiction, poetry, essays, and academic articles in Nebula, Wazee, Janus Head, The Journal of Lesbian Studies, and elsewhere. In addition to freelance editing and writing, she currently teaches online writing and literature classes for Paris Junior College, Paris, Texas, She received an M.A. in English from the University of Northern Colorado and lives in Buena Vista, Colorado. E-mail: kheise2000@yahoo.com