Legends of the Old West - BONUS: Nancy Plain Interview

Episode Date: July 29, 2018

Nancy Plain, the president of the Western Writers of America, discusses WWA and her book about the life of iconic Western painter, Charles Russell. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. welcome to another legends interview this time i had the pleasure to sit down with the president of the western writers of america nancy plain she's won numerous Spur Awards from the Western writers, the most prestigious prize they hand out. Her work is for younger audiences, and it's covered a wide range of topics. When I met her at the WWA convention, we talked about something that we haven't gotten into in the show, but I think is a big part of the American West, the art of the West. She's written books on two of the most iconic painters of the Old West, Frederick Remington and Charles Russell. We'll dive into their lives and their art,

as well as talk about the Western writers of America as an organization. I'm sure we have a few aspiring authors out there. Shout out to you, Gary Patterson. And you'll want to hear this. Here's Nancy Plain. Nancy Plain, incoming president, or I should say brand new president of the Western Writers of America. Welcome to the show. Thank you very much for agreeing to do this. Thank you. It's exciting and a pleasure to be here.

So the first thing we want to talk about is actually the Western Writers of America itself. Can you give me some highlights about the organization? As we record this, we are sitting here in Billings, Montana. The week of meetings and panels for the convention for 2018 is just wrapping up. But I want our listeners to know what really is the Western Writers of America. I can say so much about Western Writers of America I could keep you here all day. It is a wonderful organization of people who write about the West. This is our 65th anniversary. We were founded in 1953 and we have grown immensely. We are, it started out as writers of traditional westerns, shoot-'em-ups, cowboys and Indians, wonderful novels.

But it started out only as novelists. And since then, we have expanded to include major historians, children's book writers, poets, songwriters, screenwriters, juvenile nonfiction, which is what I write, juvenile fiction, cookbook writers. We have a lovely cookbook that was published last year by Two Dot Press, which has gotten great reviews. Right. And it's chock full of comfort food and really fun recipes for cornbread and cake and everything we love. Right. for cornbread and cake and everything we love. And it's the friendliest, most interesting organization I've ever belonged to and that I can ever think of.

You come here to the convention, which we hold every year in a different western city, and it's like a homecoming. It's like a family reunion. Over the years, we've just all grown to know each other. And we also welcome new members. We have lots of new members this year. I think we have 102. So we're growing. We're expanding.

We're looking to preserve all the great traditions, but we're also looking to innovations how to get our word out how to get our work out to just nationwide we were looking to partner with museums and we go to book festivals and it's just it's such a an active organization with so much going on that I'm trying to think of everything, and I'll probably forget something right now. You couldn't possibly go through the entire list, I'm sure. And we certainly wouldn't ask you to try to run through all of the highlights right off the top of your head.

But, yeah, that's a great one. And my sister and I have been here all week experiencing the convention, and we got that exact same feel. Everyone who was so welcoming to us here, who were completely new and foreign to most people, we talked to a few people before the convention, but it's been great to meet everyone, and we really got to see firsthand the family reunion aspect that you were talking about. This really is the time of year where everybody comes together

from across the nation, sometimes even across the world. People come from outside of the U.S. to come to the convention, and they all get to hang out for a week here and have fun and talk about all the different topics and see a whole bunch of stuff on the panel. So it's been a really fun experience for us. And you know, there's one thing I want to emphasize, and this really strikes me a lot. We help each other. We're made up of people who are just beginning their writing careers. We give an award for first novel and first nonfiction book but then we run the

gamut from people just starting out to people who are really very well known. Craig Johnson is on the board now and he and A. Martinez and Marcus Redthunder gave a wonderful panel on the Longmire series. And so we just mingle and mix and we share each other's stories and give advice and it's great for networking and you just got me started. And we have an editor-agent panel so if you're looking to pitch a book, you sign up to speak to a particular agent or editor, and you pitch your book. And careers have been started here. And I know that Western Writers has helped my career immensely. Right. And I'll give a quick shout out here to

a gentleman named Gary Patterson, who is a loyal listener of the podcast and interacts on Twitter and he and I I sent him a picture of that panel that editor and agents panel and said we got to be here next year so he I know that he is an aspiring Western novelist or nonfiction writers probably both he probably wants to dabble in both but I it was it was kind of a fun thing I said yep here we go you got to plan your next year's trip so hopefully Gary can get his work finished and maybe you can be here next year's trip so hopefully Gary can get his work finished and maybe he can be here next year. Well let me tell you a little bit about the Spur Award and one of our major functions is to give awards for distinguished writing on all topics Western and you know it runs the gamut from

categories to screenwriting to biography. We have many categories. And so we give a Spur Award each year. There's a winner and there are two finalists. And we have a list of really distinguished judges who judge these books. And it's a lot of work because there's a ton of reading. It's great reading. I've been a judge and I've really learned a lot from reading other people's writing and I've enjoyed it. So the Spur Award is given. We also give our biggest literary award is the Owen

Wister Award for a lifetime of writing. This year's winner is Rudolfo Anaya, who is the foremost founder of the Chicano literary movement. And I was lucky enough to be able to read his letter of acceptance of the award. And it's a big, beautiful statue too. We also give awards within the organization for people who've done the most for the organization. Okay. And a number of other awards, but our main feature is the Spur Award. Right. And I know in my own career, having won four Spurs, it's been an immense help in getting proposals accepted by publishers. Sure, I can imagine.

And it's just a thrill. Every year I come,'s just a thrill. Every year I come is a thrill. And I joined in 2008, and I haven't missed a convention yet, and I hope never to miss a convention. Right, well, happy 10-year anniversary. Thank you very much. One of our thrusts is to let people know that, you know, the West is not dead and it's not only the past, although the past really fascinates most of us. But what's going on today is really important. Right. As you see, we're in Billings.

Montana couldn't be more beautiful. It's like paradise. And people are living here today and facing all kinds of issues, environmental and ranching and you name it. Sure. And just to slightly build on that, and we'll kind of wrap up with the discussion of the Western writers. But as you mentioned earlier, the Western writers started as novelists and it has expanded to cover pretty much every type of writing that's out there. And just as we've been here, there have been roundtable discussions about screenwriting. There's panels on screenwriting. So obviously the film aspect of it and all the different kinds of fiction and nonfiction and juvenile fiction, all that stuff is represented here. So that's some of the stuff

that I found fascinating too. And obviously we had, you mentioned it too, the Longmire panel about bringing a novel to the screen, in this case, a television series. So that kind of stuff is just as present. There's the real world issues. television series. Oh, yeah. And that was fascinating. So that kind of stuff was just as present. There's the real-world issues. There's some fun historical issues. And then there's also the kind of movie magic aspect of it, too. Right. And poetry and, oh, everything.

Yeah. I love WWA. It's just, it's the most fun. You know, and I encourage people to come to the conventions. You don't have to be a member to come. You can pay a one-day pass and sit in on, hear historians talk about Custer and the Little Bighorn or whatever you want to do. Right, right. Yeah, we came as non-members this year, luckily. Well, I'm glad you came. Yeah, it's been a fantastic experience. Great. Well, thank you for telling us a little bit about

the Western writers. We appreciate it. A Nighthawk. It was night and the big sky over Montana territory glittered with the cold light of a million stars. A young cowboy named Charlie Russell was on nighthawk duty for a cattle roundup. On his spotted pony Monty, he watched over the horse herd circling and circling as the animals grazed and slept. To keep them calm, he sang a cowboy tune. Charlie didn't mind riding all night. He would catch up on sleep in the morning when the other men were out on the range chasing cattle.

Besides, the sunrise over the mountains, the way light and color moved across the prairie was a treat to see. Charlie was new to the Roundup, but already he felt at home. This wasn't because he was a first-rate roper or rider. He wasn't. In fact, he was afraid of bucking broncos. But he liked life on the range, and he made friends easily. Around the campfire, he told stories that made the other cowboys roar with laughter. And always, as he talked, he would pull a lump of beeswax from his pocket and

make little figures, Indians, cowboys, outlaws, animals, whatever characters he needed to illustrate his tales. It seemed that Charlie could draw or paint anything, too. Wherever he went, his pencils and paints went with him, stuffed into a spare sock. The cowboys recognized their faces in his pictures, which he dashed off on scraps of paper, bits of wood, even the lining of someone's hat. In a few years, this habit of sketching life on the range would earn Charlie the nickname the cowboy artist, and he would become famous throughout the country. But in 1882, his first year as a Wrangler, he was just that newcomer, Kid Russell.

He was a long way from his hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, but Montana was where he wanted to be. So Charles Russell and Frederick Remington were contemporaries. They're two of the more famous Old West artists or West American Western artists that have been out there. They're iconic artists. They were working at about the same time. I think Remington is maybe three years older than Russell, something like that. They're very close to the same age.

But why has their art had so much staying power over the years? has their art had so much staying power over the years? I think their art has had so much staying power simply because it's so magnificent and they're very interesting men to compare because actually in terms of personality they couldn't have been more different. Really? Their lives were very different. Remington was an Easterner who fell in love with the West. And he was a wonderful artist. He has a painting called The Fall of the Cowboy, which in my fantasy life I would have in my living room

because it's one of my favorite paintings in the world. It's at the Amon Carter Museum, and I went there a couple of years ago to Fort Worth and just stood in front of this painting. The topic is the end of the open range days and it's a snowy day in the picture. It's gray and kind of bleak and there are cowboys leading their horses home after a long day working with cattle but they have to open a fence in order to get home. And I don't remember whether it's a barbed wire fence or not but the reason why the painting is titled The Fall of the Cowboy

is because the painting is emblematic of the death of the open range, and it was kind of Remington's lament. And he has another wonderful painting called The Outlier, which is all, it's very impressionistic in my mind. which is all, it's very impressionistic in my mind. It's an Indian sort of a night watcher all done in blues. And it's also very poignant. But Remington also painted many pictures of the cavalry.

He was very interested in the military out west. That was pretty much what he was really drawn to. And as I say, he was not a real Westerner, although you wouldn't know it from his pictures. Another painting I love of his is called Buffalo Runners in the Bighorn Basin, and it's a picture of Indians dashing up a slope in the Bighorn Basin running after buffalo, and it's so exciting.

The movement in his paintings is just thrilling. Now, Charlie, on the other hand, Kid Russell, was actually a wrangler. He worked on the open range for 11 years, and when he started out, he was primarily a cowboy. He was a young cowboy. That was his dream, to primarily a cowboy he was a young cowboy right that was his dream to be a cowboy and um he painted the people he knew he painted the people in the cowboy camp as you know when they're on the trail and in fact um all his friends could recognize themselves in their

pictures and they would recognize even their horses so so and he was he was a lot of fun to write about because he was just a free spirit Remington was much more a calculated man okay if that's the best way I can describe it Charlie in in the beginning of his career he just dashed off paintings and gave them away to friends and he was and he he wouldn't sell to anyone he didn't like and his first paintings he sold or most of them he gave away and a lot of people wished that you know he had given them away to their great grandfathers or grandfathers because then they would have a fortune in their attic. And so he started out giving things away in the saloon when he was palling around with his cowboys after long days on the trail.

And then when he became famous, he was getting record prices for his paintings. And I remember writing about he once got $75,000 for a painting. Or when he got $10,000 for a painting, it was astounding to him. He couldn't believe it. And now, of course, all his paintings are in museums. But he's considered, you know, he was the real Westerner. And they were both wonderful, but they were so different right and i think you touched on several different things there that that somewhat lead into a couple different questions i have so we'll try to work our way through them i think one of which i thought was really interesting you mentioned i didn't know that that a lot of the the people

and animals in his pictures are either exact maybe exact representations of people he knew or at least based on those types of things. That's really interesting. And one of the things I noticed in looking through his artwork was that he seems to have a little bit more of a whimsical quality to some of his paintings with like a horse, you know, a cowboy who's on a horse that's somewhat out of control and it kind of plows through the middle of the campsite.

Exactly. He does things like that, which you can now that you hear about it really seem like it was probably drawn from a real experience. Oh that's cowboy that's um breaking up something called breaking camp I think. I think it's something like yeah. And the Bronco is horses running wild with a cowboy on top trying to control it and it runs right through the breakfast fire. Yeah. Tin plates are flying and I'm sure that's a real thing that happened. Now that you say that,

it really feels like it had to be drawn from real life. But, you know, that's an interesting insight, Chris, that you compared his paintings. You spoke of his paintings that way because that, I just realized, that really speaks to their different personalities as well. So Charlie, you know, he said, he was a wonderful man, and I enjoyed writing about him for that reason. That was one of the

reasons. He was pretty level-headed, and he said something like, I don't deserve any credit for having talent. I was born with it. I had nothing to do with it. And he also said, they called him a sagebrush celebrity in the beginning because he was definitely in the beginning well-known in Montana before he became, I guess, world famous. Sure. And there's so much I can say about him. I'm kind of losing my thread.

But he also said he was all about telling the stories of the West on canvas. And he said, I can't even live long enough to tell all the stories I want to tell on canvas. And he was this unassuming, friendly guy. All he really wanted to do was have fun painting and hang out with his buddies in the saloon. But when he got married, he married a woman named Nancy. Now I forget her maiden name. But Nancy Russell kind of whipped him into shape and she would actually come down to the saloon and kind of drag him out and say, okay, Charlie, you know, you've got to make a

living. But he credited her in a big way for his career. And she was really instrumental in getting him well known. So he went from, you know, your friend sitting in the shade of a tree on the roundup just dashing off sketches to, after Nancy got a hold of him, to being sought after by presidents, senators, big oil tycoons and the like. Sure, sure. So she did it. Fantastic. Yeah, she said, oh he said,

Nancy is the business end on the, I guess the artist. Yeah, she kept him in line so that he could produce this artwork and make it make a real business out of it. Do it, do it for real. Right, and interestingly this is, this is a tidbit and this is one reason why I love to write biographies because you, you kind of get to know these people and things that aren't necessarily in the history books after Charlie died and he died only at 62 Nancy who was very friendly with Will Rogers exchanged some letters with Will Rogers so Will Rogers and Charlie and Nancy were good friends. But Nancy felt guilty about

having, she felt that he had held Charlie's nose to the grindstone and pressured him about getting on with his career. And she felt that maybe she had prevented him from having the And she felt that maybe she had prevented him from having the fun that he wanted. But Will Rogers comforted her and said, at one point in a letter, he said to her, he left us, Nancy, but he left us much. And that's so true. You mentioned that he was getting record prices for his paintings at the time. I don't know if they're actual records, but certainly the paintings nowadays have been sold for millions

at auction. At least two of his paintings have been sold for more than five million dollars a piece, if I'm not mistaken. So what do you think resonates about those paintings with people today? I mean, it's one thing for people at the time to have paid those giant sums of money, but people are paying even larger sums of money now to own these paintings. What kind of qualities do you think are in those that resonate with people? It's love of the West.

People love the West. People will always love the West. It will never be passe. He also wrote short stories, and he said he has this little ditty that he made up, and it says the West is dead my friend but writers hold the seed and what they sell will live and grow again to those who read but I think that applies to painting as well

nobody is gonna get tired of pictures of of the West and Western subjects. And I might add, probably not so well known a fact about Charlie is that he actually painted more Indian subjects than cowboys. Really? Yeah. And that's, it's very interesting. He was a true advocate for Native Americans and he called them the only real Americans. And he had tremendous passion for improving their lives. I mean after he started he only worked the Roundup for 11 years and then he settled down to painting full time. But he also was very active in advocating for Indians because in Montana, I forget the exact years, they were starving.

The Blackfeet and I think the Cree, they had a lot of trouble on the reservations and he wrote letters to the Montana newspapers saying essentially, you should be ashamed of what you're allowing to happen. And that was basically going to be my last question here is that he spent his entire adult life in Montana. He died in Montana. There are monuments and tributes to him all over Montana. How do you think his work has impacted Montana and shown Montana to the wider world?

Because it's not one of the classic boom towns of Dodge City or Tombstone or Deadwood or anything like that. It's much more of the open range, but Dodge City or Tombstone or Deadwood or anything like that. It's much more of the open range. But he captured that and gave it to the country. They might not have been as familiar with it as they were reading about the craziness in some of these raucous cattle towns in their newspapers. Well, that's a good question. I mean, for one, he made a huge mural for the statehouse in Helena. made a huge mural for the State House in Helena. And a fascinating thing about him that speaks to his interest in Indians is that he, the

subject of the mural is the Flathead Indians, Flathead Indians meet Lewis and Clark at Ross's Hole in Montana. And it's painted from the Flathead Indian perspective so that you see the Indians front and center and Lewis and Clark are smaller figures to the right background. And that's typical of Charlie. He was interested in the Native American history. So, I mean, that's one thing he gave the state. And I think that the West belongs to all Americans. And, you know, I'm from New Jersey, but I love the West.

And we have members, many of our members are not from the West. And I think whatever Charlie gave to Montana, he also gave to America and also to the world. And I think it's... As we wrap up a discussion about Charlie Russell, you mentioned the Amy G. Carter Museum in Fort Worth earlier I would encourage anyone who especially I know we have a lot of listeners in Texas there are two art museums western art museums in Fort Worth

you can see some of his paintings right there and obviously if you're traveling around the west you can spot them in several other places so I would certainly encourage anyone to go visit those museums and and find those works you can look them up and certainly you can look them up online as your representations but standing there and seeing them them up, and certainly you can look them up online as your representations, but standing there and seeing them in person is much different. You can find, you can see how intoxicating they are and how you can daydream and imagine what it might have been like, and that's, I think that also probably speaks to the captive quality of those paintings.

Right, and it's a thrill to stand in front of the real thing. I had seen the reproductions of The Fall of the Cowboy so many times as I wrote the Remington book, but to stand in front of it, it was kind of mind-blowing. For one thing, it was smaller than I expected, because you see these huge reproductions in books and they take up the whole page, and it was smaller. That's interesting. Yeah, but it still packs a real punch. I can imagine that too. Yeah. All right, it still packs a real punch. I can imagine that too. Yeah.

All right, thank you. You're welcome. Thanks for listening. Now, as always, if you like the show, please give it a rating and a review on iTunes. Those things help make the show more visible to new listeners as they're browsing through all the different podcasts out there. You can find us on the web at oldwestpodcast.com and on our Facebook page, Legends of the Old West Podcast.

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