Walking Three Bar T Publishing, Inc.
New Release!
a longtime gone
a memoir
Walking Three Bar T Publishing is pleased to announce the publication of ‘a longtime gone’, a memoir of boyhood days by Glen Larum, author of the acclaimed debut fiction novel, Waltz Against the Sky, and a poetry collection with the poignant title, Leaving Montana.
“I wasn’t planning to write a memoir,” Larum said. “It’s mostly truth, … loosely layered around the kernels of factl”
You can order it here, online.
Praise For a longtime gone – a memoir
“a longtime gone”
A Review of a Memoir
Who writes a memoir?
The answer to the question, I suspect, is ‘authors trying to make sense of their lives’.
But here’s how the author Glen Larum explains writing his memoir, a longtime gone, as a follow-up toWaltz Against the Sky, the highly regarded Indie fiction novel that marked his impressive 2019 debut.
“I wasn’t planning to write a memoir,” Larum said. “I was working on a novel about a Blue Ridge Mountain girl who wanted to homestead in Montana in the early twentieth century, but a boy’s life on that homestead 40 years later kept getting in the way. So, I wrote his story to clear the decks so I could get back to the original novel.
“It’s mostly truth, … loosely layered around the kernels of fact,” he explained of his memoir. “I’m reminded of the Kris Kristofferson’s lyrics …“ … He’s a walkin’ contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction,
Takin’ every wrong direction on his lonely way back home.”
–The Pilgrim, Chapter 33
“That’s probably a little over-dramatic,” the author admitted, “but it makes the point. In the end, it helped me understand the answer to the question, ‘How can you keep going back home when there’s no home to go back to?’”
He builds the memoir’s foundation upon a brief, happy childhood in an unlikely place –a small, desolate ranch on the eastern Montana prairie and traces his way through the first 21 years of his life. Fifty years later, he brings the story full circle, returning to the ranch of his childhood to scatter his mother’s ashes.
The author doesn’t pull any punches in this poignant story of a western boy’s life, casually exposing his childhood transgressions and chronicling up close why he regarded the errors as among the memorable mileposts.
At a distance, it’s a story of a boy’s relationships –to the Mom, Dad and family he adored; his boyhood friends; to a one-of-a-kind Little League baseball coach; an old man on the edge of town; an unforgettable 7th grade teacher; a tapestry of kindly neighbors; classmates; old-time country doctors; grocery store owners; co-workers; and a girlfriend who helps him bring it all into focus even as she steps out of his life into her own.
In a longtime gone, Larum traces all these and uses them as opportunities to express his gratitude for the unexpected kindnesses shown by family, relatives, friends, teachers, neighbors and strangers.
Home isn’t so much a place, he discovers in this humble story, as it is the people who inhabit our world and their interactions with us. Home is what we rub off on each other. We may never know how what affect we have on them but in the end, it’s all that most of us leave behind.
If it takes a slice of ‘fictionalized autobiography’ to discover that truth, then it validates the contradictions. And it’s what makes this memoir memorable, even if the author chooses to use all lower-case letters in its title.
“Home is what we rub off on each other. We may never know what it was but in the end, it’s all that most of us leave behind.” – reader and reviewer, ‘a longtime gone’
“It’s mostly truth, … loosely layered around the kernels of fact.”
– Glen Larum explains his memoir, “a longtime gone”
More by Glen Larum
Leaving Montana
collected Poems
Walking 3 Bar T Publishing announces the launch of a new collection of modern western poetry, “Leaving Montana”, written by Glen Larum. He is also the author of “Waltz Against the Sky,” named by Kirkus Reviews as one of the Top 5 Indie Debut Fiction Novels of 2019. A poetic companion to “Waltz Against the Sky,” a novel which examines the role of chance and choice in the American West, “Leaving Montana” celebrates the importance of people, time and place. You’ll find a collection that ranges across the West, though rooted in both prairie and mountain valley of his home state.
A native of Montana, Larum was born at Malta, went to high school at Charlo, and graduated from the University of Montana Western in Dillon. While he now lives in Austin, Texas, he has not forgotten his roots. And his poetry evokes images of all those worlds.
You can order it here, online / free shipping.
Sample selections can be read here on the website: Walking3barTpublishing.com/poetry
Praise For Leaving Montana – Collected Poems
The cover photo is a poem itself.
In his left hand, the author carries a small bronze marker to be dropped on a sagebrush ridge;
in his right, a pottery urn holding the ashes of his father, to be scattered on that ridge.
This is how personal his poetry is, and he carries the emotion home with a deft, cleansing touch.
Each of Larum’s poems is a full story, whether it’s eight lines or eighty lines.
Every line carries the freight of a lifetime.
In an unique voice, he introduces the West of his youth, then slices it down to a brand on a cowhide
“It was a place where people were good to you and when you go back, they will be good to you again.”
Waltz Against the Sky
Western Fiction
Glen Larum’s introductory novel, Waltz Against the Sky, is a tour de force in modern western realism that explores the fates awaiting young men who leave home behind for various reasons and venture out into the world.
Evan Blaine, a country newspaper editor, finds himself seizing a chance for a new start; Dink Downs, who has lost his first regular job on a Florida road crew, gets swept along by his older brother, Del, an ex-con who has agreed to drive across country to deliver an automobile for a former cellmate; and teen-ager Tony Angione is hitch-hiking from his home in New Jersey to California to see if he can find himself, employment, and a future with an uncle who may be more myth than the building contractor who can answer his prayers.
The paths of these four are all destined to converge in West Texas, where they bump up against each other and the people whom strangers are most likely to encounter in a strange place, people in the professional hospitality business and law enforcement officials who administer justice in their own way.
As Waltz Against the Sky begins, a series of uncommon incidents set in motion the events that seize control of the story and a flashback layering technique featuring the characters' varying viewpoints carries the reader along to their appointments with destiny. While many of the encounters with the ordinary population seem to affirm a basic goodness in people, there is an underlying tension that plays out to an unexpected end.
Praise For Waltz Against the Sky
As characters in Glen Larum's Waltz Against the Sky drift toward a small town in Texas, their stories are braided into a lariat that cinches their fates together. Like a Tony Hillerman New Mexico novel, Waltz puts the sere, flat landscape back into moral order by following a bloody crime, a violent chase, and a courtroom drama that entangle the lives of ordinary people. Evan Blaine, a young newspaper editor, must search beyond appearances for the truth—and how he can anchor his life’s work, and his heart, within the community. Waltz is a masterpiece, Larum, a master.
As I settled into Glen Larum’s book, Waltz Against the Sky, the little town of Indian Springs felt like Andy Griffith’s Mayberry, N.C. Until it didn’t. Indian Springs, sitting at a crossroads in West Texas, ended up being more like Cabot Cove from “Murder, She Wrote.” More dying folks than you can imagine. You imagine how it all happened, however, just as though you were there. Coincidences. Possibilities. Good times. Good people. Bad choices.
Young Evan Blaine, minted in Montana, looking for a fresh start in Texas, learns that Indian Springs is not like other small towns. and ends up tangled in a web of crooks, jail escapees, and manhunts. Larum spins an ambitious tale and draws you in with vivid images to carry you along...
A good read. A very good read, indeed.
An intriguing read, smartly written, Waltz Against the Sky beautifully evokes a fading era of journalism as young newspaper editor Evan Blaine covers a brutal crime in a small Texas town. He encounters darkly comic criminals reminiscent of an Elmore Leonard novel, police officers who play with the law as they wish, and a stalwart judge who tries to make things right for the hapless innocents as well as the perpetrators. With well-paced action and quick-flowing dialogue, the multi-layered stories of these realistic characters play into a lively plot that fuses their fates.
“Be purposeful. Every step you take leaves a track.”
Walking Three Bar T Publishing, Inc.
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