Laura Bell

Bell, Laura

Cody, WY

Biographical and Professional Information

Laura Bell’s work has been published in several collections, and from the Wyoming Arts Council she has received two literature fellowships as well as the Neltje Blanchan Memorial Award and the Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Award. She lives in Cody, and since 2000 has worked for The Nature Conservancy there.

Genres

Essay

Nonfiction

Wyoming Subjects

Titles

Claiming Ground (March 2010). New York: Knopf. ISBN: 9780307272881

Reviews for Claiming Ground:

Kirkus (STARRED)

Bell, Laura, CLAIMING GROUND: A Memoir

An elegant, deep-running chronicle of Bell’s 30 years living in the mountain West.

It begins as an encomium of place—the Lewis Ranch in northwestern Wyoming, up in the Bighorn Mountains, where the author took a job herding sheep, far indeed from her native Kentucky. She was fresh out of college, clueless but lucky to stumble into these parts, and she found herself a young woman among old male sheepherders—“tender alcoholics, muttering derelicts, societal rejects, and I had found a certain delicious comfort in their company.” When she could get it, that is, for the job was full of silence and space, tending to a knot of a thousand sheep, “a luminous, drifting mass that spills in rivulets through gulleys and rises up hillsides, conforming intricately to the imperfect shape of earth.” If the “bare-bones immensity of Wyoming can make you feel like a sacrifice left on a slab for the gods to pick clean,” all the better when it revealed its beauties, which Bell tenders with restrained grace. A few years later she was herding cattle and falling in love and marrying the wrong man, though her love of land and kin, particularly her parents and stepdaughters—drawn in intricate, emotionally charged portraits—helps get her through. She closes with a crushing death in the family, recounted with scalding vulnerability and sadness: “When I think the ash of every sorrow has burned cold, I’m mistaken.” The episode speaks volumes about fragility, impermanence and transformation. Slowly she made her way back to solid ground, in the same landscape she started with, and it can only be hoped that the next 30 years find her in the same state of raptness, but with an earned measure of serenity.

A work of descriptive virtuosity and a hard, honest pull through rough emotional terrain—an exemplary memoir.

(Author tour to Boulder, Colo., Montana, New York, Portland, Ore., Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Seattle, Wyoming. Agent: Nancy Stauffer/Nancy Stauffer Associates)

Advance praise for Claiming Ground:

First, it is the language you notice: phrases, whole passages composed with the musical authority of psalms. And then there is the evocation of place, Wyoming rising from these pages as actual as a wild perfume. But it is the honesty that keeps you up in the night, wondering at the frailty of what it means to be human and glad and brave and, at times, broken. Laura Bell’s CLAIMING GROUND is the finest memoir I’ve read.

Mark Spragg, author of Where Rivers Change Direction and An Unfinished Life

This is a book that compels you to the last sentence, both because of its sheer beauty and its profound meaning. It goes deep and way out to the edges, in beautifully composed, exact prose. It makes you think of Thoreau out in the woods, confronting the essential. This is just a fresh, wonderful piece of writing, about the isolated and attentive kind of life almost nobody lives nowadays, or ever did.

Kent Haruf, author of Plainsong and Eventide

Intriguing and eloquent, by turns guarded then vulnerable, and always written with honesty and keen observation, Laura Bell’s CLAIMING GROUND merges exquisitely the human condition of wonder, celebration, fear and longing with the western landscape that so arouses and nurtures these same senses.

Rick Bass, author of Why I Came West