Toby Thompson, author of Riding the Rough String, sat for an interview with Bangtail Press. That interview has been posted on Cherie Newman’s “The Write Question” blog.
http://thewritequestion.blogspot.com/2012/08/an-interview-with-toby-thompson.html
An excerpt:
BP: Many of your pieces in Rough String concern writers. Is that an accident?
TT: No. Many writers were smitten as children by the mythos of the West, and as adults, writing was one way to survive here. You could create your books, articles or screenplays without living in New York or Los Angeles, and you could do so in an extremely loose manner. I started profiling writers because A: I was interested in their work, and B: because I wished to see how their lives embraced the West. My long piece about Thomas McGuane and Livingston during the manic 1970s is case in point. The huge profile of Gary Snyder is another. Snyder did it on a subsistence basis, with a community of activists and writers accompanying him. I believe the settlement of the West by artists and writers, in the mid-to-late twentieth century, will be seen to be as important as that of cowboys or miners in the nineteenth.
