A Colorful Literary Legacy
The Fall 1969 edition of English department journal Garret featured the William Kittredge story, “Breaker of Horses,” with a cover photograph by Lee Nue.
It was the “halcyon spring of 1973,” writes William Kittredge, when University of Montana creative writing director Earl Ganz and celebrated Montana poets Richard Hugo and Madeline DeFrees decided in a faculty meeting to put Kittredge in charge of creating a “first-rate magazine.”
“It’s up to you,” Ganz said to a then-“seriously untenured, very junior” professor Kittredge.
The University in the early seventies was on the heels of a rebellious literary bent. The Book, for example, was devoted to publishing the student opinions of faculty members with the intent to encourage “good teaching,” while the editors of the rogue literary magazine Hazard asserted what they believed was their basic right to publish while protesting “the unjustified and ill-considered suppression and proposed censorship of Venture magazine by the president of the University and the governor of Montana.”
Kittredge, however, was more concerned with providing an outlet in which creative writing students might feel they were “not forever lost in backwater.” In the vein of former English and creative writing professor H.G. Merriam , who founded the quarterly journal Frontier (later titled Frontier and Midland) to encourage the work of young authors in 1920, Kittredge debuted CutBank—“Where the big fish lie”—in the fall of 1973. Thirty-six years later, the publication continues as a forum for new and venerated writers alike.
Since 1898, with the first issue of the monthly magazine The Kaimin, the University’s literary publications have inspired, protested, riled, honored and provided colorful commentary through works of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. From the satirical—including the 1933 edition of The Growler which says, “If you have gone through these pages you have seen us trampling on people’s toes, poking fun and exploding myths. We are going to keep doing this, and we’ll probably be writing about you and you and you”—to the questioning of intellectual, moral and economic infrastructures found in later publications like Camas, the collection of University of Montana literary journals housed in Archives and Special Collections showcases the emerging and established writers that make up the storied literary tradition of UM.
Posted by Margo Whitmire