Last July I wrote about Wyoming. I said that it had been a magical place since I was ten years old, a place where everyone owned a  horse and the sky went on forever. I said that I was determined to visit Wyoming, even though I'm well out of my horse period. I did some research into ways I could accomplish this goal and found a writing program held at a resort ranch there each August.

Well, I'm not going this August. I'd already come to the conclusion that drop-in style community-based writers' groups could not offer the level of instruction and peer criticism that I need. Since I've been working with my tutor, Greg Madden of Rabbit Hill Writer's Studio, I've definitely come to understand that celebrity workshops, particularly short-term programs offered in a fabulous setting, are also counter-productive for me. Not only is the level of instruction of necessity too basic for me and the amount of interaction with the tutor too limited (again, of necessity), the lure of an exotic, unfamiliar place is often a distraction. (Or I find out that the scenery might be beautiful but the room I'm assigned smells like an ashtray, the lighting is inadequate, and the coffee is terrible).

Over the past two months, under Greg's direction, I've generated a lot of material and developed some real writer's habits. I work on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, often not leaving the house except for brief errands. Thursdays I attend the spiritual study group at church I've been involved with for years and then spend the afternoon reviewing and getting ready for the in-person roundtable workshop in the evening (administered by Rabbit Hill but not involving Greg). Fridays I take off.

I'm working up to making my own residency, my own writer's retreat, time away to work on advanced drafts. There are places nearby I can go, in particular the Jesuit Center in Wernersville or the Kirkridge Center a little farther north. There's an authentic 1860s farmhouse near the Pennsylvania German research facility I use that offers bed and breakfast accommodations, as well as cheap but clean, well-lighted tourist-type motels near the sacred grounds that give me so much inspiration.

And there is still Wyoming.

Maybe.

Last week I read a story by Annie Proulx that appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1998. It was included in  her collection of Wyoming stories, Close Range. Proulx lives "out there," and wrote "The Half-Skinned Steer" as a commissioned piece for an anthology called Off the Beaten Path: Stories of Place. In her contributor's notes she said that she wrote this story after spending time at Ten Sleep Preserve, a 10,000-acre conservation district on the south slope of the Big Horns. 

"The focal point of the preserve was a spectacular river-cut canyon, fine country for mountain lions and raptors," she wrote of the place. "Several extremely rare plant species found only in the Big Horns grew there. There were brilliant Native American pictographs on limestone walls sheltered by overhangs, their meanings and function still little understood. Billy Creek ran through a narrow gorge, the trail above still deep in snow at the end of May."

Wyoming is in Annie Proulx's blood, in her DNA, the way central Pennsylvania is in mine. Were I to go to Wyoming, I would be a stranger in a strange land, having to learn what the hills have to teach before I could write about them or in them. And it might be too late for me to do that.