- [Narrator] Ivan Doig,
a son of sheep herders, born in 1939, rural Montana is today one of the most
celebrated literary voices of the American West.

- I saw the house that Doig
lived in, it was a tough
life.

- Professors responded
to him by saying, "Damn, you're good."

- [Narrator] He dedicated
himself to language.

- To me, language is
the point of all this.

The sound you can
get to come up out of the white space there.

- [Narrator] To place.

- He's taken some of the
local and made it universal.

- [Narrator] To characters.

- [Ivan] Well, I adore 'em
all or I wouldn't write 'em.

- [Narrator]
And to his craft.

- Underneath the pros,
there's the soul of a poet.

- Nobody's lucky enough to
live in a place this small and isolated and have
somebody write so eloquently
about it.

So he's really
given us a legacy.

- [Narrator] Doig was
a bestselling writer, a National Book
Award nominee.

He's one of the most prolific and influential
Montana authors.

And today he's inspiring a
new generation of readers.

- [Sarah] When I first picked
up this "House of Sky", I was 25 years old.

- [Erik] The first Ivan
Doig book that I read "Ride With Me,
Mariah Montana".

- I think young people
will find reflections of how difficult it
is to be in the world.

It's real.

- [Carol] He made the
lives of what we might call ordinary people heroic.

- [Narrator] Ivan Doig:
Landscapes of a Western Mind was made possible by Vicky York, the Big Sky Film Grant, the Greater
Montana Foundation, encouraging communication
on issues, trends, and values of
importance to Montanans.

Humanities Montana.

These generous donors.

And viewers like
you, the Friends of
Montana PBS, thank you.

(soft upbeat music) - [Ivan] The magic of
place is indelible.

It's extremes of landform.

It's powerful weather.

These immensities overwhelm
the fact of the people
thinly, salt and peppered
across the expanse.

The human stories,
the Westerners who
carry on their lives against the big, bold
landscapes of those books.

I've always tried
to attain a language which makes a shimmer
behind the story.

It is my utter belief
that writers of caliber can ground their work in
specific land and lingo and yet be writing of
that larger country that most familiar and most
mysterious place of all,
life.

(birds chirping) (soft upbeat music) - [Narrator] Ivan was the
third generation descendant of Scottish immigrants.

He was born at the end
of The Great Depression to sheep herder Charlie Doig and ranch cook
Berneta Ringer Doig in White Sulphur
Springs, Montana.

Situated in a high valley
on the Rocky Mountain front, the town has home to
about 1,000 people today, a number that's remained
unchanged since 1939.

- Ivan was born into a rural
Montana that is unimaginable in the 21st century, even for most who
live in rural Montana.

So he was born in a
very tough environment.

- Ivan's family history
and as it affected him, it's the poverty
that rings through, the unsettledness
that rings through.

When they arrived in Montana, they didn't arrive with the
ability to go for good land.

They were left with
high, dry, cold.

- [Narrator] Whatever
the prospects might seem in a dreamy look around, the settlers were trying
a slab of lofty country which often would be too
cold and dry for their crops, too open to a killing winter
for their cattle and sheep.

In those difficult
days of his youth, Doig's love of
words came early.

- I can't remember when I
didn't know how to read.

My mother had read to me
as she would sit quietly because of her asthma.

So I came outta that
with great love of words.

On my sixth birthday, my mother's lifelong
asthma at last killed her.

- [Narrator] Soon before
daybreak on my sixth
birthday, my mother's breathing wheezed
more raggedly than ever, then quieted,
and then stopped.

- Out of that came
my growing up.

- [Narrator] The remembering
begins out of that new
silence.

Through the time
since, I reached back along my father's tellings
and around the urgings which would have me
face about and forget, to feel into these
oldest shadows for the first sudden
edge of it all.

- What I gleaned about Ivan's
childhood in its effect on his writing was, he was an
only child in an adult world and a difficult adult world.

- My dad worked in
his ranch hand jobs, entertained himself
in the nine saloons, White Sulphur
Springs, Montana.

- I picture Ivan
playing in the corner, kind of behind a
piece of furniture and listening and listening.

- [Narrator] The Pioneer
served as the town's hiring
saloon.

Ranch hands looking for a job would leave word
with the bartender.

Knowing this, ranchers
would stride in to ask about a haying hand or
somebody who knew how to
irrigate.

The ranch hand might
have his bedroll right there along
the back saloon wall, and minutes later be in
the rancher's pickup.

- I wish that I could go back
to the White Sulphur Springs of this "House of Sky" where
you go to the 12 or so bars and you see different
characters in each one and you
see how each community
establishment,
which the bar was, meets the needs of a
different subset of that
community.

- [Narrator] As much as
Doig'S world highlights hardships and local flavor, it also centers on
how communities are
stitched together and how people rely
on one another.

This lesson hits close to
home when Ivan's father, now a single parent and
fearing for his own health, made a decision that
would change their lives.

- My dad called my
grandmother, my mother's
mother, whom he'd been at war with
for the past many years and asked if she would join
our household and help raise
me.

And so that became my family.

- Part of what's so tender
about "This House of Sky" comes from this improbable son-in-law,
mother-in-law conflation, hardcore folks who didn't
necessarily see eye to eye but came to deeply respect
and even love one another, although they would
never use that word.

- So do I wait for
the language of memory to come onto the exact tones
of how the three of us, across our three generations and our separations
of personality became something both more
and less than a family.

This newly formed household
went where the work took
them.

They moved all
over the region calling different
communities home.

Among them, White
Sulphur Springs, 16
Mile, Grass Mountain, Ringling, and
eventually Dupuyer.

- It was very common
trying to eek out a living, you kinda went from job to
job and we knew a lot of
people that had that kind of life.

- You go where the job was.

It didn't come to you.

- I mean, this is really what
made this country were sheep before the cattle
and the farming.

- Back in the day,
herds of two, 3,000 would come through town.

They would camp at Dupuyer
Creek maybe overnight.

The sheep herders
were very nomadic.

They traveled with the sheep and the sheep had to
keep moving to eat.

- [Narrator] The Doig sheep
herding meant they lived far from town.

But because Ivan was
a talented student, Charlie and Bessie arranged
for him to board with a
family in Dupuyer so he could
attend high school.

If there was one knack in me,
it was to hold in mind any
word I had ever seen, much of
the way Dad could identify any sheep from all others.

- He had a gift with
language and maybe his future could unfold by way
of language somehow.

- He becomes the Latin
and English teacher that sees the depth of his
talent and word knowledge and has him applying
to universities all
over the country.

- It was a kind of a moonshot
for our family, in essence.

I had a full
tuition scholarship which covered quite
a lot of the expense but I washed dishes for
four years at Northwestern.

My folks put away
every penny they could working their ranch jobs.

- [Narrator] The
train to Chicago stood like an endless
wall of windows.

Each of the three of us
snuffled in the September
air, turned aside to swallow.

Grandma's teary hug, as ever,
she had talked herself around to the conviction that
whatever I had made up my mind
to do was the only thing.

You write us about it
all and I'll do the like.

Dad's clamping
handshake in awe of all the education
awaiting me.

You're away to a
big place, son.

Before Ivan found his
calling as an author, his curiosity about
people and stories led him to study
journalism and history.

- Northwestern becomes that
incredibly rich way to study with the best minds in
the journalism field.

He quickly found professors
that dazzled him and in turn, responded to him by saying,
"Damn, you're good."

- [Narrator] It was
also at Northwestern that Ivan would meet his
partner in both work and
life.

- There was a big
night, Chicago Night Out and to my surprise, this
nice quiet Montanan asked me.

We kept coming back
together somehow and we seemed to have more
and more of a good time.

- [Narrator] They married in
1965 and moved to Seattle.

Ivan earned a PhD in history from the University
of Washington.

Puget Sound became
their permanent home.

As my decisions do, the one
now came slowly, doggedly.

I kept on through the
seminars and exams, claimed the degree the
last dusty furrow of it all but then I abandoned
the offer of a job at one of the country's
largest universities.

- He'd always wanted
to do a book on his dad and as he would explain if
he was going to write about his dad, he probably had to
write about his grandmother and if he was
going to do that, he probably had to write
about himself and he was out
there.

He thought he wanted
to write a play but his joke in
later years was, but he found he couldn't get
that many horses on stage.

- [Narrator] Ivan's drive
to recount his childhood would eventually inspire
a lifetime of storytelling but it was in 1973 that
he embarked on writing his first book,
"This House of Sky" while Carol supported them
by teaching journalism.

I began to work
full-time at writing.

I offered to Carol,
I know you married me for better or worse but this
is somewhere off the scale.

She answered, as
ever, "Do it."

(soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) - I have felt that the
West has its own riches of storytelling and language.

To me, language is
the point of all this.

The dance of
language on the page is what literature
is all about.

The sound you can
get to come up out of the white space there.

The way people talk, the way
they act, the way things
look, that's all born out
of love of language.

When I was doing my first
book, "This House of Sky", one of the things
I did was sit down with five by eight file
cards and begin remembering what things were called.

What did we call those little
pens that we put the ewes in when they had their lambs?

Jugs, ah-huh.

And what did we bring
them in to the shed before we jug them?

Ah-huh, the gutwagon.

And so all of a sudden you've
got these two very powerful pieces of memory as well
as strong words to go with.

Well, you multiply that by
several thousand file cards and you begin to have
the makings of a book.

(soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) - [Jan] What are
some of the tabs, what are the
titles of the tabs?

Can you read 'em?

- Drinking, bars
and brothels, jokes, cussing and Montana lingo.

- So this is his interest
in getting things right in his books.

He doesn't want characters
who don't use the right lingo or who cuss wrong, you know?

I don't know,
what does it say?

- Wouldn't that
just frost your ass?

- [Narrator] People who
were poor in all else are often rich in language.

The everyday dance and prance
of the imaginative tongues I grew up around must
have drilled that into me.

There is a delicious hunger
of the ear behind stories and I spent a lot of time simply following
the sound of voices.

- If we were eating, say
breakfast in a cafe in
Montana, he had his ears out.

He was listening and he
would write 'em down.

- We would make fun of Ivan
and his little notebook because there was
never a dinner in which he
didn't whip it out and write down somebody's
interesting expression.

But that was just Ivan.

- [Narrator] That capture in
fiction of the prance and
play of a community's everyday
language seems to me vital to know the world of place.

- After he got a draft down,
he could start editing.

He loved the editing 'cause
he loved the language and the little bit of
detail that he could put in.

He wanted to make
every sentence sing.

- Ivan wrote and
rewrote and rewrote.

When you look at
Ivan's manuscripts, you see the degree to which
he wants every sentence to be just right.

- So he's busy
correcting himself but he's also very busy
correcting his editor.

(soft upbeat music) So his editor might say, "Do you really wanna
spell howdy this way?"

No, that's the way my
character has to say howdy,
you know?

- Stylistically, he's a
master and Ivan was very fond of talking about the
poetry beneath the pros.

- He's a great
narrator, right?

He describes places and
people in detail but he goes
beyond.

He stretches, he forces
himself into the realm of
lyricism.

He builds this little piece
of art in every sentence and sometimes when you
read one of his sentences, you have to pause, right?

You said, "What did he say?

"I need to read it again."

So when you approach
Ivan Doig's books, you should never
be in a hurry.

You just need to
taste every sentence.

(soft upbeat music) - [Ivan] I glance higher
for some hint of the weather and the square of air
broadens and broadens to become the blue expanse
over Montana range land.

So vast and vaulting that it
rears from the foundation
line of the plains horizon to
form the walls and roof of all of life's experience that my younger
self could imagine.

A single great house of sky.

(soft upbeat music) (tractor roaring) - [Narrator] Doig's
tender and vivid portrayal of the people from his
youth was just the beginning of his bringing individuals
to life on the page.

Whether they were real people or historically
inspired creations, Doig showed great affection
for his characters and was committed to
revealing the complexity of their lives.

- You talk about essences
of the west, of big canvas, with hard lives being
lived against it.

I never had to look very far
to find that kind of
material.

- The people in Doig's
life inspired more than just his memoirs.

He mined his past for
fictional characters as well.

- Zoe, from the "Bartender's
Tale" as a character, is so captivating and
interesting because she
captures what it's like to be
a 12 year old girl in a non-stereotypical way.

Zoe proved to be
something like a pint sized force of nature, thin as a toothpick
and a sharp.

Her face was always a
show, her generous mouth sometimes sly,
sometimes pursed, the tip of her
tongue indicating when she was really thinking, her eyes going big beyond
belief when something pleased
her, and when something didn't, she could curl her
lip practically to
the tip of her nose.

She's strong and she's
confident and she's witty and she's precocious.

- [Speaker] You need to
read "Bartender's Tale".

- Yes, that's right.

Zoe has a lot of the same
characteristics that Vicki
has.

That's all I'll
say about that.

- It's fiction, we know that, - We know it's fiction and we
know it's not to the letter.

However, as we've discussed- - [Speaker] Yeah.

- Okay, dream on.

- [Narrator] And Doig
didn't stop with characters from his own life, leaning on
his journalistic experience, he dug through
historic records.

He met strangers in archival
photos who inspired
characters and he recorded
countless oral histories.

- [Clifford] We
had a few droughts, after that come
all kinds of pests.

One year it would be
grasshoppers.

- [Ivan] Your dad was
still trying to farm?

- [Frances] He was
still trying to farm and I was trying to teach
school with all my money which was only $99 a month.

- [Narrator] Sometimes
within these interviews were the seeds of new novels including a White Sulphur
Springs hometown legend who found success as a singer
in the Harlem Renaissance.

Taylor Gordon would inspire
one of the main characters in the book,
"Prairie Nocturne".

- [Ivan] This interview with
Taylor Gordon is being taped on July 3rd, 1968.

- [Taylor] I moved to Harlem and then I was working for
the New York Central
Railroad.

When I was railroading,
I could sing, learn how to sing better.

- [Narrator] Because Doig
loved his characters, he found ways to
bring them back.

- [Alan] He recycles
characters because
imaginatively, he's not done with them.

And he exhibits that most of
all in the Montana trilogy with the three
generations of McCaskills.

And the Montana trilogy
really stamps his reputation.

- [Narrator] Doig had made a
life in the Pacific Northwest but his mind and heart
remained concerned with the
people he left in rural Montana.

He devoted himself to
showcasing an American west he experienced yet
didn't see represented.

- [Ivan] One of the
challenges for those of us writing out here is
that the larger society has long had its own mythic
notion of life out west.

None of the guys good or bad, seems ever to do a
lick of everyday work.

- Come and get it.

- [Ivan] Milk a cow, churn
butter, plant a potato.

Books set out here on
the west side of America didn't give much attention
to the workaday life and the valid voices
of our region.

The west of people
who came to build rather than to gun sling.

To work but to dance
and laugh along with it.

- He's not just interested in
the landscape as beautiful, I mean it's there, but
he's interested in people making a living
on the landscape.

It's such a huge place
and he writes so well about the little people
on the landscape.

(soft upbeat music) - Doig always honors
all kinds of work.

He creates characters who
are experts with their hands and they stay with it,
they don't give up.

In "English Creek", you have forest rangers
and firefighters.

In "Dancing in
the Rascal Fair", you have a school teacher
and a sheep rancher.

In "Bucking the Sun", you
have all kinds of machinists and bartenders and
prostitutes and the list goes
on and on.

- [Narrator] Doig's heroes
aren't bosses and barons but rather the hard workers
and his full cast of
characters always includes a greater
sampling of society.

- And there are minor
characters who are failures, there are drunks, there
are people in trouble who don't get out of trouble
by the last page of the
novel.

- Montana values
historically, have to do with
something about self-sufficiency and I
think probably it has to do with hard work and
community as well.

People who may
be down and out but are deserving
nevertheless, of your
respect.

I think Ivan had
that in spades.

(soft upbeat music) (wind howling) - He can reproduce the winds, he can reproduce the
sounds of the winds, of what the cottonwood
trees look and sound like when they're seeding in June
or when leaf fall time comes.

- He spends a lot of time
describing the environment.

- [Narrator] The dark
timbered mountains around
them went white as icebergs.

The tops of sagebrush
vanished under drifts.

- The landscape features
in all of his books.

"Dancing at the Rascal Fair"
is particularly interesting because he has created
this imaginary landscape that combines several
real landscapes along the Rocky
Mountain front.

And he has maps drawn,
especially for this book which tells you right away
when you're opening the book, "Oh, the landscape, the
place, is very important
here."

- I see that Dupuyer
is Gros Ventre and Dupuyer Creek
is English Creek.

You can recognize
certain aspects.

The huge rocky mountains, the
big sky, the clouds, the air.

- Ivan wrote and lived with
that incredible diligence and attention to detail.

Being in settings, going
back and standing on the road to the Sixteen country
and looking all around and have Carol
taking photos of it.

- He would say, "Carol, take a picture of
me holding these rocks."

Because he wanted to remember
what the rocks looked like when he got home.

- You wanted to see if his
two characters could sleep in the upper lobbies of Old
Faithful Lodge in
Yellowstone.

So we climbed all the way
up and Ivan stretched out on the historic sofa and
yes, he could scope out what he could see.

- You and Ivan were in
Montana and he says, "Well, I wanna get
up before sunrise "and go out on
this certain butte to see what the
sunrise looks like," the way Jick, his
main character, the
narrator of the book, would see it.

So he gets up at four
in the morning which- - Not only he, we.

- [David] Yeah,
right, yes, we.

- Ivan did his own intense
research for "Sea Runners".

He went to Alaska and
the Alaska Archives.

For "English Creek" and
"Dancing at the Rascal Fair", he and Carol went to Scotland
and looked at records.

Here in the States, he
relied heavily on the library at the University
of Washington but when he and Carol set
aside time to travel Montana, then we were all
part of that mix.

He'd be here at the
Historical Society, he'd go to the Butte
Historical Society.

- When they came over here,
they always stayed with us.

And Ivan and Carol snuck
out always before breakfast to go to the archives.

- The genesis of "The
Eleventh Man" came from the
late great Dave Walter of the
Montana Historical Society who Ivan credits with telling
him this story of the top 11 on the class of 1941
Montana Agricultural College i.e MSU Bozeman's
football team and the fact that all of
them were killed in combat.

- [Narrator] Storefront
by dozing storefront, the town still looked
as if the world of war had nothing to do with
it, yet he knew better.

- That's the other beautiful
thing about reading Ivan
Doig.

It's great literature but
it also takes some time to tell you about some very
important parts of our
history and how men and
women in Montana were going to make
their contributions
and live their lives.

- "Bucking the Sun" may be
more than most of his novels, tells us about the decade
of Ivan Doig's childhood, how absolutely hard scrabble
and desperate it was.

- [Narrator] As "Bucking
the Sun" depicts, the Fort Peck Dam changed
the face of Montana throughout the 1930s
and offered new work to those who could handle it.

Fort Peck's snow
enthusiastically degenerated into Fort Peck's mud.

Clods of clay like
squashed bricks were churned up everywhere
by the crawler tracks and the bulldozers.

Tough dam workers watched
their chance to sidle off
alone and stand for a minute as if
looking around for something, actually just to sniff the
talcum smell of spring.

Doig's unique form
of historical fiction and his evocative depictions
to the west earned him a
place among writers such as Wallace
Stegner, Norman McLean, Bill Kittredge, Marie
Clearman Blew, Tom McGuane, James Welch and others.

He contributed to their
collective project of illuminating
disparate experiences
of the American West.

They brought forth
stories of ranching towns, Native American experiences
and industrial progress.

- Like a lot of writers, he
left in order to come home.

You go away actually to
imaginatively best own the landscapes that
you grew up in.

- [Narrator] Before Ivan
became a writer of fiction, he and Carol returned to
Montana throughout the 70s to conduct interviews
and research.

They took a room for several
months at the Ringling
Mansion which at the time functioned
as a boarding house.

- [Ivan] I've sat at a
keyboard trying to recollect
clearly the circumstances of
portions of the western past that I'd personally
been through.

Some comes easily enough,
who can ever forget what a sheep rancher's
mood was late in lambing when his feet were aching
from all those weeks of living in overshoes.

But memory is not
always enough.

In fact, seldom is
your own memory enough when you're trying
to write accurately.

- [Narrator] Doig's approach
to writing about place, even for his own memoir
was always as a historian.

- [Bessie] We had chickens.

- [Ivan] Yeah, that's right.

I had forgotten chickens.

- [Bessie] Remember how we
used to have to catch 'em and run 'em down?

- [Ivan] How many
sheep did they run?

Any idea?

- [Charlie] About 1,200 each.

Sheep was only what 75
cents a head to a dollar.

- [Narrator] Then my father
and my grandmother go, together, back
elsewhere in memory, and I'm left to think
through the fortune of all we
experienced together.

And of how, now,
my single outline meets the time swept
air that knew theirs.

- He is trying to understand
how the past exists in the present.

Reading "This House on
Sky" is really emotional.

When you see Charlie
succumbing to emphysema, it's really hard because
his voice is with you.

You know when you
write about the dead, you make them less dead.

(soft upbeat music) - Memory is a set
of sagas we live by.

By now, my days would
seem blank, unlit, if these familiar
surges could not come.

A certain turn in my desk
chair and the leather cushion must creak, the quick dry
groan of a saddle under my
legs and my father's
and his father's.

The taste in the air as
rain comes over the city is forever a flavor back
from a Montana community too tiny to be called a town.

The people here in
Montana say to me, "Why didn't he ever
move back to Montana?"

And I have to
explain that Montana, he said he was starved
out of Montana.

It's so tragic when he
realizes that he has to leave in order to survive, in order
to help his family survive.

- It stirs something
inside of us.

You cannot read "This House
of Sky" without weeping.

- It can be tough.

He writes in that
one section where, see, it makes me cry even
just thinking about it.

- [Ivan] Worry, an
edginess set in on dad.

The weather had an
unaccountable chill and with our shorn ewes
we had on our hands a double thousand of the
world's most undressed
creatures.

And dragging across the
spire line of the Rockies, black clouds were beginning
to fray into rain.

We're gonna have to
hightail it for the brush on two medicine
with these sheep.

Lady, you'll have
to work the dogs; dog the bejesus out of 'em.

Ivan can run, he can get
on the head end of the band and try to push 'em
toward that big coulee.

- They lose hundreds.

- [Ivan] Exhausted and
freezing, they jutted their
necks flat along the ground, rolled
their eyes, and did their
dying.

- They're dotted
out on the prairie.

It's heartbreaking.

- [Ivan] We abandoned
these stragglers, humped white on the prairie
behind us like small boulders left by a glacier and
fought on with the sheep still eddying across
the grassland.

- And if you're
in charge of it, it's that much
more heartbreaking.

- [Ivan] As much as at any
one instant in my life, I can say, here I was turned.

How long such a moment
had been in the making, I am the last judge
because once made, it seemed to have begun
farther back than I could
remember and yet to have happened
like an eye blink.

I had no steady idea about
what I would do in life but I intended now that it
would not include more
seasons of sheep on that vast
gambling table of Blackfeet
rangeland.

(soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) When I'm asked at book
signings and readings what my working habits are, I hardly know what to say
except pathological
diligence.

- He was just
plain a hard worker who came with the
disciplines that began when he and his dad and
grandma were on a ranch.

You know, Ivan was
committed to 400 words a day and he would say to
bright-eyed, new young
writers, "If you can actually get
400 words a day down, "you have a book."

- Ivan started very
early in the morning.

By the time I might wanna
get up at 6:30 or seven, he would've had
his breakfast, his one small pot of coffee
for the day and then he would
go fetch the newspapers and my
cup of tea and bring them to
me.

I mean, that's the kinda
guy he was, you know?

In his dogged way, then he'd go work until
he had those words.

- [Narrator] Ivan's
determination was tested
early in his career as "This House
of Sky", his first book, was rejected over and over.

And over.

More than 40 times.

- When he wrote the beginning of "This House of Sky" 40
times, he typed it 40 times.

- To me, work is
its own country.

You've got to spend
a lot of time at it and how do you do that?

You have to take
a lot of time.

And it's not as
grim as it sounds, words are
interesting company.

- [Narrator] It was
finally in 1978, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
published "This House of
Sky".

- It was a sort of
breakaway memoir.

(soft upbeat music) Who at the time was really
interested in the memoir of a late 30s man?

And yet it became this
incredible success.

- Did you and Ivan know that
that book was gonna hit it so big and so- - [Carol] Oh, heavens no.

- So you were just kinda,
"Okay, this is his first
book.

"Let's hope for the best."

And then, boom!

he just took of?

- [Carol] Yeah.

- [Narrator] From
"This House of Sky" to "Last Bus to Wisdom",
Ivan wrote 16 books earning many
prestigious awards.

Today, The Ivan Doig Archive
at Montana State University in Bozeman is available
to the public at large.

(soft upbeat music) - What I want you to
notice is that evidence of the writing
process is just woven throughout this
entire archive.

- [Narrator] The
archive includes his
diaries, manuscripts, pocket notebooks,
correspondence, note cards, medical records
and memorabilia.

- And this means that
this is available for free for everybody now in the
world which is really huge.

It shows you how the author
thought as he was writing.

I remember when I discovered
that we had the photo albums, after reading
"This House of Sky" where he talked so
poetically about looking at the photo
albums to try and capture his memory of his mother.

It brought me to tears to
realize we actually had
these.

So as a writer, he of course,
used the tools of writing and we're a little bit
shocked to know that a man
who died in 2015 still
used a typewriter and this is literally
cut and pasted.

You should run
your hand along it.

There's texture because
it's all pieced together.

- [Student] All the
different whole punches.

- [Jan] Yeah.

- [Narrator] Also central
to Ivan's work process was his partnership
with Carol.

- Carol turns out to be
quite a keen critic of plot and character development.

That's the kind of
criticism you really want or really should have.

- She was his research
assistant, his photographer, his first and last editor, and they were active
collaborators seven days a
week.

- She is a literary
intellectual in her own right who happened to be
married to Ivan Doig and they both
made each other.

(soft upbeat music) - [Carol] Well earned end of
the day.

- [Ivan] Well, cheers.

- Nevermind the lettuce.

- Cheers.

(soft upbeat music) - [Narrator] In 2001, Ivan was diagnosed with a
pre-cancerous condition.

It laid dormant for
years but in 2006, he was told it
was progressing.

- And even in old age and
even as his health was
worsening, he still went
out on the road.

(soft upbeat music) - And I think that that
sort of heroic face to life is part of what he writes
about in all of his books is people who are facing
really difficult things and they face 'em.

- He knew 'cause
it's in the notes, he knew that multiple
myeloma was a death sentence.

(soft upbeat music) What we didn't know was
how long could he last?

His answer to that diagnosis
was to keep working and if anything, work faster.

(soft upbeat music) And so in the eight
years and three months, he wrote four books.

You know, gonna do
as much as he could.

He had the next book figured
out so he never let up.

(soft upbeat music) - [Narrator] Language is the
light that comes out of us.

Imagine the words as
if they are our way of creating earthlight as
if what is being spoken by this man in a
wind swept dawn is going to carry
everlastingly upward.

The way starshine
is pulsing constantly across the sky of time to us.

(soft upbeat music) (bright upbeat music) - As we look back
on Ivan Doig, he's clearly one
of the giants.

I just, like a lot
of us, counted on him and it was as though a
support had disappeared
suddenly.

He has left a daunting
example of industry and
invention and quality and he has
most importantly created intimate emotional
connections with an enormous
range of readership.

- He had a really huge
following in this country.

I can remember he
showed us the bandaids he had in his pocket because
his fingers would get
blistered from signing books.

- As a reader, I
really like Doig because you
can't put it down.

You can say I'm gonna read
for 10 minutes before bed but then you look at the
clock and it's three hours
later.

- I think he met
his goal of poetic.

He was doing what he loved and for me that matters
a whole lot as a reader that I'm reading someone who's whole heart
and soul are there.

- He contributed to the
development of the memoir as a genre in this country.

He was at a sort of cutting
edge of it at that time.

In terms of the
rest of his books, I think that they are ready
for more academic work.

His legacy is that he has
written about a Montana that
has.. that is slipping away.

He's writing about people
who know how to work.

Now that isn't
necessarily slipping away but I think the
willingness to focus on the work that people
do and make it interesting and honor it is not a
common focus for writers.

- All right, and this used to
be where the Ranger Bar was, was the Log Cabin Bar.

- Ellie, Mary,
Rita, and Vicki, they are the ones who began
Ivan Doig's birthday party and Ivan Doig Highway and
the Ivan Doig Monument and just embraced that
piece of Dupuyer's history.

- Okay, here we go.

Here comes Dupuyer, by golly.

(indistinct chatter) Ivan had a special
feeling for Dupuyer.

So it is wonderful for
me simply to be here.

- We are trying to make sure
that Ivan has a readership that extends
across generations.

- We just hope that there'll
be other writers who come and are inspired enough by
his long example to reach some of the places that he
reached over and over again.

- Ivan was a kind person.

Sense of humor.

And he came to be remembered
most of all, as a good man.

(bright upbeat music) - When I first picked
up "This House of Sky", I was 25 years old.

Reading about White Sulphur
Springs and the landscape and the ranching in the
mountains and the culture and the community,
it really drew me.

Hi guys, how's it going?

- [Bartender] Can we
get you a whiskey?

- Yes, you sure can.

It felt old fashioned
in some ways the way Doig
described this place but it also seemed
really honest and real as far as what is the norm
here and the culture here but also what's
possible here.

This is the suite
where Mr. Ivan Doig lived while he was writing
"This House of Sky".

He's spent about
six months here and these walls
have stories to tell and I think this is the
kind of historical asset that we should share with
the community and the public.

I'm working with the current
owner to turn it into a
community gathering place, an artist residency
and a place for writers or songwriters to come and a rural institute
down the line as well.

(soft upbeat music) - [Erik] The first Ivan
Doig book that I read was "Ride with Me,
Mariah Montana", and it's about a
newspaper photographer traveling around the state
during the centennial.

My first job as
a photographer was for this small town
newspaper in Montana.

I think his work has
inspired my photography in a number of ways.

The way he
approaches character is something that
I've tried to emulate, not glossing over the hard
part, the stuff in between.

You know these jobs that are
difficult at times in
Montana.

Every time I drive through
Ringling, I think about him.

(soft upbeat music) And I think about some of
the lines in his books.

I keep a few of his
quotes on my phone, it's like an anchor for me.

(soft upbeat music) The spaces between stars are where the work of
the universe is done, which to me means we focus on
the stars for the big events that happen but the
bulk of life happens in between there
somewhere, in the gaps, when we're not even
paying attention.

Oh man, look at this light.

What does that
look like for me?

What does that mean to me?

Have I done the work
that I wanna do?

Have I left the legacy
that I hope to leave?

(soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) - Our district covers an area
of about 150 square miles.

Our kids come from all over.

Everybody come up and write
something on the board.

It can be character names,
it can be a plot event.

You can write a theme
that you remember.

Maybe the setting,
keep it appropriate.

Not that thing that you
wrote yesterday, please.

Students in Montana sometimes
don't get to see themselves reflected in work and we
always wanna provide them the windows and the mirrors, so windows into other
perspectives and cultures but we also wanna
provide them a mirror that reflects back
at themselves.

- If this is not biblical, I shall always
believe it should be that all of us need
someone who loves us enough to forgive us
despite the history.

- You know like you
never really get stories about smaller towns.

- This kinda feels
like close home.

(soft upbeat music) - One of those
universal themes that I've seen in
multiple Doig works is what does it mean
to be able to look back on your childhood
and recognize the good things that
happened, the bad things that
happened, and how you feel about them.

And that provides us
a really great way to open up those
conversations with our
students about their own lives and
their own experiences.

Mixed in with all of the
other stuff that we read that's not as close to home,
it gives us a good
opportunity to kind of examine why
we are the way we are.

How does our place
impact our identity?

- I will see you guys
tomorrow, we will be watching
Hamilton.

Have a good rest of your day.

(soft upbeat music) - [Jan] Many of us
would like to be Ivan Doig because of how devoted
he was to one thing and how devoted
he was to writing and how diligent
he was about it.

If we could have that kind
of vision in our own lives, what could we accomplish?

(soft upbeat music) - [Ivan] So if
a sense of place is to be our hymn and
marching song across this
west, let's allow some
jazz into it.

Place is something
to work from but also to work on, and, work toward.

(soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) (soft upbeat music) - [Narrator] Ivan Doig
Landscapes of a Western Mind was made possible
by Vicky York, the Big Sky Film Grant, the Greater
Montana Foundation, encouraging communication
on issues, trends, and values of
importance to Montanans.

Humanities Montana.

These generous donors.

And viewers like
you, the Friends of
Montana PBS, thank you.

(soft upbeat music)