About this item
Dogs, like humans, have memories, instincts, fears, and loyalties. But, as far as we know, dogs do not get swept up in nostalgia, speculation, or self-analysis. Although they have hopes, they are not driven by regrets. In Crossing the Plains with Bruno, Annick Smith weaves together a memoir of travel and relationship, western history and family history, human love and animal love centering around a two week road trip across the Great Plains she and her 95 pound chocolate lab, Bruno, took in the summer of 2003. It is a chain of linked meditations, often triggered by place, about how the past impinges on the present and how the present can exist seemingly sans past.Traveling from her rural homestead in Montana to pick up her nearly 100-year-old mother from her senior residence on Chicago's North Side and bring her to the family's beach house on a dune overlooking Lake Michigan, Smith often gets lost in memory and rambling contemplation.
About the Author
Annick Smith is a writer and filmmaker from western Montana. Born in Paris, she grew up in Chicago, lived in Seattle, and has settled in Montana for over fifty years. She was a filmmaker first, producing the prize-winning feature "Heartland" and was a co-producer of "A River Runs Through It." Her documentaries include a series about Indian tribes in the Inland Northwest, "The Real People," for public television, and a portrait of poet Richard Hugo, "Kicking the Loose Gravel Home." Smith was a founding member of the Sundance Film Institute and the Independent Features Project. ?Her nature essays and travel articles have appeared in such publications as Orion, Outside, Audubon, National Geo Traveler, Travel & Leisure, the New York Times, and regional magazines, as well as in literary journals such as TriQuarterly. Her fiction has been published in Story magazine and her story "It's Come to This," appeared in Best American Short Stories 1992, won a National Magazine Award for short fiction, and has been widely anthologized. Smith's most recent book is a memoir, road trip, dog book, Crossing the Plains with Bruno (Trinity U. Press, 2015) . Other books include an earlier memoir, Homestead (Milkweed) , a collection of essays In This We are Native (Lyons/Globe Pequot) , a book about Oklahoma's tall grass prairies, Big Bluestem (The Nature Conservancy/Council Oak Books) and the anthologies, The Last Best Place, co-edited with William Kittredge (MT Historical Soc./U of Washington Press) and The Wide Open: Prose, Poems, and Photographs of the Prairie co-edited with Susan O'Connor (University of Nebraska Press) .?She has also been a teacher, an editor, a community organizer, and an environmental activist as well as founder of Hellgate Writers, a literary center in Missoula and the Yellow Bay Writers Workshop on Flathead Lake. Smith is currently working with Susan O'Connor on a book about the traditional and personal meanings of Hearth, as well as an illustrated book about her photographer father and artist uncles, The Deutsch Brothers in Chicago. She lives on a homestead ranch in Montana's Blackfoot Valley, often with companion William Kittredge andher sons and their families.
