“Life here tests the human spirit, but Montanans have found ways to express their relationship with the land. Something in Montana’s landscape nudges, pushes, and even shoves the creative spirit.”
— E.L. Kittredge
Welcome to my landscape… to Next Year Country.
A multitude of threads have shaped Kittredge’s awareness and drive to advocate and care for the circle of community formed by the land, its people, learning, and the land’s diversity.
Exploring the family ranch horseback and helping with delegated work, she experienced the lessons taught by her parents. In the lea of the one-room schoolhouse she attended, she learned to see the horizon through the eyes of her culture. By reading whatever she could reach in the family library and then using a salvaged 1930’s typewriter, she learned about the flow of thoughts and words.
Those threads of experience stimulated and prepared the way to learn more. It paved her way to the College of William and Mary and her receiving a B.A. in English from the University of Montana with studies in history and journalism. It led to her receiving a Master of Arts degree from Arizona State University. As a post-graduate, she studied anthropology there before receiving her doctorate from Montana State University.
Twenty years of living and working nationally provided a wealth of experiences but found Kittredge looking home to Montana. That return utilized her academic background, her knowledge of the land and a thirst to learn more about the links emerging from her experiences. In addition to teaching experience., this move called on her cross-cultural communication background at Marquette University (Wisconsin) and her lived experience in entrpreneurship and communication. It relied on her skills as a grass-roots capacity builder and a deep desire to share through her writing.
BOOKS
Crossing Bird Creek: A Land Ethic for Montana and the New West
Coming in 2026!
Artrepreneurship: Sustaining the Creative Life
Guidebook for the My Artrepreneur Program course in helping creative minds how to build a sustainable life doing what they love.
The Weight of the Drop
A novel in submission. A genre bending historical fiction of an early gold camp and two women who lose everything, acquire a vast fortune, and embark on a quest for justice against those who wronged them. But the story has lived on and is replayed in the lives of two women in a small rural town tied to boot-legging, on the eve of the Great Depression.
A Bird Creek Imprint
Thanks for visiting this little corner of “Next Year Country” in the Upper Great Plains. Here’s where we gather and sort our thoughts about life along Bird Creek.
Now that you are here, let’s stay in touch!
If you wish, do follow us on Facebook or Instagram, what some in the past may have called “A Half-Penny Post.”
If you want to read longer essays about what I have been working on/creating, visit “Bird Creek Letters” on Substack.
The topics touch on the wild and working land, culture, creativity. And of course, learning, writing, and the spaces in between.
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