Gossamer Possibilities

"Gossamer Possibilities: Re-reading Ivan Doig's Winter Brothers in a New Season," The Limberlost Review: A Literary Journal of the Mountain West (2025): 345-53.

On the page with these words of Doig, I found my bookmark from my last reading of Winter Brothers. A simple index card, an artifact of my mind from two decades past. My jottings were brief, meant as discussion starters, not even ten points of emphasis. But offset in a place of prominence, I had written: WESTS of Book (Doig & Swan). We all were interrogating why the West placed a hold on us. Again and again, Doig wrestled with this West, these Wests, as he grasped toward understanding Swan, seeming to believe if he understood the place he could finally comprehend Swan, a man whose voluminous writings included abundant daily details and little introspection. Doig’s search for Swan’s anchor is his own struggle to explain himself. That I marked those “West” passages suggests I hungered for this grounding, too.