THE TEXTURE OF PLACE

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LOCAL AUTHOR CARRIE LA SEUR PUSHES HER BOUNDARIES

written by LINDA HALSTEAD-ACHARYA

EDITOR’S NOTE: There are

many interesting authors who call the Magic City home. That’s why YVW will be chatting with some of them throughout 2021, telling you about their latest work and what you might want to pick up to read when you have a little downtime. LOCAL AUTHOR Carrie

La Seur penned two novels set in the Billings area. But “author” is merely one of the many paths she’s chosen.

La Seur published “The Home Place” and “The Weight of an Infinite Sky” and is currently at work on a third novel. Her resume, however, includes a law degree from Yale, a Rhodes Scholarship, a history of advocating environmental law and a lengthy list of articles, stories and poetry published in notable journals and magazines.

The breadth of her experiences reflects her drive for pushing her own boundaries. At the same time, La Seur remains anchored by place. And that place is Montana.

“Montana has always been a place my family came back to, over and over,” she says. “I have so many complicated feelings about this place now.”

As a fifth-generation Montanan, her blood runs thick with local ties — ties that have sculpted her life and shaped the words she writes. Her roots trace back to 1862, when her great-greatgreat grandfather Robert Curtis first scouted the area. Those roots also include Harriet Crow (an Anglicization of the German name Groh), a Christian Scientist credited with healing the sick during Billings’ tuberculosis epidemic of 1900.

Thus, the Big Sky State hasn’t only rooted La Seur’s family but entwined this place in the family tree. And with such deep-seated history comes an awareness of the hardships so many endured. That awareness serves as a reality check when she writes. It gives her work an edge and steers her clear of romanticizing.

“There’s a lot of beauty (in Montana), but it’s harsh,” she says. “There was an instinct for survival.”

That gritty, gut-level sense of place also served her well as an attorney for Plains Justice, the legal nonprofit she founded. Although she has since shifted back to private practice, she remains devoted to the landowners she represented over energy and environmental issues.

“It was really interesting work and compelling clients,” she says.

Touching on themes that pulse through her life, La Seur spoke with particular passion about This House of Books, a cooperatively owned, independent bookstore she helped found in Billings.

“The idea was, we could all have an ownership stake that could be passed on to the next generation,” she says. “I am an owner but now there are hundreds.”

With the store poised to mark its fifth year, she marvels at its success.

strong sales despite the pandemic,” she says.

La Seur’s love for books is mirrored by her lifelong compulsion to write. When she was barely able to put pen to paper, she had squirreled away a notebook to scribble her thoughts. By the sixth grade she had signed up to learn typing in summer school. “So I could type my stories faster,” she says.

Tied to the land and driven to write, La Seur typed the first pages of “The Home Place” while clerking for a law firm in Australia.

“I felt so far from home and wondered if I would ever go back,” she says. “I was thinking about what ties you to place. That’s what got me started.”

La Seur spent years on the project, squeezing in her writing between her family life and her full-time law career. The book’s protagonist — Alma, a young female attorney — returns home to the Billings area to deal with her sister’s tragic death. “The Home Place” earned La Seur a High Plains Book Award, was short-listed for the Strand Critics Award for Best First Novel and was named one of the Great Falls Tribune’s Top 10 Montana Books for 2014.

“It (the High Plains Book Award) was a tremendous honor,” La Seur says, noting that she is currently judging poetry for this year’s event.

Local readers seem to relish La Seur’s spot-on descriptions of the Billings area and the local landscape.

“People have said that they can pick out the places that the book walks you around,” she says.

She refers to it as “texture” — writing about a place one knows so well and conveying sensations that run deeper than the obvious.

“It’s not all that you see with your eyes,” she says. “It’s many layers.”

In her second novel, “The Weight of an Infinite Sky,” she gives voice to Anthony, the book’s main character. Like La Seur herself and Alma in her first novel, Anthony is drawn back to Montana after living away. Some elements of the plot shadow Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”

“I love Shakespeare,” La Seur says. “I sometimes work in Shakespearian themes without really realizing it.”

Today she laughs as she speaks of her third full-length undertaking, which does not take place in Montana. She’s writing “Darling Clementine” as a “novel in short stories,” several of which have already been published in journals and magazines.

“It feels like I’ve written it 10 times,” she says. “It’s a historical novel, very research heavy. It’s going to take a long time.” ✻

CARRIE LA SEUR’S READING LIST

SOME OF HER FAVORITES BY • MONTANA AUTHORS •

“Bitterroot, A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption” BY SUSAN DEVAN HARNESS “Best Laid Plans” BY GWEN FLORIO “And It Will Be a Beautiful Life” BY CRAIG LANCASTER