The print version of the Fall 2008 issue of Drumlummon Views (www.drumlummon.org), the online journal of Montana arts & culture.

This issue features an expanded offering of original works, with substantial selections of fiction (by Scott Hibbard, Melanie Rae Thon, Russell Rowland, Chris Nicholson, and Matt Pavelich) and poetry (by Greg Keeler, Paul S. Piper, Phil Cohea, and Michele Corriel), together with a moving memoir by O. Alan Weltzien and an insightful interview with artist Wes Mills.

The journal’s visual arts section features a film and essay celebrating the art and life of the late, great Montana sculptor, Rudy Autio (1927– 2007). It also includes a cautionary essay by ceramist Chris Staley on the shrinking role for the hand—and the full range of the senses—in the making of art today and a portfolio of Richard Buswell’s singular photographs of Montana homesteads and mining camps, with an essay by Julian Cox, curator of photography at the High Museum, Atlanta.

The Travels & Translations section includes a portfolio of, and essay on, Missoula artist Patricia Forsberg’s “Japanese” drawings, together with a story set in East Africa by Montana agronomist Gilles Stockton.

Drumlummon Views continues its coverage of science and health issues with an excerpt from a lengthy biographical essay on Montana biophysicist Jeff Holter, who developed the now-ubiquitous Holter Heart Monitor in his Helena laboratory.

Nicholas Vrooman acknowledges the importance of the Indian Education for All initiative, and the journal continues its serialization of Ada Melville Shaw’s homesteading memoir, “Cabin O’Wildwinds.”

The Literature section ranges from the creation of post-revisionist western fiction (like Karen Fisher’s A Sudden Country) to the development of western literature by such figures as playwright Bert Hansen and novelist Caroline Lockhart. Poetics scholar Robert Baker contributes a lovely meditation on Theodore Roethke’s poem, “The Waking.”

This issue of DV includes reviews of Montana books and compact discs, plus memorial essays that mark the passing of leading Montana culture-bearers like Rudy Autio, Liz Claiborne, and Senator Pat Regan.