A River Dream

An anthology and tribute to a unique independent publisher, Clark City Press.

In 1987, the painter and author and fly fisherman Russell Chatham, renowned for his stunning landscape paintings and his appetite for life, decided to take control of his own career by creating a publishing house in Livingston, Montana.

As one does, at least if they are Russell Chatham. “Control” was probably the wrong concept—for the next five years, Clark City Press was the chaotic home of beautifully produced works by an eclectic, talented collection of writers and artists, many of them given a painting in lieu of a publishing advance. What began as an effort to publish Chatham’s own work and that of his friends (a large and varied group) in elegant trade paperbacks morphed into something grander and more wayward. Chatham could talk almost anyone into anything, and before the press imploded, all sorts of people said yes: Barry Gifford signed on for A Good Man to Know, a fictionalized memoir about his gangster father, Jim Harrison traded paintings for The Theory & Practice of Rivers and Just Before Dark, and Rick Bass wrote about the first wolves to resettle the continental United States in The Ninemile Wolves. Clark City Press published Thomas McGuane on fishing and memory, Guy de la Valdene on hunting woodcock, Richard Hugo’s only mystery, James Crumley’s short stories, and Peter Stackpole’s Life photos from the golden age of Hollywood.

In A River Dream, Clark City’s former editor, novelist Jamie Harrison, has collected some of the best of the press’s prose, art, and poetry, in a glorious celebration of a small and lost world.