Bryce Towsley: The Wild Places Are Still the Best

 Leave it to Bryce Towsley to turn social and economic collapse into what he calls “a rollicking good read.”

     Set partly in Vermont, THE 14^th REINSTATED, the award-winning author and photographer’s first novel, unveils a dark, frightening vision of a world devastated by war, hardship, and unrest, in what one reviewer calls, “a very gritty look at a future that seems more likely every day.”

     As Towsley’s hero battles to protect his family and save the world from ultimate destruction, he faces his share of knife fights, shoot outs, desperate chases, and encounters with pretty girls in an action-packed novel that’s part prophecy, part commentary, and part post-apocalyptic survival manual.

     In fact, the avowed “gun nut,” who’s published thousands of articles and six books of non-fiction, most on hunting and firearms, has just signed a contract for a book tentatively titled, “Survival Guns for Preppers.”  You could say he’s something of a spokesman for self-reliance.

       He’s also an industry expert. Towsley brings almost 50 years of hunting experience to his writing, having taken his first whitetail in Vermont in 1966 at the age of 11 (check out his website for a dozen tips on rattling them, or for advice on how to make an old rifle “look sexy”). Since then, he has hunted extensively throughout the United States and Canada, and around the world, for a wide variety of game. 


     A Life Member of the National Rifle Association and a firearms consultant, Towsley has competed in several shooting disciplines and is active in 3-gun shooting as well as IDPA and USPSA, organizations offering opportunities to engage in “practical” sporting uses of handguns that incorporate simulated self-defense and real life scenarios.

     When he’s not traveling the globe, Towsley, the father of two grown children, lives in the Clarendon, VT, with his wife, Robin, and several well-fed dogs.

You’ve made a life’s work of out of your love of hunting, and have published many books and thousands of articles about the sport. How did you get your start?

It’s more than a love of hunting. It’s a love of writing as well. A lot of my contemporaries got into this business because they loved hunting, shooting or guns, but they hate the writing. To be truly successful as a writer you must enjoy writing. I don’t just write about hunting, I cover a wide range of topics and genres. The key to writing well is to love writing and to love what you are writing about.

How did I get started? I owe it all to my wife, Robin. Before we were married I was working and living in Manchester while she was staying in my place in Clarendon. I didn’t want to hit the bars at night and get into trouble, so I took her old manual typewriter to my little cabin on the Battenkill River and worked most of the winter on my first article. That one sold and I never looked back.

I have always been a reader and interested in guns and hunting. Like a lot of people, I thought I could do a better job than a lot of the writers I was reading. That gave me a topic. Once I discovered I liked to write, I branched out into other areas.

I get bored writing on just one thing, so I like to reinvent myself often. I never abandon anything, but I keep adding to the list. I write product reviews, adventure travel, technical articles, do it yourself articles, humor, fiction, mood pieces, whatever is interesting at the time and will sell.

Your work has taken you all over the world.

I have been in all 50 states. Most of them many times. Also, every province in Canada except PEI. I’ve made multiple trips to Mexico, including the jungles of the Yucatan. I have been to Argentina and made nine trips to Africa including Zimbabwe, South Africa, Tanzania, Namibia and short visits to Mozambique and Zambia. I have been to Russia and much of Europe. Great Britain, Germany many times, Austria, Belgium, Greece, and others including some offbeat places like Hungary and Lithuania. I have visited Norway and Sweden. This fall I go to Poland.  I have also been to Turkey and United Arab Emirates.

I have backpacked in Yukon, where we landed the Super Cub and walked for many miles to our location, carrying our gear. I have camped out with the Eskimos in the winter in a tiny, unheated tent above the Arctic Circle. I have stayed in a very remote cabin in Russia and among the Aztec ruins in the Yucatan Peninsula. I have weathered killer storms in Alaska, I have been chased by elephants, explored a jaguar den and been stranded in Zimbabwe by an airline strike. I have seen seventy below zero wind chills and have chased armed poachers in Africa. Lots of adventure.

Recently? I was in Zimbabwe last fall where I’ve had a few exciting adventures with elephants and while tracking a wounded cape buffalo. This spring, I stayed on a boat off the coast of Alaska for a brown bear hunt, which was one of my most enjoyable trips.

Tell us about your work with the Benoit brothers.

The Benoits are a Vermont family of hunters who are famous for tracking big whitetail bucks in the snow. Larry Benoit was the first “hunting celebrity” and he pioneered the entire industry.

I was asked to write an article about them by the editor of Deer and Deer Hunting Magazine back in the eighties. That turned into a book, “Big Bucks the Benoit Way” which is the best-selling whitetail deer hunting book in history. That led to a second, very successful book, “Benoit Bucks.” Then we republished an updated version of the first book called, “Big Bucks the Benoit Way Volume 2.”

You are a regular contributor to American Hunter and Shooting Illustrated and American Rifleman . . .

They are the top publications in their fields. They are all NRA publications. American Hunter and American Rifleman are membership magazines and Shooting Illustrated is a subscription and newsstand driven magazine. American Rifleman is now one of the top 25 magazines in the world in terms of circulation. They represent the pinnacle of my markets, the best of the best and I worked very hard to become a field editor for these prestigious magazines.

 . . . and a consultant for firearms companies. What does that work involve?

I am hired to consult on firearms, ammo and accessories design. It is a sideline that has resulted from my recognition as one of the leading experts in the field, a recognition that is driven by my writing for the top magazines and publishing several books.

  

You’re also s a field editor for the National Rifle Association. Tell me something about the NRA that will soothe my progressive, left leaning, save-the-wolves soul.

     The way the NRA has been represented by the press and in today's society is unfair and inaccurate. Politically, the NRA is a one-issue organization that is dedicated to preserving our constitutionally guaranteed right to keep and bear arms.

     That said, they do have a wide range of programs.  The Eddie Eagle program has taught millions of kids about gun safety.  The NRA promotes competitive shooting and has training programs for just about all aspects of gun ownership. The list goes on.

     The people who run the NRA and the vast majority of the membership are some of the finest people I know. They have high moral values and are American patriots who believe strongly in the rights of the American people as detailed in our constitution. 

 What advice do you have for parents of young hunters?

The days you spend hunting with your kids will be some of the best memories you will make with them. I have written several 4,000 word articles on how to do it right, but the key is just do it. Make it your “thing;” take the hunter safety course with them. Help them pick out their gear and teach them how to use it safely. Butcher the deer, cook the meat and eat the meal as a family. Make them part of the process, not an addendum.

Tell us about your novel, THE 14^th REINSTATED.

It’s set in Vermont after total social and economic collapse. But, that’s a tool for the story. It’s an adventure story. It’s a commentary on the folly of modern American society. It’s a prepper’s manual. It’s a story that explores the value of family, friends, values, morals, loyalty and most of the other important things that make us human and shape our souls. It’s a story of betrayal and redemption. My gun guy friends love it because I am one of the few authors who gets the technical gun stuff right. Mostly, I just wanted it to be an entertaining story that will suck you in and keep you up late at night because you have to find out what happens next.

I was competing in the World Championships of Shooting in West Virginia recently and I was sitting at a table before the awards ceremony started when a woman came up and started talking about the book. She told me how much she loved the book and then gave me hell for not getting the next one out yet. She said that she had always read the best books out loud to her husband because it was something they started when they were dating and continue now, decades later. She said that this was the book they both have enjoyed the most.

Then she told me a funny story about reading the passage in which the character Mickey thinks he can hear a cow in the woods, out loud in the Denver airport and about the stares and laughter it caused. (It’s a funny passage, but the language is a bit blue.) She doesn’t understand it, but that conversation was the best paycheck I have ever gotten from any book.

I had more fun writing that book than anything I have ever written. It’s been years since I woke up in the morning with the feeling that I couldn’t wait to get to work. I felt that in the early years and decades as a magazine writer, but after a while you have pretty much written everything you needed to get on paper. This book brought that all back. I really didn’t have a clue what was going to happen when I wrote that first line and I had to get to the keyboard every day to find out what was going to happen next.

I have studied a lot of writers and everybody has a different approach to the craft. But the best novelists, those who I gravitate to and love to read, all take this same approach. They don’t outline, they don’t plan ahead other than in the most general terms, they just sit down at the keyboard and let the novel buried in their lizard brains flow out through their fingers. They often talk about being in the zone or in almost a fugue state when writing and that’s what I experienced with much of that book. For a writer, it’s the best high there is. 

Do you consider yourself a prepper? Should we all be prepping?

It depends on how you define “prepper.” I believe in being self-sufficient and in having the ability to manage your own life. I can fix a truck, build a house or butcher a deer. I have the ability to protect my family and my property from evil. I have studied history, human nature and I keep an eye on what is happening in the world. Knowing what is possible, I have made sure that we have the tools and the knowledge to survive no matter what happens. I suppose some will call that prepping, but I call it being smart about life. If you depend on others to solve all your problems you leave yourself and those who depend on you vulnerable if those “others” are suddenly gone for any reason. I think that is a foolish way to live your life.

I do believe that we are at a very dangerous time in history. The odds still say that America will survive, although I think it will look different in the years ahead. But if the worst case scenario does happen, those who are prepared have the best chance of survival.

We Americans have our heads buried in the sand and we think it can’t happen here, but we are wrong. We have enemies who wish us evil. Hurricane Katrina has shown how poorly prepared we are for a major natural disaster. I have seen the results of economic collapse in places like Zimbabwe and if you know anything at all about economics, you understand that while we are taking a different road, we are heading to that same destination. There are a lot of bad things lining up to change our way of life.

Those who can’t make it past next week without a government check or a fully stocked grocery store are not going to do well. Those who have learned to deal with life and have made some preparations will be in a better position to survive.

Am I a prepper? Not in the sense that the foolish and exploitive television shows define the word. But I am taking steps to make sure we can survive if the world changes. But mostly it’s not much different than how I have always lived my life. Prepping is a lifelong process of learning how to do what needs to be done without turning to somebody else to solve the problem.

Should you all be prepping? I think that anybody who is not is a foolish person who does not understand reality. 

Am I being too subtle here?

Who are some of your favorite authors?

Hemingway. I discovered him in my twenties, I re-read him every decade. I come away with a much different understanding each time.

Robert Ruark. He is famous with hunters for a few books and a column he did for Field and Stream called the Old Man and the Boy, but he did some great novels and was a famous newspaper writer back when newspapers meant something. He is one of the best wordsmiths I have read and it drives me crazy to read him and realize I can never be that good. 

     I read everything from junk to classic literature. On a bet a few years ago, I kept track and I read 112 books that year. I appreciate any good writing. Some of the best-selling authors are horrible and there are some unknown, self-published writers who are brilliant. My favorite at any given time is the writer who has my attention and is holding on to it tightly.

What’s next for you, in your writing life and travels?

Who knows for sure? That’s part of the adventure. I just finalized a contract for a prepper’s gun book. I am working on a collection of hunting adventure stories and on an outdoor humor book. Of course, I am also writing a sequel to “The 14th Reinstated.” I have a few other novels I want to write and several short stories, but the money making part of this business, the magazine articles and the contracted books, take up too much time.

 For the travels? I have not been to Australia and hope to address that flaw this year. Any trip that can take me into wild places is always welcome. I love seeing the parts of the world most tourists never see. Hunting has taken me into remote and wild lands, which I love. The thrill of straddling a mountain top and realizing that you are on the top or the world, or watching a hunting lion walk through the twilight just a few feet from you are the moments that make life interesting.

I am traveling a lot now to national and international shooting competitions, which are always fun, but the wild places are still the best.

To answer your question, I don’t really know what’s next in writing or travel. Life would be boring without surprises.

The Magick's in the Mind: Don Bredes's New Cli-Fi Adventure

Novelist Don Bredes wants to shake you out of your complacency. 

In his new young adult novel, POLLY AND THE ONE AND ONLY WORLD, Bredes imagines the ravaged landscape and socio-political nightmare we might leave future generations, if we’re not, as he puts it, up to “the challenge of our time.”

“While I began drafting the novel, as I thought about the journey my young heroine would undertake,” Bredes says, “I envisioned Polly’s world as a stricken version of our own, a world whose dwindling goodness she might have the chance to preserve.  For me, in recent years, the carelessness, greed, hatred, and especially the willful ignorance of human beings have increasingly seemed to threaten everything we love about life on earth.”

That love of life on earth informs Bredes’s work and his life in South Wheelock, where for 35 years he’s made his home, enjoying hiking, bird watching, and cultivating impressive gardens. He includes star-gazing among his favorite pursuits. 

The author of six novels and three screenplays, Bredes is perhaps best known for his Hector Bellevance mysteries, which vividly portray small-town northern Vermont.  Author John Smolens describes the world Bredes creates in those novels as “an inviting, yet dangerous landscape where local history, long-held grudges, and intrigue lead the town folk to draw lines in the mud.”

As richly as Bredes envelops the reader in Bellevance’s Vermont scenery and milieu, in his new novel, he sets us smack into the frightening consequences of staying the course on global warming, conformity, and religious intolerance. In doing so, he calls young readers to be mindful of  “the one and only world.”

“For our purposes, this ‘pale, blue dot,’ as Carl Sagan called it, is all there is,” says Bredes.  “We have the power, if we can embrace it, to protect our fragile planet and the conditions that foster earthly life: ‘forms most beautiful and most wonderful,’ in Darwin’s famous phrase.  And we have the power to corrupt those conditions beyond any redemption if, as a species, we can’t bring ourselves to defend what we already know is good and precious.”

“The choice,” says Bredes,”is now ours to make.”

How did you find your way to Vermont?

I was born in New York City and grew up in Huntington Bay on the north shore of Long Island, where my first novel, HARD FEELINGS, is set.  In 1969, when I graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in English composition, my prospects for satisfying employment seemed limited to teaching.  One of the very few places where I could hope to find a job as an untrained, would-be teacher was the State of Vermont, where, in those days, “emergency certification” might be granted to promising candidates.  I was fortunate, late that August, to be offered a position teaching English at Lake Region Union High School in Orleans. 

In 1972 I was accepted into the MFA program at U. of California in Irvine. When I returned to Vermont two years later, I worked as a waiter at Carbur's Restaurant in Burlington while I was writing my first novel.  Carbur's, on St. Paul St., was right next door to an old gas station on the corner where I watched a couple of guys named Ben and Jerry set up their first ice cream maker in the front window.  

You’re no stranger to controversy – your award winning young adult novel HARD FEELINGS caused a local uproar.

That’s right.  My popular first novel was much reviled in some quarters when it came out in 1977.  It's still on some banned book lists.  

In fact, HARD FEELINGS provoked a blow-up in our own community in 1978, a blow-up that had no connection to the coincidence of my living here.  A freshman at LI happened upon the book in the library, took it home to East Burke, found herself shocked by all the (humorous) sex and profanity, and showed it to her parents.  They demanded that LI remove that filth from the school library.  

The story was a big one here (lots of letters to the editor)--and also in the Free Press--partly because of the coincidence.  But LI's headmaster at the time handled it well.  They would not remove the book, he said, but they would send home a notice advising all parents of its presence in the library and suggesting that parents who did not want their child to read the book should send a note with that message to the librarian.  

You’ve said that POLLY AND THE ONE AND ONLY WORLD “stands to be pretty controversial” as well. Tell us why.

The story is set in a much-diminished America called the Christian Protectorates.  The new government, formed in the wake of devastating cataclysms that are not explained, is a stifling theocracy.  The story’s villains, then, are fundamentalists afflicted by all the delusions that may sometimes be inspired by religious history and mythology.  Involuntary servitude is legal, for example, while public libraries are not. 

At the start of the novel, the Faith and Redemption Amendment has just become law, mandating that “all the heretics, apostates, and followers of false creeds anywhere in the Protectorates had 90 days to register for assignment to a ReBirthing facility or apply for bondservant status.  Anyone who failed to comply with the FRA, citizen or outlier, would face arrest and exile, consignment to a work camp, or death.”  So, Polly, a practicing witch, must try to hide, seek safety in exile, or risk imprisonment and execution. 

Needless to say, some readers are bound to be offended by the depiction of Christians as hateful oppressors—and of witches as heroic figures. 

Your friend Howard Frank Mosher calls you a realist, and has described your depictions of the Northeast Kingdom in your novels as “strictly accurate.”  In POLLY AND THE ONE AND ONLY WORLD, you’re exploring an imagined future, ravaged by climate change and social upheaval. 

Yes, I’m more than alarmed by the gloomy trends we’ve all been seeing in the culture for the last 20 years or so:  the widespread, vehement denial of scientific consensus and the ignorant rejection of basic truths about our existence--like natural evolution--coupled with the rise in religious oppression in the public sphere.  These are ominous cultural developments.  What they may portend will probably not take shape in our actual future as Americans, but the world I have envisioned for the novel will, I hope, inspire young readers to work for positive and enlightened change in our own world today.

So would you say that your latest novel is an example of the new genre that has recently emerged in popular entertainment—cli-fi, or eco-fiction?

Yes, it fits right in, no question about that—though I had never heard of cli-fi until just a few months ago.  Clearly, the changing climate and its harsh consequences are a preoccupying concern for almost everyone today.  Our problem now, as human animals on what has been a hospitable planet for many thousands of years, is that the natural world, the world that has nourished all of us in the most elementary ways, is under grave threat.  A threat that we have produced.  So we’re the ones who must forestall its consequences, if we can.

I’m curious why you gave your heroine paranormal abilities.

Polly is a true witch, a maiden Adept in training.  Her skills are not so much paranormal as they are purely magickal.  That is, with some effort and strenuous focus, and with the aid of her grimoire, The Craeft, she can cast various complex spells.  To be effective, the magick depends on her ability to influence the space and energy that hold matter to form.  So, there’s a kind of science about it, or that’s the airy notion that underlies the narrative.

POLLY is a young adult fantasy in the mold of ALICE IN WONDERLAND, DOROTHY AND THE WIZARD OF OZ, THE GOLDEN COMPASS, THE HUNGER GAMES, HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCEROR’S STONE, and many others.   The magic(k) involved in flying, shrinking, befriending talking animals, casting spells, and so on falls squarely in that literary tradition.

In POLLY, the magic also stands in contrast to religious spell-casting, like exorcism, for example, or even prayer.  Most people do not believe that magic spells are real, and yet at the same time most people in America do believe that supernatural entities, like ghosts and angels and demons, and mythological places, like hell and heaven, are real.  In the world of the novel these two categories of supernatural belief exist on the same plane, where I think they belong.

You’re best known for your popular Hector Bellevance series. Tell us about its genesis.

One day in September, 1984, two acquaintances of mine, Roland and Maram Hanel, were slain in their isolated ski chalet near Jay.  They were each shot many times with a 9mm machine pistol.  Nothing was stolen from the house, and investigators uncovered no helpful clues. The case remains open today, the Hanels’ executioners unknown.

Ten years later, when I got around to looking into the crime myself, my plan was to use the peculiar circumstances surrounding the murders (and the frustrated investigation) in a novel about stranger-on-stranger homicides and how they’re seldom solved.  The 650-page manuscript I came up with featured a Vermont dairy farmer who finds himself the prime suspect in the killings.  Even his own wife is not sure of his innocence.  So he embarks on his own stubborn and willful investigation.  The story ends after he has managed to exonerate himself–although he never does find the killers.

My agent sent THE SUGARWOODS MURDERS to half a dozen publishers. They all passed.  In the meantime, my old friend Howard Mosher read the manuscript. “Don,” he said, “I think what you’ve got is actually a mystery. But the book you’ve written is almost an anti-mystery. What the story needs is a sleuth character who solves the crime.”

That’s how Hector Bellevance was born.  I spent two more years rewriting the book, introducing Hector, a Boston Police Dept. homicide dick who has retired under a cloud, and inventing a set of motives and villains partly inspired by the factual events. The literary mystery, COLD COMFORT, came in at 370 pages or so.  A year later I sealed a two-book deal with Harmony Books for COLD COMFORT and a sequel.  I told everyone, “The good news is I sold my novel! The bad news is I have to write another one just like it.” The truth was I wasn’t sure I could write another mystery. The form doesn’t come easy to a writer like me. My stories tend to be less plot-driven than character-driven, so they’re quirkier and more surprising than the more standard, plot-driven mysteries.  And they take a lot longer to write.

Over the next three years I wrote the second Bellevance mystery, THE FIFTH SEASON, loosely inspired by the Carl Drega shootings in New Hampshire in August, 1997.  It came out in 2005.

The third Bellevance mystery, THE ERRAND BOY, came out in September, 2009.  This one was also partly inspired by an unresolved (but not unsolved) crime, the Orville Gibson murder in Newbury in 1957.  In some rural communities, like Newbury, there may live a person everyone knows to be a killer but who cannot be held to account because enough evidence to support a conviction is lacking. Gibson’s killers were known to the townspeople and the state police, but at their trial no one would testify against them. They died unpunished.

You’ve also written the screenplays for the film adaptions of two of Mosher’s novels.

Yes, thanks to filmmaker and producer, Jay Craven.  Howard and I first met when I came to Vermont in 1969 to teach high school English at Lake Region.  Howard lived a mile down the road from me in Barton.  He had just ended his stint there as a teacher.  By coincidence, he, his wife, Phillis, and I were Syracuse University grads.  And Howard and I were both trying to write short fiction. 

In 1970, Howard was accepted into the MFA Program in Writing at the U. of California, Irvine.  When they arrived in southern California, however, he and Phillis soon decided that that part of the country did not suit them.  At all.  So they came home to Vermont.  Two years later, as I mentioned earlier, I was accepted into the same program.  I liked it out there—the ocean, the newness, the time to write. 

I was at Irvine when I wrote the beginning of my first novel, HARD FEELINGS.  My work attracted the interest of a well-established literary agent, Don Congdon.  After graduation, once I was back in Vermont, I suggested to Congdon that he have a look at what my friend Howard Mosher was writing.  He was impressed and offered to take on Howard, too.  In time, Congdon found excellent publishers for our first novels.  When Jay Craven decided to make a short film of Howard’s short story, “High Water,” he chose me to write the script.  Jay and I worked well together.  Later, when he decided to make a feature based on Howard’s first novel, WHERE THE RIVERS FLOW NORTH, he hired me to do the adaptation. 

What’s your writing routine? Do you write every day?

I write every day, yes, with regular breaks to read, play tennis, or hoe the beans.  It’s a luxury, an obsession, and a sacrifice.  I haven’t had a fulltime job since I stopped teaching at Lake Region, though I have worked part-time, teaching college courses in writing and literature and working as an advisor to adult college students for Johnson State College’s External Degree Program.

What are you reading now?  Who are your favorite authors?

When I’m working on a novel, I tend not to read much, except in periodical literature, because longer, immersive fiction, especially when it’s well done, can influence what I’m trying to do myself.  That said, I have enjoyed reading James Howard Kunster’s futuristic novels and, most recently (off the top of my head), the work of Cormac McCarthy, Tom McNeal,  Barbara Kingsolver, Louise Erdrich, William Trevor, and others.

What’s next?

The ending of POLLY AND THE ONE AND ONLY WORLD leaves the door wide open for a sequel, and I have a file of notes and ideas for that project. And I’m midway through the fourth Hector Bellevance novel.  For no special reason, when I began the Bellevance series, I had imagined a quartet of novels, each inspired by an actual crime and each unfolding over a week’s time during a defining season of the year.  The first three are set in foliage season, mud season, and high summer.  Next up, set in the depths of winter, is THE BIGFOOT HUNTER, which I hope to finish in 2015.

Upcoming Events for Don Bredes's

Polly and the One and Only World

Vermont-based Green Writers Press will publish Don Bredes’s new young adult novel this month. The author will appear and sign copies at these upcoming events:

October 4, Brattleboro Literary Festival, Brattleboro, 2:30 pm

October TBA, Galaxy Books, Hardwick  

October 10, Green Mt. Books, Lyndonville, October 10, 4-6 pm 

October 30, St. Johnsbury Academy library, 3 pm

November 14--Northshire Bookstore, Manchester, 7 pm 

November 15--Northshire Bookstore, Saratoga Springs, 7 pm 

This interview appears in the October issue of The North Star Monthly.  Check out their site:

The North Star Monthly