"Richard Hugo taught me that anyone with a desire to write, an ear for language and a bit of imagination could become a writer. He also, in a way, gave me permission to write about northern Montana"
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Welch frames writing less as a gated talent than as a practice you earn by paying attention. The first sentence is a quiet rebuke to the myth of the born author: desire, an ear, a bit of imagination. Not pedigree, not cosmopolitan polish. Coming from Welch, a Blackfeet/Gros Ventre novelist and poet who spent much of his career being read through the narrow lens of “Native writer,” that checklist lands as both generous and defiant. It’s craft talk, but it’s also class talk, regional talk, cultural talk.
The second sentence is where the emotional voltage is. “Permission” isn’t about Hugo handing down approval like a dean; it implies Welch had internalized, or been taught, a set of literary zoning laws: serious writing happens elsewhere, about other places, in other voices. Northern Montana, in the coastal imagination, is flyover country; in the publishing imagination, it risks being treated as quaint backdrop or ethnographic exhibit. Welch’s word choice suggests he felt the pressure to translate his home into something legible to outsiders, or to abandon it for “proper” subjects.
Hugo matters here because his own poetics argued for the authority of place: you don’t have to leave to be literary; you have to look harder. Welch’s tribute doubles as a manifesto. By crediting a teacher, he sidesteps ego while making a radical claim: local knowledge and lived terrain are not limitations. They’re the source code.
The second sentence is where the emotional voltage is. “Permission” isn’t about Hugo handing down approval like a dean; it implies Welch had internalized, or been taught, a set of literary zoning laws: serious writing happens elsewhere, about other places, in other voices. Northern Montana, in the coastal imagination, is flyover country; in the publishing imagination, it risks being treated as quaint backdrop or ethnographic exhibit. Welch’s word choice suggests he felt the pressure to translate his home into something legible to outsiders, or to abandon it for “proper” subjects.
Hugo matters here because his own poetics argued for the authority of place: you don’t have to leave to be literary; you have to look harder. Welch’s tribute doubles as a manifesto. By crediting a teacher, he sidesteps ego while making a radical claim: local knowledge and lived terrain are not limitations. They’re the source code.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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