Against the backdrop of a world on the brink of inconceivable transformation, spanning five generations, Cowboy State is the story of two friends; of a prominent family tormented by secrets and devastated by lies; and of the resources upon which they draw in order to survive.
“When they came to the hard T at the end of the cutoff, the monster they hadn’t known was gaining caught up—a big rig like the one they’d passed earlier. A sharp glare in the rear-view mirrors and a loud, decelerative, machine-gun popping were the only startling indications of its approach. As both slowed, the speeds of the larger and smaller must have matched. The impact was gentle, more a shove than a crash. For a heartbeat, the Pinto hung, suspended, between contact and consequence, then was thrust across the intersection—Jamie shrieked—into a pillowy bank of snow where it abruptly came to a standstill, its hood and windshield submerged. The rig turned south and went on its way, its driver either oblivious or a psycho. The whole thing took no more than a few seconds and concluded with the diesel engine’s subsiding roar. Bo shut off the music. In the dark and quiet, it was like they’d been buried and forgotten.”
In 1970s Wyoming, best friends Greer McAlister and Bodil Hendrickson come of age in the high plains town of Eminence—a place both defined and devoured by the oil boom. Generations of McAlisters and Hendricksons have built their lives on that land, but Greer and Bo come to question what it has cost.
Quiet and focused, Greer grows up believing she’ll follow her father and grandfather’s footsteps into an Earth Sciences career. Yet the women before her—her grandmother and great-grandmother—teach her to see and to protect the traces of human history and spirit buried just beneath the surface.
Bo—a tomboy who may or may not be queer (she flirts with everybody but her sexuality is a mystery, even to her)—transforms self-doubt, guilt, and memories into fierce, experimental art that exposes the uneasy marriage between human ambition and the natural world.
Meanwhile, Greer’s little brother, Jamie, chases myths to become a man—costing him his soul—while their half-brother, Z, moves through their lives like a bad storm, leaving devastation in his wake.
Spanning five generations of inheritance and fracture, Cowboy State asks what it means to belong to a place; to whom and for what we must take responsibility, and what—if anything—we owe the worlds that made us.
Janna L. Goodwin 