But Tell It Slant

Matt Pavelich was born on the Flathead Indian Reservation. He is not native American. On the ranch where he was raised, his were mostly urban interests, but country manners followed him to town and through a lengthy education that further confused the issue. He was a pacifist in the Marine Corps, then a day laborer who never successfully paired a strong back with a strong mind. He has been a bad pilot and a peculiar lawyer. He is a thrice-married bachelor. While it seems this tendency to be a poor fit has served him pretty poorly, it does have its uses for Pavelich the writer. He belongs only to his craft and the rich murk of thought and sensation he might stir with it. Standing outside, Pavelich is constantly discovering in his work how he stands there, outside, with nearly all of humanity. The attention he lavishes on the rhythm, timbre, and pace of his language was evident from his earliest published stories, Beasts of the Forest, Beasts of the Field. Pavelich uses musicality to serve up constantly shifting moods. In the novel, Our Savage, he dared to occupy as a fictionist times, situations, and personalities he might only research in his imagination; thus the story of a giant, told in naturalistic terms, making his way from the court of the Holy Roman Empire to a Wyoming coal camp. In The Other Shoe, Pavelich walks a cast of innocents painfully through his musings on justice. In Survivors Said the people of his stories do just that, survive, an often mixed blessing.For Pavelich, it seems, the purpose of life is life itself, and perhaps a song to properly sing it.