Had she writer’s block? “No, I wrote two novels that didn’t sell,” she says. “One was set in New York, and then I wrote another Jules. I was writing screenplays of these books. I had no real confidence, too. It’s easier to write when you’re getting just a little bit of praise. But I did write two published books in between. So it wasn’t really writer’s block, it was no time. And no confidence. When somebody stops buying something, you just shrivel up. It’s hard.”

And beginning again? “I started by making Jules my age of 60-plus, but that didn’t work,” she says of the new novel. “Jules essentially is me. He’s an over-educated archaeologist who came back to his hometown, Blue Deer—which in reality is Livingston—because he missed it. His father had been a sheriff, and he thought maybe he could be a good cop. And make up for his father’s death somehow.”

Taliaferro says, “He’s an archaeologist. Perfect fit.”

“I wanted to be an archaeologist,” Jamie says, “but I sissy-ed out and got an English degree. Digging up bodies is innately interesting to me. I dig up a lot of people.”

Regarding the nature of mysteries, Taliaferro says, “It’s finding the grave. Jules’ effort to solve these mysteries is also his effort to solve himself.” He laughs. “I’m so glad Jules is back, because he’s made such great progress!”

The audience titters. Someone asks, “Can a genre novel be literary?”

“Sure,” Jamie says. “I really wanted to write mysteries, because A: I lost my job, and B: I’d read a lot of mysteries and they were all the really great ones. I thought I could do them, and,” she pauses, “quite frankly, I wanted as much as possible to avoid being compared to my father.” A beat. “Because that was a game I was never going to win.”

Few critics weigh Jamie’s work against her father’s, but most acknowledge the relationship, as Jim is regarded as one of the more important poets, essayists and fiction writers of his generation. He was widely praised by critics as the author of such novellas as Legends of the Fall, Revenge, The Woman Lit by Fireflies, the poetry volume, Letters to Yesenin, and the novel, Dalva, in which he wrote from the persona of a woman. The London Sunday Times went so far as to say, “Jim Harrison is a writer with immortality in him.” An outdoorsman, a bon vivant, a food critic and a gourmand of epic proportions, he was a hard act to follow. He died in 2016, at his desk, with an unfinished poem before him.

Jamie says that, as a child, “writing seemed like something you did as a calling. I read everything I could get my hands on and was very serious about that. But I didn’t want to be a writer.” She hesitates. “It was not a good way to make a living. My dad didn’t make more than eight or 10 grand a year until I was in college.”

She’s seated at a picnic table in the backyard of her Livingston house—a comfortable bungalow she shares with her attorney husband, Stephen Potenberg, and in past years her two sons, John 28, and Will, 34. Jamie and her younger sister, Anna Hjortsberg—who manages The Country Bookshelf in Bozeman—are executors of their father’s literary estate. Each of Jim’s 40-plus books remains in print. Three have appeared since his death. The sisters have editorial control of this fabled archive.

“We’re sorting out some last-minute copyright things,” Jamie says. “But we decide.”

Financial success for Jim Harrison did not arrive quickly. In the early 1970s, he quit teaching at Stony Brook University in New York to return to his home state of Michigan to write, eschewing other employment—not without consequence for his family.

“He’d won a Guggenheim and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. But we really didn’t have any money,” Jamie recalls. “When I was in high school, I paid the electrical bills sometimes. I worked for a nursery down the street. I worked from the age of 13 on.”

Jamie’s mother, Linda King Harrison, was from a wealthier family than Jim’s, “so my grandfather loaned us money. Friends loaned us money. But it was always a big deal when Dad got paid by Sports Illustrated for an article. I did go up to the mailbox looking for checks. But we didn’t miss meals. For one thing, we were living in Lake Leelanau, a tiny town in northern Michigan. You could charge at the grocery store. I remember signing off on the chit and getting up to $900 in credit there. We had a garden. We didn’t eat lavishly. But nobody starved. We had books and we had food, and we had Hearty Burgundy.”

Jim later wrote, in an essay titled “A Sporting Life,” that, “A few years back, when we were quite poor, lower-class by all the charts, we had a game dinner at our house … We ate, fixed in a number of ways, venison, duck, trout, woodcock, snipe, grouse, rabbit, and drank [two] cases of wine. I doubt you could buy the meal on earth.”

That sounds glorious, even rich. But as a teenager, Jamie had concerns not just about her father’s income, but about his mental health. “He was incredibly depressed,” she says, about his career and the hardships imposed upon his family. “I was worried that he was going to kill himself.” And of her family: “I remember being actively worried about people’s happiness, rather than whether we were going to eat.”

Despite this concern, Tom McGuane, Jim’s oldest friend, remembers Jamie “as a very lively kid, twirling her baton and imagining herself as a cheerleader. She was a wonderful child.”

In high school, Jamie won a National Merit Scholarship to the University of Michigan but could not accept it because of her father’s “nonexistent tax forms.” He hadn’t filed. “He was a truly self- absorbed person,” she says. “But he worried about us and felt guilty.” His depression came to a head in 1972-73, during the composition of the long poem, “Letters to Yesenin.” Sergei Yesenin was a popular Russian poet who had hanged himself: “And what a dance you had kicking your legs from the rope,” Jim wrote. “Beauty takes my courage away this cold autumn evening. My year-old daughter’s red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop.”

Alcohol had always been Jim’s “reentry” vehicle from the loneliness of writing, but drugs, he admitted in his 2002 memoir, Off to the Side, had entered the equation. In the Key West tribute film, All That Is Sacred, which celebrates Jim’s, Buffett’s, McGuane’s, and Guy de la Valdene’s drug-spackled friendship, Jamie says, “If your father asked you to hide the cocaine, you hid the cocaine.” She adds here, “I remember cocaine being around from the time I was 12 or 13. At some point, I was delegated to bury the coke grinder out in the barn floor somewhere. I was doing cocaine too, by the time I was 17 or 18. I was everything in moderation. I’m not Grace Slick, but I’m glad I’m alive.”

Jim’s poverty gamble eventually paid off. In 1977 Jack Nicholson, whom he’d met on the set of McGuane’s film, The Missouri Breaks, shot in Montana, staked him enough cash to write Legends of the Fall and two other novellas. The complete Legends appeared in Esquire magazine, and its movie version, starring Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins, jumpstarted a lucrative screenwriting career for Jim. The family was out of debt.

“Altogether, I would say I had a happy childhood,” Jamie says. “Because it was we three or four against the world. We spent most of our time together. I would try reading what my parents were reading. Everybody would go to the bookstore together. Everybody went to dinners together. We all cooked together. It was, in a kind of weird way, idyllic.”

At the University of Michigan (from which she graduated with honors), Jamie studied English literature but felt she did not have the science to tackle archaeology. “I did the Great Books thing. I also had wanted to be an art history major, but looked around at the girls in pearls and realized I didn’t have the background, I didn’t have it, shall we say.”

After graduation, her plan was “not moving back to northern Michigan. I’d found a place in Soho, a sublet.” She worked at the gourmet deli, Dean & DeLuca, for a couple of years, doing food chores and “writing its first catalog—with two-dozen ways of describing olive oil.” Those were the cocaine days in New York City. “That and AIDS.”

Burned out by 1987, she and Potenberg moved to Livingston and Russell Chatham’s house on Deep Creek. She spent five years working for him at Clark City Press before that endeavor crashed and she felt sufficiently liberated to tackle the Jules Clement mystery series.

Those novels were positively reviewed. The New York Times wrote of the novel, The Edge of the Crazies: “A sparkling, caustic first novel … In this madly original debut, Ms. Harrison speaks up in a fresh animated voice to say something worth saying about the festering animosities of small minds cooped up in small towns.” And of the next, Going Local, the Los Angeles Times wrote: “What seems characteristic of the best present crime writing is surpassingly true of Jamie Harrison … she is also writing social history as accurate in its essences as a road map and generating a most admirable work of literature.” The series of four sold respectably and spiked her career arc.

In addition, there was something placid about her new home, Livingston, a town Jim had visited yearly since 1968 to hunt and fish with McGuane, and one she had visited only twice as a child.

“I think I was 13 the first time I came out here. And I absolutely fell in love with the smell of the air, with everything. I’ve always been interested in the idea of women who ran away. It’s reinvention. It’s running into something. It’s not always cowardice.” She snorts. “I’ve always been fascinated by people who can pick up and start again.”

“I’ve always lived in places where the past is sort of fascinating. I’ve always liked graveyards, and potter’s fields are everywhere. What happens to the lost people? Not good things. I am politically angry enough to want to poke at that, too.” – Jamie Harrison

The Livingston poor farm and potter’s field appear in several of Jamie’s novels, including what she calls her two “literary ones,” The Widow Nash and The Center of Everything, which are stunningly good, have won awards, and deserve essays unto themselves. McGuane has called them “grounded, original and moving,” with “a moral center and steadiness that are hers alone.” They involve women who have escaped from difficult men or have a heady preoccupation with the past. This afternoon a crisp wind blows through the potter’s field’s white crosses. Jamie steps around them, intently studying the sunken graves.

“I don’t know what my poor house interest is about,” she says. I guess it’s because they have them in Michigan too. I’ve always lived in places where the past is sort of fascinating. I’ve always liked graveyards, and potter’s fields are everywhere. What happens to the lost people? Not good things. I am politically angry enough to want to poke at that, too.”

She leaves the small cemetery, its tall grass shimmering, and walks to a brick monument erected by the county. This poor farm had been established in 1892 to house indigents, the aged, and the infirm. Between that date and 1924, its cemetery held at least 111 people, most of their graves unmarked. Jamie scans the monument’s list of names, many of them European in origin, but distinctly Montanan. “I’m surprised I didn’t use any of these for my novel,” she says.

In The River View, Jules has quit the police department and is trying to understand what motivated his father’s death—a murder. Jules works as a PI and as an archaeologist, identifying graves at Blue Deer’s poor farm, so that a road might be constructed through it. The River View is, in part, about property grabbing—real estate. “The book is about greed, about land. Everybody wants a river view. The few people who have it are not particularly fortunate—they’re up on the poor farm.”

In The Center of Everything, Jamie wrote, “From the poor farm, perched between the Absaroka Mountains and the river below, you would have had the best view possible of the town that didn’t want you, the thousands of people who didn’t care, the whole world you didn’t own … if you were ill and had no relatives to care for you, you were given to the care of the county, which fed you, clothed you, gave you a bed, and did its best to tend to your medical and psychological needs.”

Jim had needed little more than caregiver attention near the end of his life. He was a financially comfortable and well-respected author. His name, in critical circles, was sacrosanct. His books sold admirably, here and abroad. Now, as someone at Elk River’s event had quipped of literary success, “It’s Jamie’s turn.”

The critiquing of Jim’s manuscripts from high school on, her partial editing or proofing of them and her collaborations with him upon potentially rewarding screenplays was finished. Also done was the care, with sister Anna, of both their aging parents—no small task. Watching Jamie study the poor farm’s graves, one is reminded of what she’d said earlier about her parents’ deaths—her mother’s in late 2015, her father’s in early 2016: “My mother got sepsis and was in the hospital for four months. She had an infection that they never traced. My dad had shingles, which was what killed him, basically. Six years of pain and drinking through it.”

He’d succumbed to a coronary, alone at his casita in southern Arizona. “I left him on a Wednesday, and he died on Saturday. He had wanted me to stay. So I felt horrible, obviously. I went down the next day, and I think Anna got in on Monday. As McGuane said later, ‘He was not a candidate for long-term care.’ Dad was not okay at all after Mom died, and he wasn’t going to get okay. But when I saw him there in Arizona he was smiling. I have to say, that was nice to see.”

Offering nothing further, the wind tangling her hair, she strides past the gravesites toward the car.

Read Maggie Neal Doherty’s review of The River View online.

Toby Thompson is the author of six books of nonfiction, including Positively Main Street, his biography of Bob Dylan, and Riding the Rough String: Reflections on the American West. He has written for publications as varied as Esquire, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, Outside, and Men’s Journal. He is a part-time resident of Livingston, Montana, and teaches nonfiction writing at Penn State.