Distinctly Montana Magazine

90 D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A M A G A Z I N E • S U M M E R 2 0 2 4 mention the names Grace Stone Coates, whose short story collection Black Cher- ries is outstanding, or Mildred Walker, who wrote one of my favorite Montana novels in Winter Wheat, to people to- day, and very few even avid readers are familiar with these names. But we writ- ers know who they are. Perhaps the best of the Montana women writers, not to mention the most successful, was Dorothy Johnson, a writer who should be sitting among the greats of Montana. Instead, when most people think of Montana writers, the names that most often come up first are Ivan Doig, Norman MacLean, and A.B. Guthrie. And don't get me wrong, these writers are well known for good reason. I admire their work. The point is, you have to wonder whether these fabulous women writ- ers aren't remembered in the same way just because they are women. In Johnson's case, I believe the au- thenticity of her stories starts with her own upbringing. She was born in Iowa, but her family moved to Montana soon after she came along. She grew up in Whitefish, where she became interest- ed in writing when she was still in high school, when she wrote for the local newspaper. For a brief period, Johnson thought about going into medicine, and af- ter high school, she spent a couple of years studying pre-med at Montana State in Bozeman. But her hunger to write brought her back up north to Missoula, where she studied English. After finishing her degree, John- son had a sojourn to New York City, where she worked as an editor. But after about fifteen years in the city, a period she later described as very un- pleasant, she moved back to Missoula, where she spent the rest of her long life. It was in New York that she also discovered just how much the world of writing about the West was dominated by men, when many of the bylines for articles she had published were credit- ed to "D.M." Johnson because the ed- itors didn't want readers to know the author was a woman. Johnson must have thought her dreams of becoming a fiction writer were about to come true when she sold her first story to the Saturday Eve- ning Post for $400 in 1935, when she was twenty-nine. And let's just skim right past the sad realization that this is about the same fee writers can ex- pect to get for magazine stories now, nearly a hundred years later. Johnson soon learned the brutal truth about the publishing world, as it was another eleven years before she sold another story. There's no way of determining whether this drought happened because she was a woman, of course, but it's not hard to imagine that this was an issue. But that second sale was a big one, again with the Sat- urday Evening Post. This time, they paid her $2100 for four interconnect- ed stories featuring a character named Beulah Bunny. But following that, in large part be- cause of World War II, Johnson hit an- other dry spell. She went to work for the Air Warden Service, a government agency that was created in order to give citizens of the US proper warning and training for how to handle an air raid.

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