About Elk Love:

A world-weary museum curator and a bereaved rancher come together amidst the dazzling beauty and seasonal rhythms of a cattle ranch in a hidden Montana mountain valley—a wide-open, wind-filled place where words give way to the wisdom of nature.

Having spent ten summers on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation near Glacier National Park, part of her fieldwork for a PhD in Native American Art History, forty-two-year-old Lynne Spriggs thinks of Montana as her healing place. When she moves to “Big Sky Country” from the East Coast in a quest to reset her life, she arrives with high hopes.

Her new start in Great Falls, a farming and military town in central Montana, is not what Lynne imagined. But her dream of being more connected to nature in the American West comes alive when she meets Harrison, a handsome but cantankerous rancher. With her dog Willow by her side, visits to his hidden valley lead her to bugling elk, dancing birds, and night-calving in blizzards. In a modern world where listening is rare, Elk Love explores an intimate place where loneliness gives way to wonder, where the natural world speaks of what matters most.

Author bio:

Before moving to the rural West at age forty-two, Lynne Spriggs curated exhibitions of folk and self-taught art at the High Museum in Atlanta. She spent ten summers on northern Montana’s Blackfeet Indian reservation while pursuing fieldwork for her PhD in Native American Art History at Columbia University. She also worked in the film industry as Production Coordinator for Spalding Gray and Jonathan Demme on the iconic Swimming to Cambodia. After landing in Montana, she curated Bison: American Icon, a major permanent exhibit for the Charlie Russell Museum on bison in the Northern Plains. For the past fifteen years, she and her husband have lived on a cattle ranch in an isolated Montana mountain valley east of the Rockies, where her life centers on writing, animals, and family. Elk Love is her first memoir.