“Burning Fence: A Western Memoir of Fatherhood”

By Craig Lesley

St. Martin’s Press, 368 pp.

From its brilliant beginning, standing in the graveyard at his father’s funeral, Craig Lesley’s new book weaves a tale of innocence lost, a search for his father that leads to the hardscrabble backcountry of the diminishing West in Eastern Oregon and the difficulty of learning to love characters who come into his life. And this is nonfiction!

In the opening of “Burning Fence,” a Western memoir of fatherhood, Eastern Oregon is on fire. “Ponderosa, lodgepole, red pine, juniper, sagebrush – all burning.” Rudell Lesley built juniper fences, and now, at his funeral, they are going up in flames.

Best known for his fiction – “River Song,” “The Sky Fishermen,” “Winterkill,” “Storm Riders” – Craig Lesley dives into nonfiction with a passion and expertise of drawing the right balance between the serious longing for answers to his father’s abandonment and the humor involved in facing life head-on. He writes that his brother Ormand said God had forgiven Rudell, “but I hadn’t,” he concludes.

After the funeral, the book jumps back to Lesley’s early childhood. “I had to let the story take me where it wanted,” Lesley said. “I had to let the story develop, and it developed in a nonlinear way.”

Opening with the funeral, Lesley said, created the opportunity for his stepfather to come onto the scene. “The absence of my father made it possible to be unprotected from my stepfather.” The stepfather figures prominently in the first section of “Burning Fence,” progressing from wandering hands to physical abuse. Then, just like that, it’s over. Lesley’s mother packs up and leaves with him and his sister in tow.

The second section, “Back to Monument,” (one of the most perfect place names you couldn’t make up) is a monument to the Old West – the fur trappers, the poachers, the backsliders who want nothing to do with civilization and its rules. It is in the town of Monument that the World War II shell-shocked Rudell “tacked a lean-to onto a banged-up trailer and was catching coyotes and poaching deer.”

Like Wallace Stegner, Craig Lesley has a handle on these men of the West and the country they inhabit. He is at once of them, but not one of them. Abandoned by his father at the age of 8 months, he doesn’t see Rudell again until he’s 15.

Lesley attempts to burn a few fences of his own – the barriers between fathers and sons. In his quest to be unlike his father, Lesley takes on the task of caring for an Indian boy damaged by fetal alcohol syndrome. “Wade stayed with me because no one else wanted him and I did,” Lesley writes. “I vowed to raise him right and show up all those who had abandoned me.”

Wade’s antics keep the humor flowing, but the pressures of being the responsible parent weigh on Lesley. Rudell later says, “I don’t know why you went and bit off so much gristle. Life’s tough enough.”

The book is filled with tough characters. Perhaps the toughest are his mother, who left and raised her kids on her own, and Lesley, who survived to tell it.

Craig Lesley’s tremendous powers of writing make this a must-read for anyone over the age of 17.

Craig Lesley’s memoir, “Burning Fence,” was recently selected for the national BookSense “Recommended Reading List” for the month of December. Only 19 other books are chosen by independent booksellers throughout the country for this honor.

Lesley is the author of four novels, “River Song,” “The Sky Fishermen,” “Winterkill” and “Storm Riders,” along with numerous other works. He has received three Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Awards, the Western Writers of America Golden Spur Award for Best Novel and an Oregon Book Award. Both “Storm Riders” and “The Sky Fisherman” were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Lesley has received several national fellowships and holds a Doctorate of Humane Letters from Whitman College. He is the senior writer-in-residence at Portland State University. He lives with his wife in Portland.