Wednesday Western: SJ Dahlstrom

Wilder Good

Crowds shuffled through Arlington, a city of roller coasters and stadiums. The jumbotron declared that the temperature was nearing triple digits. It was June, after all, when Texas heat tightens its grip on the air.

Novelist/poet Nathan Dahlstrom and his son had driven here from Lubbock. Over the course of their five-hour trek, they played John Wayne DVDs on repeat.

And I drove from Oklahoma with my 4-year-old daughter, who was giddy on her first road trip.

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We met at Globe Life Field, where the Texas Rangers faced the New York Mets. Neither of our kids had been to an MLB game before. What a distinctly American rite of passage.

This convergence of fathers had all the markings of Nathan’s Western-tinged fiction and poetry, composed under the pen name S.J. Dahlstrom.

In an era when libraries have allowed the creep of ideology to spoil words and undermine literacy, Nathan delivers characters and scenes with backbone. He tells stories the way people used to, before popular art and literature fell to political whimsy.

Nathan’s books feature wise mentors who transform weak adults into protectors so that they can lead their children to wisdom. Strong families, sworn to unity.

Nathan is devoted to this upbuilding, where love is a matter of construction. He employs this in many ways, right down to his guidance as a creative writing teacher.

But here I am straying from his clearest advice: Don’t try to produce a message. Just tell the story, and maybe a message will appear.

Range life

The Rangers average 30,000 spectators at home games. There was a bright excitement to the atmosphere. Less than a year ago, the Rangers won their first World Series, finally able to hoist the Commissioner's Trophy.

The closed roof of the ballpark intensified the feeling that we — thousands of us waiting for fireworks — were as small and frantic as ants, color-coded and primitive. Bursts of high-intensity songs blasted out at random. Fans shrieked at cheerleaders with T-shirt cannons. It was a disorienting but electric setting for a pre-interview.

Nathan wore his trademark cowboy hat, a long-sleeve Wrangler pearl-snap, and cargo shorts. We lifted our hands to our hearts for the national anthem, and our kids followed our example.

The next morning, we would sit down for an interview at Mercury Studios, home of Blaze Media.

Nathan and I had originally planned to meet months earlier, in Oklahoma City, for the Western Heritage Awards, where Nathan won a Wrangler award, his fourth.

But a nasty virus struck the Ryan household, and I had to cancel my trip.

Nathan sent me a few updates from the ceremony and dinner, including pictures with John Wayne’s children.

We got along immediately, with a shared love for the 1962 John Wayne-Jimmy Stewart film "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." Coincidentally, that week, it was the feature Wednesday Western.

Without ever saying it, we also share a love for the writing of 19th-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, the first existentialist, who was a Christian, meaning that the basis of existentialism, a supposedly atheistic philosophy, is in fact centered on Christ.

In fact, Kierkegaard was alarmed by claims about the decline of Christianity. He wrote, “In the midst of the self-importance of the contemporary generation there is revealed a sense of despair over being human.” Kierkegaard describes reality as a tool God uses to teach us, guided only by His presence.

Be wilder

Nathan crafts lean stories that are carefully flowered with philosophy and grit. Reading them feels smooth, like floating down a river. They thrive with Hemingway’s deceptive minimalism.

It’s so easy to zip through a chapter, to land on a closing sentence that grips you. He weaves scenes full of emotion and upheaval and beauty and love, always cinematic. His characters might seem unremarkable in a market saturated with bizarre fantasy and surreptitious politics. But these sacred nobodies understand the fragility of life.

It’s only a matter of time before some wild creative turns the series into a TV show or movie. I believe that it would be a phenomenal hit. The Wall Street Journal included Nathan’s work on a list of children's books featuring "grit, audacity, and imagination."

Wilder Good is a 12-year-old boy with two married parents and a sister. Nathan modeled Wilder Good on himself, drawing from his own childhood. He grew up on a small ranch, surrounded by miles of unbroken nature, his private frontier. He learned to become a cowboy. His family attended a Church of Christ three times a week.

Compare this to Disney’s prolific use of characters without families. A whopping 30 Disney movies include variations of dead parents, roughly half of the company’s 62 animated films. Alongside animal sidekicks, dead or missing parents are quite possibly the most prevailing theme in Disney movies.

Why? If it’s merely a literary device or an irremovable part of the Disney formula, then it’s bad writing. Pure laziness.

But what if it’s more? As a cultural journalist, it intrigues me. As a writer, it annoys me. As an armchair philosopher, it fascinates or bores me — I can’t decide. As a parent, as a father, it riles me up with a special indignation.

Nathan offers an escape from Disney’s bizarre mythology. As Wilder’s mother tells him in "Texas Grit," while discussing her cancer treatment, “Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and get mad and hold on.”

Wilder Good is a hunter who loves riding horses and exploring the wild. As a result, we see the emotional complexity of the hunter who shoots Bambi.

The Wilder Good series opens with "The Elk Hunt," Wilder’s chance to use his grandpa’s 270 Winchester rifle. The book was a finalist for the 2016 Lamplighter Triple Crown Awards.

"Texas Grit" followed, winning the 2015 Will Rogers Gold Medallion Award for Young Readers. In it, Wilder gains even greater emotional depth, a strengthening of his resilience. You can see Nathan stretching out a little as he tells the story.

The downpour of awards began with his fourth volume, "The Green Colt," which garnered Nathan’s first Wrangler Award and his second Will Rogers Gold Medallion Award, as well as two finalist honors.

Nathan opens the book with an extended soliloquy, an almost stream-of-consciousness monologue by Papa Milam, Wilder’s grandpa. It’s longer than the previous Wilder Good novels, marking a shift in Nathan’s style and process, an advance in his creative play.

"Black Rock Brothers," the fifth, earned him a Will Rogers Silver Medallion Award. With his sixth, "Silverbelly," he was back to Gold. "Black Rock Brothers" also started his three-year streak of winning the Wrangler Award.

The seventh, "Cow Boyhood," also earned him another Will Rogers Silver Medallion Award.

His most recent Wrangler Award-winning book, "Heartwood Mountain," marks the eighth installment in his Wilder Good series. By now, Wilder Good is minted, heroic. Nathan doesn’t even begin the book with Wilder, in an adventurous approach.

Paramount

A former Paramount hub, Mercury Studios is the largest TV and film studio in Middle America.

It's the site for scenes in "JFK," "Walker, Texas Ranger," "Talk Radio," "Leap of Faith," "Prison Break," and — my favorite — the children’s show "Barney & Friends" — one of Barney’s beloved tree-mendous trees slumps outside Stage 19. It also served as the platform for music videos by an array of artists, including Garth Brooks, Phil Collins, Guns N’ Roses, and the Backstreet Boys.

Nathan and I chatted on one of the many couches in the 75-foot-ceilinged hallway.

We discussed the importance of creating redemptive and edifying but most of all entertaining children's literature, the influence of the Bible on personal lives and literary works, and the craft of writing. We shared our experiences and insights on mentorship, storytelling, and living a meaningful life. We discussed the role of leadership and governance in society, as seen in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," and the ability of the Western genre to explore the concept of the ideal man.

We lauded the fruits of creativity, hard work, and living life fully in the pursuit of success and personal growth.We pondered masculinity, discernment, order through wildness, and even kung-fu wisdom.

The searchers

Nathan grasps an ancient ritual of elders who mentor the youth. It’s one of the most unwavering themes throughout his work, often performed by the wise old man who guides boys to manhood and men to humility.

In Nathan’s case, this mentorship was also creative and professional. His friendship with John R. Erickson, author of the “Hank the Cowdog” series, launched him into a writing career. John Erickson taught Nathan how to use his gift, although first he had to find it. Nathan has done the same in turn, many times over.

He co-founded Whetstone Boys Ranch, a boys' home and boarding school that offers therapeutic ranching to troubled young men.

But this quality is also evinced with his own son, a wonderful, sharp young man who gives me hope for the future of our nation. It was cool to see their connection. They have a special bond, as if they can understand one another in a million unspoken ways. They could just as easily be the father and son from Cormac McCarthy’s "The Road," navigating a post-apocalyptic hellscape, always with a sense of continuity.

Nathan loves Teddy Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, and John Wayne, but most of all, he loves Christ Jesus. This is the height of manliness.

There are plenty of nonsensical rules in society. One of them is that creatives stand on one side of the battlefield and frontiersmen on the other. Nathan Dahlstrom upends this paradigm. Because the reality is quite the opposite: If a man can fight — and he ought to know how — he certainly better know how to speak, how to translate his emotions, how to be gentle, how to be kind, and how to honor women without degrading his masculinity.

Then there’s the gentleness of fatherhood, an experience that requires a man to be tender. But other times, a father must be a brute. A man has to bleed.

In one poem, Nathan describes “the glory of men talking low” as they wait for a hunt. You can hear that silence.

He likes to say that he’s “interested in all things outdoors and creative, he writes poetry while bowhunting and collects wildflower seeds when doing ranch work.” That description is fantastic. It should be a common goal among men, balancing nature with art.

He lives by the twin mottos "be Wilder" and "find beauty."

“Whetstones: 40 Manly Poems” is a chapbook themed around masculinity, although he certainly doesn’t exclude the role of girls and women.

Some of it is written using couplets or quatrains, with the formal rhyme schemes of ballads and sonnets. There’s also free verse, gorgeous lines like, “We held our cowboy hats to our bellies / as the wind stirred / the fall-yellowed cottonwoods / in the canyon below us.”

He writes, “Only hidden beauty is true.”

When creating their art, writers, poets, and musicians all must decide: Will my music conform to truth? Or does my truth conform to music? Most take the latter. It’s far easier. Great music arrives unexpectedly. It is forever passing through. Truth, however, does not bend so easily. It’s rigorous and unchanging.

Before having children, I saw life in abstractions, colors, melodies, poems. But then my kids changed everything into poetry. I used to understand only the potential of life. Now I see the endlessness of love.

The Ranch

It’s a joke at Mercury Studios: If someone’s in town, you take them to the Ranch, the finest steakhouse near the Blaze Media headquarters. Some of my colleagues groan at the mention of it. But not me. The cowboy ribeye and meat and cheese platter alone are worth any wait.

So naturally, we all went to the Ranch after our interview. My dad, my sister, my daughter, Nathan, and his son. My only regret is that we didn’t record the conversation. It centered largely on truth.

Nathan values authenticity. A real man, an authentic man, is both rough and gentle. An outdoorsman. A hunter. But equally a lyricist and a gardener.

Nathan is well educated, with a major in Bible studies and a minor in Greek. He’s incredibly well read. Yet he urges young folks to reject the absolutism of a college degree. An education can only have a heart if you also pursue the wildness of life and the order of nature. This theme courses through Nathan’s work: A rich education too often leads to pride; humility is better than credentials from the most impressive universities.

As the waiter began pulling plates from the table, Nathan quietly announced that one or all of us had to finish the meat. (No problem.) There’s something violent about tossing meat into the trash.

Nathan often explores this sacred connection to God’s lower creations. His first novel, "The Elk Hunt," contains vivid scenes driven by this tension. He applies a brokenhearted philosophy to the examination in his poem, “Watching a Deer Get Killed.”

In another, he describes cats with a funny disdain, “Something about their smell / and blasé nonchalance / doesn't seem American / seems arrogant without achievement. / Seems French.”

Humor aside, his reverence for animals is constant.

The truth of nature isn’t growth or motion; it’s self-preservation, followed by the hope of redemption. Life always fights to survive, or at least to have had a chance.

Wilder Good captures all of this, without guttering into condescension. He intuits the still sad music of humanity reflected in nature. Then there’s what nature does to herself, her red-clawed destruction, only, in the next breath, to sigh to us with a breeze. As Dante writes, we are calmed by “the bond of love that nature makes.”

The paradox doesn’t end.

Wilder Good is at peace in nature. But he also understands the painful realities of hunting. Killing is unnatural. Yet life can’t function without it. Look at Genesis 3:21: God provides Adam and Eve with clothing … made of animal hide, of skin. In order to survive, we have to continually destroy other creatures’ chance at survival. But this is not as bleak as it sounds.

In "Texas Grit," as Wilder crosses through untouched nature, he muses, “The world seemed as fresh and raw as it must have been at the beginning.”