For Immediate Release

Contact: Chris Cauble, Publisher, Riverbend Publishing

406-449-0200, ccauble@riverbendpublishing.com

85-Year-Old Author Recounts Life on Montana Prairies

Nedra Sterry always wanted to write, but between raising five children and working with her husband on their northern Montana wheat farm, she found it hard to find the time.

It wasn’t until after her husband’s death in 1997, when she herself was in her 80s, that she finally settled down to craft a memoir of her life on the Montana prairies. The resulting story, When the Meadowlark Sings: The Story of a Montana Family, was recently published by Riverbend Publishing of Helena, Montana.

The book, which traces Sterry’s family through the homesteading boom, the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar advancements brought by rural electrification, has garnered high praise from such prize-winning authors as novelist Cai Emmons. Sterry “really knows how to tell a story,” Emmons said about When the Meadowlark Sings. “I realized as I finished reading that I had been holding my breath.”

Born in 1918 in Fort Benton, Montana, the daughter of hailed-out homesteaders, Sterry grew up in a succession of isolated one-room schools in northern and central Montana, where her mother, a teacher, eked out a living.

Sterry credits her mother for her love of stories. “My first memories are of sitting on a quilt in the corner of the schoolroom watching and listening while Mama taught

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phonics on the blackboard,” Sterry recalled. “And in the long winter evenings—after being cooped up with other people’s children all day—our mother managed us by doing

what she did best: she read to us. We roamed the caves with Huck and Becky and Tom. We were Riders of the Purple Sage. She read to us by the light of the setting sun. She read to us by firelight. When we ran out of kerosene she made a lamp out of a potato cut in half. It had a wick drawn through it, and it sat in a bowl of oil.”

Clear-eyed and decidedly unsentimental, Sterry does not gloss over the toll disease and poverty took on her family. Despite—or perhaps because of—the hardships of her childhood, Sterry learned young to take pleasure where she found it and her book is graced with memories of porcupine hunts, Saturday night dances, well-told stories, and the meadowlark’s song.

“Nedra Sterry’s experiences seem remarkable to the modern reader but as tough as her life was, it was actually fairly typical for many Montana families at the time. What is very unusual is Nedra’s ability to take the reader into her memories,” Chris Cauble, of Riverbend Publishing said. “I was attracted by the stories she had to tell and, especially, by her exceptional ability to tell them.”

David McCumber, author of The Cowboy Way: Seasons of a Montana Ranch, agrees, noting that “When the Meadowlark Sings should take its place among the very best Montana memoirs."

The 232-page book is available for $12.95 in bookstores across Montana and directly from the publisher by calling toll-free 1-866-787-2363.

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