Matt Pavelich

in conversation with
Nick Pavelich and Riley Pavelich

Saturday, February 21, 2:00 p.m.
Lewis & Clark Library, Helena, MT

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Join the Lewis & Clark Library Foundation as we celebrate the writing journey of novelist/short story writer Matt Pavelich. He will be joined by his adult children, Nick Pavelich and Riley Pavelich, in a lively conversation of mutual discovery and remembering the places, events, and experiences that have shaped Pavelich’s three-decade writing career.

The presentation will be followed by a brief reception and book signing.  Copies of Pavelich’s books will be for sale by Bedrock Books. All events at Lewis & Clark Library are free and open to the public.

Pavelich is the writer of seven books, two of which were published just last year by Bar R Books. 

The Harrows: A Novel of the American Century, Pavelich’s third novel after Our Savage and The Other Shoe, begins at the start of the 20th century with Charlie Harrow, erstwhile freighter, and his beloved Dove, schoolmarm and homesteader in her own right, establishing the family farm on Montana’s fabled Square Butte Bench, a “place of taunting, receding horizons.” The novel ends at the same place, with the return of a great-granddaughter intent, unaccountably, on continuing the family operation.

His second book published in 2025 is titled after the classic Emily Dickinson line, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Tell all the truth but Tell It Slant – Fierce Fictions consists of nine short stories and the title novella. As in Pavelich’s previous story collection, Survivors Said, the fictions in But Tell It Slant are, in the words of novelist Gish Gen, “vintage Pavelich; sharp-sighted and phrased just so, they are singularly alert to the worlds in a word.”

Helena writer/publisher Aaron Parrett writes, “From the moment he first appeared on the literary horizon with his Montana Book Award-winning story collection, Beasts of the Forest, Beasts of the Field in 1989, Pavelich has distinguished himself as a master of the form, penning story after story (and a few novels along the way) to remind discriminating readers what honest, organic wordsmithing looks like.”

In a recent issue of Big Sky Journal, Marc Beaudin writes: “Matt Pavelich has done something wondrous in The Harrows: A Novel of the American Century. This five-generation story of the Harrow family rolls off the pages with such liquid grace and poetic clarity that one feels a new Montana classic has just been penned, one fitting a list shared by A.B. Guthrie Jr.’s The Big Sky, Debra Magpie Earling’s Perma Red, and Ivan Doig’s This House of Sky.”  Excerpt from BSJ, Winter 2025, Marc Beaudin.

Prior to the books released in 2025, Pavelich published two novels and two collections of short stories: Beasts of the Forest, Beasts of the Field: Stories (Owl Creek Press, 1990), Our Savage: A Novel (Counterpoint Press, 2005), The Other Shoe: A Novel (Counterpoint Press, 2012), and Survivors Said: Stories (Drumlummon Institute, 2015). 

Pavelich also wrote a 36-page, limited edition, letterpress-printed work of fiction titled Himself, Adrift: An Account of the Mysterious Disappearance of Thomas Francis Meagher, illustrated with photo-collages by Peter Rutledge Koch. This was a collaborative publication of The Territorial Press based in Helena and Peter Koch Printers in Berkeley, 2015).​​​