Author Lynne Spriggs O’Connor will read from her new book, Elk Love: A Montana Memoir. Books will be available for sale and signing.

Having spent ten summers on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation near Glacier National Park, part of her doctoral fieldwork for a Ph.D. in Native American Art History at Columbia University, 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 has high hopes for what awaits her.

Great Falls, a farming and military town in central Montana, is not what Lynne imagined when she left city life behind. But her dream of being more connected to nature in the American West comes alive when she meets Harrison, a handsome rancher thirteen years her senior. Wary but curious, with her dog Willow by her side, she leans into the seasonal rhythms of his unfamiliar existence. 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.

While conducting research for her Ph.D. in Native American Art History from Columbia University in NYC, Lynn spent ten consecutive summers on northern Montana’s Blackfeet Indian Reservation. After moving to live in Montana, she curated a three-year project called Bison: American Icon, a major permanent exhibit for the C.M. Russell Museum on bison in the Northern Plains. For the past fifteen years, she has lived with her husband on a cattle ranch in an isolated Montana mountain valley east of the Rockies. Her life centers around writing, family, and animals—dogs, horses, and cattle—as well as elk, mountain lions, beavers, bears, and other species in the surrounding National Forest. The ranch’s old-growth grasslands also provide habitat for over ninety bird species. In 2021, O’Connor and her husband partnered with the National Audubon Conservation Ranching Initiative, utilizing regenerative grazing practices to help sustain this increasingly threatened habitat. Elk Love is her first memoir.