Welcome to our series, #WHYoming, brought to you in partnership with Commerce Bank of Wyoming.
We are highlighting people throughout our communities and asking them a few questions. We want to learn a little about them and see why they chose this great state to raise their families, start their businesses, or simply to ask — Why Wyoming?
For this month’s #WHYoming, I had a chance to talk with Barbara Smith, Wyoming Poet Laureate. Barbara taught at Western Wyoming Community College for 38 years and continues to teach a memoir writing workshop for the community. She published her first poetry book, Putting a Name on It, in 2022.
While Barbara was born in North Dakota and spent a large amount of her childhood growing up in Montana, she moved to Rock Springs shortly after her college graduation. And then she never left. For Barbara, after finding passion for her career in Rock Springs, meeting her husband and raising her family here, and finding never-ending inspiration from this community, she knows that this is her place in the world.
Speaking with Barbara for this article was a true joy, and her passion and knowledge can be found in every story she tells. She has endless positivity and she wears a smile through every triumph and adversity. Barbara likes to preface her memories and experiences with, “everything has a story,” and her stories are so entertaining to hear. Sweetwater County is proud to call her our own, and Wyoming is lucky to have her.
Barbara, what has your experience as Wyoming Poet Laureate been like?
Well, ok, everything has a story. You know how you get all these phone calls that are unknown, well I don’t answer a lot of them but I was waiting on somebody and so I got this phone call last fall, and this guy says, “Hi, I’m Mark Gordon.” And I said, “who?” And he said, “I’m Mark Gordon, I’m Governor of the State of Wyoming.” And I’m going, oh my God, you know. And he asked if I would be willing to be the Poet Laureate, since the last one, Gene Gagliano, was retiring. He’d been poet laureate for around eight years.
Earlier in the summer, this Wyoming poet, Tom Spence, had called me and said he was going to submit my book to the state office. And I thought, you know, there’s a lot of writers who have had more books than I have published. This is my only book so far, so I just kind of put it out of my mind.
But anyway, that was quite an honor, you know. The governor looked at everybody’s stuff and I guess he liked my book and picked me.
I’m the only poet laureate from the southwestern part of Wyoming, ever. There’s been eight before me, and they’ve all been in Sheridan, Buffalo, Casper, Cheyenne, and I’m the only one ever picked from over in this part of the state.
So, I told Rachel Clifton, the director of the Wyoming Arts Council, that I didn’t want to be driving to Cheyenne every other week, and she told me it’s a voluntary, honorary kind of position, which means they don’t pay you and therefore they don’t ask you for a whole lot. And I’ve been doing quite a few different things, but it’s sort of on my own what I want to do and what people have asked me to do.
So she took me up my word and did not schedule me for a bunch of stuff, up until February, when it blizzards right at Elk Mountain. That’s when they have the Governor’s Art Awards and the legislature meets. And there’s all kinds of stuff going on in Cheyenne, and the only thing they really want is for the poet to come to the Governor’s Arts Award and read a few things.
So I went there, and I spent several nights, several days doing different things. I went to the legislature and read poetry for both the House and the Senate, and they were fairly receptive. I was kind of surprised, I thought they’d be looking at their watch like, “we have things to do here.” But they kind of liked everything I did. And because I’m the first one from this part of the state, the poems I picked to read to them were about the landscape and the place around here that’s different from the the mountains and the cowboy culture. You know, Rock Springs and Green River have a different history, more of an immigrant, railroading, mining, sheep herding instead of cattle. So the whole history here is a little bit different.
What inspires your writing and what are some of the themes found in your book?
There’s a desire all the way through history for people to put their name on things. Even when you think about the petroglyphs, that’s people writing or drawing. People at Independence Rock, writing their name all over the place, or people putting their stamp on things, saying, “I was here, I’m important.” They’re laying a claim. That’s where the name of the book came from.
I also think you really have a topic for a poem when you come across some unexpected change, or something unexpected happens. Like with the boom and bust in this community, and how people survive rapid, unexpected change. That makes for a good story, a good poem.
One theme I’ve been writing more, because of where I am and my family and my husband and so on, is about aging. In my book there’s a poem in there about how after my parents died my sister and I kept their house. It was up on Flathead Lake, up in Montana, and we would go there in the summer and stay, sort of like a weekend place. But it got to the point where we decided nobody was getting the use of it and it was needing a lot of maintenance, so we needed to sell it. And that all of a sudden brought up the fact, and this is the idea of the poem, that when we sold the house, that was when they really died, right? When we took the pictures off the wall, and so on. And so that moment, that makes for an interesting poem, you know?
Another one is sort of portraits of people. There’s several poems in here that are, well, I guess what you would call character sketches. There’s a poem in here of a woman, slouching down the street and going to the grocery store with a cigarette that has this ash, and it doesn’t get tapped. And so the poem is hinging on the image of all of us waiting for that thing to fall off, and she’s just looking at us. So there’s just that moment, it’s just some image that’s just frozen in a moment. I’ve been thinking about doing another book based on photographs, based on portraits, because what a picture does is it freezes a moment in time, and then you can investigate that a little bit.
Also, southwestern Wyoming. There’s one poem in my book called Flyover Country. I wanted to name the book Flyover Country. You know, the idea that there are all these important things that happen in New York or Los Angeles, and we’re just flyover country. And Rick, who’s my publisher, he never told me no for anything, he just went, “oh, okay, well, let’s look at that.” And he came back and said, “well, there’s about 15 books called Flyover Country.” But that idea, and the idea of a place in the high desert and other people’s perception that this area is desolate, that comes up quite often in my writing.
Then another theme is people coming through here, like in the pioneer times, maybe did not expect to stay here. They were on their way to Oregon, or they were on their way somewhere, and they ended up staying here and finding a home, finding a place. And even now, contemporary people who come here saying, “I’ll be here for a year and make some money and then get back to civilization,” and they end up finding this is their place that they found.
Anyway, these are some themes that show up here and there, and then I think I’m done with these themes and I’ve written all I can about them, and then I get another idea. Or maybe I’m just limiting myself to those ideas, we’ll see.
How did you end up in Rock Springs?
Again, everything has a story. I’m 22 years old, I’m graduating from college—I went to school up in Montana, where I’m from, and then I went to the University of South Dakota because I had a fellowship there, and I went to the place that offered me money. So I just graduated, and I thought, I’m gonna have to find a job, and this was way back in 1969 and community colleges were just really getting to be popular and cranked up in the state of Wyoming.
I went to an English conference in St. Louis, and they had some job boards, actual bulletin boards because this was long before computers and all that, I barely had an electric typewriter in those days, and there was a job for the Rock Springs Wyoming Community College. My fellowship at the time was to work on teaching English to Native Americans at the University of South Dakota, so I was thinking, well, Wyoming has a lot of Native Americans. I should have applied at Riverton, I guess. But anyway, so I applied, and I’m fresh out of college, and I hadn’t heard anything from anybody so I called Bob Snow at Western and told him I had applied for this English job and was wondering if they still had the job and if I was being considered. This was how naive I was.
And what happened was while he was talking to me on the phone he pulled my application out of the slush pile, because there were like a hundred applications, and by the end of the conversation he asked if I wanted to come out for an interview. So I came out here for an interview, and the college was just being built up on the hill. It was the last year they were gonna be out at Reliance. Anyway, I ended up getting the job and when I was hired, there were only three women teachers in the whole system. And I thought, I’ll stay here a couple of years, and 55 years later, I’m still here. Like most people who come here.
You still teach a memoir writing class, right?
I still teach that and it’s gonna start again in October. I started teaching that class in ’76, and I get a lot of stories from the class that end up being in my poems. So they aren’t all just my experiences.
But there was this guy up at the college and he was trying to get some interest in having classes down in the community, like non-credit classes, rather than just classes up on the college hill. So he came to me and asked if I would teach a class at the senior center. And I was thinking, what kind of class, I don’t know how to crochet or anything. But he said a writing class, so it started out as a general creative writing class and I talked all these senior citizens into signing up. We started writing memoirs, and I really loved it.
So whenever there was a opportunity in my schedule I’d teach a memoir writing class, and I tried teaching it down at the senior center. After that first time, I taught it as a credit class because then it was part of my teaching load. This is a very positive relationship that we still have between the college and the senior center.
I always get a good bunch of of people in that class, and I get a lot of college kids in there too, so that’s a nice mix of different generations. I’ve had a 70-year-old and a 90-year-old mother and daughter in the class, which makes it pretty interesting, because they sometimes disagree on what happened in these stories.
As long as people are happy about it, I like teaching that that class.
When did you fall in love with poetry?
I always dabbled around and that’s what it was at the beginning, and then in college I wrote some things but at that point in life I wrote things just for me, poetry that I only understood. I didn’t want other people to know what i was writing about, actually. And then I went to a writing workshop and Marvin Bell, who was a poet from Washington, said something that really resonated with me. And that is, he said, “I became a poet when I came to the point where I wanted other people to understand me. And I wanted it to mean something.” I understood what he meant, where you have a poem and it makes those leaps to communicate, and you want people to read it and understand. Now I try to be understood.
And that’s what’s the fun about doing doing readings. I really like to do readings because I get these reactions from people, sometimes surprising reactions.
And, you know, when you’re in high school or grade school or whatever, poetry sometimes is just old dead white poets. But that’s not what’s going on out there in the poetry world anymore.
What was it like publishing your book?
I’m sort of an undisciplined writer. There’s a lot of male writers who are very disciplined, you know, they get up at five in the morning, and they go to their cross fit, and then they go to their office and they work on poetry every day, and someone keeps the door shut and the kids go to school, and so on. And I’m more sporadic. I get an idea, I have to push the stuff away on the kitchen table and get it written down. When you have five kids all going to school, you’re not going to get up at five in the morning and write all morning. Not when you have a job to do. It was unorganized chaos.
So when I was putting this book together, first of all, the publisher, Rick Kempa, who I worked with for years, he called and told me I needed to get a book put together, which is kind of an unusual way for a publisher to start with. Usually you go to them, right? So, anyway, I got a bunch of poems together, and I sent them off to him.
I thought, that was the end of it. But no, he sent all of them back and I ended up doing some work and getting this thing together. I had to sort them into five sections, and I didn’t think that poems written over 30 years had anything to do with each other. You know, what does something I wrote last year have to do with something I wrote back in the ’70s? But it turned out that was quite an interesting experience, because I started to see groups that work together. And then he made me go through every single poem and work them up and edit them if they needed. That was an interesting learning experience for me.
Digging around, I found in a couple of instances that I had written the same poem, several different times, in different ways. I kept coming back to that tale, that thing.
I’ll think I’m done with poems about the boom and bust, and all of a sudden I get another idea, and now they say, we’re gonna have another boom. I’ve got more material coming.
What do you appreciate most about our community?
Well, I tell you something, people rise to the occasion. You know, you get a bad rap here in Rock Springs. In Montana, the town that gets ragged on all the time is Butte. And Rock Springs and Green River, but mostly Rock Springs, gets this rap about 60 Minutes and prostitutes going up and down K Street, like that’s Rock Springs. And I think that that does not reflect the true nature of people here, the immigrants, the 57 nationalities.
And I wrote a story that’s in my book called, Leaning Into the Wind. That one’s about when I had the twins, I had to have a C-section, and the three oldest kids were just getting out of school that week, and my husband took the week off that I was in the hospital but when I went home he had to go to work on graveyards that night. I got home from the hospital, and I didn’t actually even know which kid was Julie and which was Jason just from looking at them. And I am sitting there wondering, how can I do this all night long? My husband is going be gone. I can’t hardly even get up out of the chair.
We were living in the village at White Mountain, and these two women came to see the babies—one was from Afghanistan and her husband owned Jay’s Restaurant, which is now a car dealership place. She brought me a great, big strawberry pie with whipped cream all over it. And they asked me how I was doing, and I told them I didn’t know how I was going to manage this night with Leonard working and these two babies waking up all night. I hardly knew these women, but after they went home, they came back and said, they talked it over and decided that they were going to take turns staying the night and watching the babies so I could sleep. And they did that for about a week.
I don’t know how I would have managed. Anyway, long story short, that’s an example of how people will rise to the occasion in this community.
You see on Facebook, somebody having cancer and somebody doing a fundraiser for them, or people being more friendly than other people expect. When push comes to shove, the community becomes a community, I think, and people tend to help each other out a little more.
What is something unique about you?
I guess I’m more optimistic than I ought to be, and I try to see the plus in things. I laugh instead of yell about things. You can get pretty pessimistic about things going on, but being more upbeat is more satisfying to me than being cranky.
I’m also pretty shock proof, because when I got married, I ended up with three little kids, and then on my third wedding anniversary, I had twins. So I went from being happy and single to having five kids in a few years, and managed to do it with humor.
What are some of your hobbies?
I grow some things in the summer, despite the fact that I’m not good at it necessarily, I grow some tomatoes and flowers and so on. I like going up to our place up at New Fork Lake. I’m not much of a hiker but I’ll go out and sit around the campfire. I really have always liked going up to Montana to the the the few beautiful places, not that I ever lived in any of the beautiful places, I lived out there in the wheat fields.
And let’s see, I can get hooked on a television series, and I really do a lot of reading. I’m in a book club and being in a book club, you end up reading books other people recommend that you wouldn’t ordinarily read in a million years, and then you like it.
If you could give one brief piece of advice, what would it be?
When things get difficult, especially when they get difficult, you have to just keep on going. And you have to figure out how to sustain yourself and maintain the ability to keep going, even if it doesn’t look like it’s gonna work out. You can’t just fall into despair.
What is one, or a few, of your proudest accomplishments?
I think being considered a good teacher. I got a lot of warm fuzzies from people who said they thought I was a good teacher, that would be one of the the big ones.
And I think raising my kids. Also, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I worked as what was called my grandson’s “coach” when he was home schooled through the State of Wyoming. I didn’t know beans about second grade but for over a year I managed to be his coach for second grade, and he still speaks to me. I was worried about that because what if I had to be mean to him because he’s not behaving, but he was a pretty good little kid.
Where is your favorite place to hang out in Sweetwater County?
The college. There’s so much going on all the time. The library, that’s a favorite. Also, because I teach my class at the senior center, I like it there. There’s a lot of possibilities there for people in my age group. I like the bookstore downtown too. And I like the brew pub.
Our book club meets at Coal Train and it’s always really good, that’s a neat place to hang out. But for activities and for stuff going on, I think the college really has a lot.
If you had all the time and resources necessary, what’s a skill you would want to learn?
Oh, I might like like to learn Spanish. I learned in college that I was not naturally inclined to learn a foreign language. I took French, and my poor French teacher, I think she almost retired because of me. When I couldn’t think of the word, I would just say the English word with a French accent. But learning Spanish is something I always had in the back of my head.
What would you sing at karaoke night?
*Starts singing* Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba-Barbara Ann. Or Jeremiah was a bull frog, what’s that one called? “Joy to the World”. I always threatened that I want “Barbar’ Ann” played at my funeral. Or maybe “Sweet Caroline”.
How would your friends describe you?
I think they would describe me as laughing and fairly happy. Putting on that kind of persona most of the time.
Who would you want to play you in a movie about your life?
Oh, Meryl Streep. Wouldn’t that be something? She would be wonderful, and she looks a little Scandinavian. Oh, that would be funny.
Why do you choose to live in Wyoming?
I unexpectedly found it is home. I feel like it’s my place, and my husband and I have talked about this a lot that there’s a lot of people like this who come here, they don’t expect it, and they end up feeling like this is home.
And when you come from somewhere else, and you’re growing up in a different climate, different place, different people, you don’t expect to come to an alien place but we made it our home. Only a few weeks ago they had the funeral for Charlie Love, who taught at the college, and all of these people came back for his funeral, and they all said, “I really miss being here. I really miss Rock Springs.” And probably because our kids live here, we still stay here, but I don’t know whether we would go anywhere anyway because this has become home over time. Of course, Leonard and I just had our 50th wedding anniversary this summer, I’ve been here over 50 years.
But, because it is home.
This community series is brought to you by our great sponsors at Commerce Bank of Wyoming.
