A lifetime in the making: Shell resident publishes book of memoirs

TEN SLEEP – Longtime Shell resident Mary Flitner has achieved what most people dream of, not only writing a book but also getting her book accepted by the first publisher that she sent it to.

Her book "My Ranch Too, a Wyoming Memoir" came out at the beginning of September and is already available in local libraries, book stores and major internet sites.

"It was kind of a hobby for a long time. I kept journals since the 1970s just for the fun of it. It was mostly trivia about the weather and school events and stuff like that. But then gradually I began to think about writing more chapter-like things separate from the journal. Then I started putting together some of these chapters. I didn't know what to do with them. I wrote a few and they were accepted by High Country News and published in those kinds of venues, different places," Flitner said.

Flitner's book took years and years to write mainly because it was just a hobby at first. But after taking some classes Flitner decided that it was time to write a book and worked really hard for three years to get it ready to be submitted to publishers. "I took a couple of classes and that kind of got me motivated to try and put together a whole manuscript, which I did. I worked hard on it for about the last three or so years, worked really hard on it with getting it edited and finding pictures and that kind of stuff. Thinking, OK I have a book in mind, a true book that is cohesive that stays together. Deciding what chapter to put first and what I should leave in and what I should take out. I have crates of material. I could truthfully say I worked on it for 30 years fiddling around just as a hobby," Flitner said.

One of the classes Flitner took taught how to submit manuscripts, Flitner said. The teachers also explained to her that she needed to be prepared for rejection. "I always thought if I can't get a publisher, I'll just go to Staples and have a hundred copies made and I will give that to my kids for Christmas," she said.

Teresa Jordon, one of her teachers, read Flitner's manuscript and suggested that she submit it to a university press such as the University of Nebraska or the University of Oklahoma because of the western flavor, Flitner said. "When I got the thing all ready to submit, I realized that I had met a guy that was working for the University of Oklahoma, so I thought well I will send it there first. All they can do is say no and when I talked to him later that month, he said, 'You know, you'd have to do some work on it but I think we could use this.' So I never got rejected once, which they tell me is very rare," Flitner said. "This is the same press that did John Davis' books too. But his are much more historic then mine. I called him a couple times for advice about this or that and he was very helpful," she added.

"The University of Oklahoma helped me too; they have a nice editorial staff. Although I worked pretty hard on it and I am proud to say that I had all my punctuation right and I had it pretty well done. They had some suggestions about things that I could clarify for people who aren't ranch people," Flitner said.

When asked if people should look forward to a second book Flitner stated that she highly doubted it. She said that she has plenty of material, crates full, but that she felt that another one would just be retelling the same kind of stories. She added that she hopes that this book will resonate with everyone who reads it. "I hope that it's a book that goes beyond just western stories. I think it reaches to a lot of families, whatever life they live. I think if you read it you would probably say the same thing, you'd think well, that's true in my family too and yeah, that's how it feels, that's how it works, that kind of stuff," Flitner said.

Flitner and her husband Stan, whom she married in 1963, are both born and bred Wyomingites. Mary Flitner's great-grandfather came to Wyoming on a cattle drive in the late 1800s and her husband's family came to Wyoming in 1906. After they married she moved from the ranch where she grew up to the ranch where she lives now. Together they raised two sons and two daughters on the ranch and now have nine grandchildren to pass on the family traditions.

To anyone who wants to write a book but doesn't think that they can, Flitner has some advice, "Everyone has a book inside them and it can be done, I'm living proof of that."