Last week I got a coveted phone call informing me that I won the Ellen Meloy Fund’s 2023 Desert Writers Award—a major award for desert writers—for the very project this query letter will present to you. So fresh it’s not yet publicized, soon I can yodel this news from the desert to the plains; meanwhile, I’m sending the query.

I sent it on a Saturday, because I write, or work on writing projects (marketing, queries, proposals), every day possible, and days of the week don’t matter. A Saturday query might get read the following Monday, or sometime in the weeks afterward. I may get a response sometime in the weeks after, or never. In the world of publishing, never means no. The other answers, Please send the full proposal, or, Please send the complete manuscript, are rare, and often followed by months of waiting for a response to that send. It’s just the way things work. 

The Monday following my sending of the query for The Last Cows, on my way to picking up Mark Meloy in Bluff to give him a ride to the Cortez airport, I stopped to get fuel. My cell phone rang as the pump pumped and I glanced at the screen, ready to decline one of those invasive calls asking for donations. But the screen said Montana. Curious, because Montana has brought me good things in the past, I answered.

“This is . . . ” and he said his name, “editor of Bison Books at University of Nebraska Press.” He’d read my query.

“Oh,” I said. “But, editors don’t call people,” contrary to the evidence at hand.

“We do,” he said. “I would have called yesterday [on a Sunday!] but I was refinishing my canoe and got sidetracked.”

“Understandable. Rivers come first,” I said, or something equally inept. 

As I replaced the nozzle, got in my pickup, and drove to a parking space a few feet away—without hitting anybody or anything despite the trance I found myself in—he explained that my book idea sounded like a perfect fit for Bison Books, and how a university press works, and what I needed to do next, if I was interested in pursuing this potential relationship.

Fuck yes, I thought, and hope I didn’t say. Unable to get past the shock of receiving a call from an editor, let alone the Executive Editor, let alone less than forty-eight hours after sending a query, I must have continued to sound incoherent, and left the conversation promising to send something he asked for, hoping I would remember what it was. Before resuming the drive, I called my mother, breathlessly recounting what had just happened, she at least as thrilled as I. As I drove through a spectacular redrock canyon into Utah, I barely noticed the shapes and colors of stone, or the surprise of green grass, or even the road. I couldn’t wait to tell Mark.

“Do you think winning the award has anything to do with this?” he asked. He has been a big supporter of my writing, as Ellen was, and has listened patiently to my angst after each year’s rejection. I think he was as relieved as my sister and mother when I finally won it.

“I’m sure of it,” I said, telling him how my query letter led with the win. The endorsement of the Ellen Meloy award, even before the book is finished, is HUGE.

Things kept tumbling ahead like rocks in the many slides this year due to all our snow—loosened by the top stone of the Ellen Meloy award, which bumped into Bison Books, I am now under contract with Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press, and the chapters are plummeting down the slope. This is a poor metaphor as what lies at the bottom of a rockslide is a bunch of rubble, yet maybe that’s appropriate as I do have to pick up the chapters, clean them off, clear away the debris, integrate the detritus, and make an orderly pile. For now, let the words tumble!