[MUSIC] The desolateness of this landscape, it really does have its own incredible beauty.

[MUSIC] The landscape was unforgiving.

It's challenging.

It's life and death.

[MUSIC] He's writing about that heroic face to life.

The moment you come over that hill, it opens up, the sky gets bigger, the expanse grows.

That's the point where I start thinking about all the lines from his books.

[MUSIC] Ivan Doig, a son of sheep herders, born in 1939 rural Montana, is today one of the most celebrated literary voices of the American West.

I have felt that the West has its own riches of storytelling.

He's a great narrator.

He'd like to make his sentences unusually figurative.

There's a lot of austere beauty in the landscape descriptions.

Doig was a best-selling writer and National Book Award nominee.

He's one of the most prolific and influential Montana authors.

He lived here during an impactful time of his own life and an impactful time of change for this area.

[MUSIC] This house of sky, it became this incredible success.

Ivan wrote and rewrote and rewrote.

He wants every sentence to be just right.

His phrasing is very poetic.

There's a whole novel wrapped around this, but there's little pockets of beautiful poetry.

You see his family battling to survive.

He had so much to overcome.

[MUSIC]