Friends of the University Libraries

Silver Pen Award Recipient 2002
Gregory Martin

Author of Mountain City, North Point Press, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Graduate of University of Virginia, B.A., philosophy; University of Arizona, M.F.A, creative nonfiction.

Assistant professor in creative writing, University of New Mexico; faculty member of Taos Summer Writer’s Conference; writer.
 

Not so long ago, a young writer – a yet-to-be-named Silver Pen Award honoree – sat down to write about a place called Mountain City.

“Mountain City is one mile long, limit to limit,” Gregory Martin wrote, describing the tiny community, north of Elko, which has all of seven buildings. The Forest Service, the Miner’s Club, post office, steakhouse, motel, gas station and Tremewan’s Store. “Thirtythree people live in Mountain City,” Martin noted. “I come and go, but when I’m here that makes thirty-four.”

Martin’s insightful book, Mountain City, is a mosaic of personal memories, tributes to his Basque family who helped settle the area in the1860s, and a historical record of a vanishing place. Within the first pages of Martin’s debut memoir, you meet his grandfather and grandmother, his uncle Mel and aunt Lou. Soon you get familiar (and fall in love) with the rest of the town. Martin solidly nailed the Silver Pen Award with this book, beautifully written in spare, clean language.

No need to tell you the 31-year-old author feels highly honored.

“It’s wonderful,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “But there is a bit of irony in getting it: My mom flunked out of the University of Nevada, Reno when she was a sophomore. When she did, she left and went back to Mountain City to work with the Forest Service and in the (Tremewan’s) store.”

(Eventually, Dolores Martin returned to UNR for her undergraduate and graduate studies. Now she is the business school dean at Eastern Washington University.)

“I thought of all that when I got the news of my award,” said Martin.

Martin’s parents will be at the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame reception. So will his uncle and aunt, Mel and Louise Basanez, who, along with the general store they inherited from Martin’s grandfather, are prominent personalities in his book.

It was in Tremewan’s Store that Martin recognized the seeds of a book. He’d just finished college, and having no firm plans for the future, had gone to Mountain City to work in the store. Much of his research took place there. While stocking the shelves, he’d write notes on the back of produce slips and jot down interesting things people would say. His collection of quips, anecdotes, historical facts, and even jokes, is the pulse of the book.

Martin wasn’t born or raised in Mountain City. As he says in his book, “I’ve lived in twenty-one places in twelve states in twenty-seven years.” But he went there often to visit beloved family members, such as his grandmother and grandfather, Oliver and Anastasia Tremewan, and his Aunt Lou and Uncle Mel.

“I wrote my book because I wanted Uncle Mel to read it and like it,” he said. His audience also included Nevadans and western writers he admired, such as Robert Laxalt and Ivan Doig.

Uncle Mel liked it. So did other readers across the nation, who, after reading Mountain City, made pilgrimages to Tremewan’s Store to meet Uncle Mel and Aunt Lou. Eventually, the Tremewans installed a guest book. “It’s filled with hundreds of names,” said Martin.

Life-after-the-book continues in Mountain City, but without the Tremewan’s Store, a 60-plus-year-old landmark. Uncle Mel and Aunt Lou retired, closing it last December. The population, too, has dropped. Now it’s below 30.

Martin’s life has changed, too. He has a full-time job at the University of New Mexico and a 21/2-year-old son named Oliver, and his wife is expecting another child. He’s also working on another book, this time a novel. It is set in a remote stage station, across the border from Mountain City, in Owyhee County, Idaho.