Jim Fergus

Books by our favorite writer friend, Jim Fergus

Braised Lamb Shanks Recipe from Jim Fergus

Sage Grouse ala Georgio Recipe from Fergus’s A Hunter’s Road

Writers don’t exist without readers. There is always a special, symbiotic bond between those who put words down on the page, and those who read them. This relationship can be as volatile and complicated as that between lovers or spouses or family members. I seek stories to tell that engage me on some visceral, personal level, hoping that my own passion for them will become yours. I write the kind of books that I like to read — novels that move along briskly, propelled by interesting characters, a sense of adventure, beautiful landscapes and genuine human emotions.  I hope that my most recent novel, The Wild Girl, provides such a reading experience for you. I went to work on it each morning with a sense of excitement, wondering what was going to happen to these people today, people for whom I had come to care deeply. When I wrote the last sentence, I wept for their human frailties and was sorry to leave them. I hope you, the reader, will feel similar emotions.  —Jim Fergus

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Old interview from The Denver Post which we like for flavor:

Outdoors writer Fergus turns to world of fiction

By Bill Husted

Denver Post Staff Writer

Read the review

Nov. 21 – Jim Fergus sits outside a coffee shop on a crisp Colorado morning looking like the outdoorsman he is. He is comfortable in the busy urban setting of Cherry Creek, but one can’t help thinking that he would rather be out hunting with his dog, Sweetzer.

Actually, hunting season is over for Fergus. “These days I’m just writing,” he says.

He lives and writes in Rand, a small town in northern Colorado. “The Sporting Road,” Fergus’ third book, is just out and earning nice notices. He’ll be at the Tattered Cover Cherry Creek at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 30 to read from it and sign it.

Fergus, 49, was raised as a suburbanite outside Chicago. He came to Colorado to go to college in the ’60s and hasn’t strayed too often. Except for that time in Florida.

“I couldn’t figure out a way to make a living as a writer, so I taught tennis at the Jupiter Hilton Inn,” he says, recalling a life that seems a world away. “I retired from that in 1980 and moved to Rand, into a cabin for $75 a month. I had a little grubstake put together, saved up about $8,000, which in 1980 was a good chunk of change. The cabin had no plumbing and an old coal stoker heater. But I’m still there. I bought it three years later when I got married.”

“Hook-and-bullet’ tales

He started writing and selling “hookand-bullet” tales for sporting magazines, stories about fishing and hunting and the outdoor life. He wrote for The Denver Post’s Empire Magazine and for Rocky Mountain Magazine for its short glorious run. In 1990, Fergus published his first book, “A Hunter’s Road,” a chronicle of a five-month trip across America with Sweetzer and a shotgun.

The New York Times reviewed it, speculating that his wife “must be an extraordinarily patient and indulgent woman to have to put up with her husband’s adolescent wandering and maiming of things.” At the time, Fergus took it as an impertinent observation. Now he is just amused by the comment. “It’s funny. It’s just such an urban thing to say.”

For the most part, fans enjoy reading of these excursions. “Everyone who has a regular job is somewhat envious of these adventures,” Fergus explains. “They find the notion to be pretty romantic, to hit the road with your dog and shotgun for five months. And, of course, it is romantic.”

Romantic, but not particularly profitable.

“At best it’s a modest living. At worst, you do work on the side.”

During one “worst” phase, Fergus would truck cypress furniture up from Florida and sell it on street corners in Boulder. It is a time he does not remember with particular fondness.

Proudest moment

Two years ago, Fergus wrote “One Thousand White Women,” a historical novel set in the Great Plains in the 1870s. “It took on a word-of-mouth life and made the local best-seller list,” Fergus says. “My proudest moment as a writer was beating Suzanne Somers for two months in a row.” It was optioned by CBS, where it is under development for a TV movie or miniseries.

Now comes “The Sporting Road,” a collection of adventures, many of which appeared earlier in such publications as Sports Afield and Outdoor Life.

“I think this is my last sporting book for a long time,” he says. “I’ve been doing 30 or so magazine columns and articles a year on bird hunting and fishing, and to be perfectly honest, I’m running out of things to say on the subject.”

But what he writes touches many an armchair sportsman.

“I have always been more interested in the periphery of sport,” Fergus says. “I don’t see sport as goal-oriented. I go bird hunting and don’t find any birds and don’t shoot any birds and I don’t really care. It’s the whole world of sport, the people you encounter, the countryside, the exercise of being out there that fascinates me.”

Explains fascination

Fergus explains this fascination in the introduction to “The Sporting Road”: “The beauty of the natural world, the state of grace offered by hunting and fishing, the pure focus of attention demanded by fish and game birds and dogs, and by the companions with whom we go afield, offers us such clear and uncluttered respite from our ghosts, allows us to lay down our little boxes for awhile and infinitely lighten our souls. Is that not good enough reason in itself to hunt and fish and wander the countryside?”

He wanders no more. These days, Fergus is working on a new novel, spending his time cooped up with a computer in the laundry room at the Rand cabin.

“Being a novelist is totally different,” he says. “There is no romance to it. I find it incredibly hard work – torturous, painful and difficult. The only pleasure I get out of fiction writing is when I am finished with it. I go weeks without talking to anyone. I’m not good company, either. It’s not fun for anyone.”

But then Fergus catches himself.

“I hesitate to complain about the luxury of making a living the way I have,” he says. “I have basically been bird hunting and fishing for the past 20 years. It’s a great life, beyond the fact that I don’t know how to do anything else except write. I can’t imagine anything as rewarding as writing. And as difficult as fiction is and as paltry as the financial rewards are, it’s still a wonderful thing to do.”