June 30, 2012 -- Pictures from western North Dakota and eastern Montana's particularly lonely stretch of U.S. Route 12, an east-west corridor whose railroading and homesteading history is masterfully chronicled in Jonathan Raban's Bad Land: An American Romance(1997).
June 29, 2012 -- An auto shop in Lemmon, South Dakota, echoes the prayers of residents across the fire-ravaged Mountain West, including the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, just over the Montana state line, where crews struggled against heavy winds and a blaze just 5 percent contained on Friday.
June 28, 2012 -- The noonday colors at Feather on Head Cemetery and a nearby tipi on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, or Wazí Aháŋhaŋ Oyáŋke, in western South Dakota.
June 15, 2012 -- Juliet's Promise, a fourth generation descendant of Secretariat, wins Race 7 and RBM $10 on an unremarkable Friday at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky. The story of six furlongs, as told upstairs:
RBM delivered a reading and talk on "Transmigration and the Fictional Essay"—adapted from his creative dissertation, The Land of Infinite Variety, a collection of linked prose—at the 55th annual conference of the Western Literature Association in 2020. One of the collection's stories received the WLA's creative writing award the same year.
The Society of Professional Journalists Western Washington chapter named RBM its 2019 Journalism Educator of the Year. He and other honorees delivered remarks at the Northwest Excellence in Journalism Awards Party in Seattle.
Having concluded his doctoral work at the University of South Dakota, RBM no longer edits nonfiction for South Dakota Review, but remains a superfan. Among other fond memories: celebrating SDR's 50th anniversary in Seattle and presenting a panel on creative writing pedagogy with former managing editor Sara Henning at the 2014 AWP Conference: "Teaching Brief, Sudden, Flash, and Very Short Prose."
After teaching in the humanities for more than a decade, RBM currently works as an instructional designer for Oregon State University Ecampus. Along with teaching English at Clark College, he served from 2015-19 as Washington State University Vancouver's first adviser dedicated to student media. He lives in Portland with his partner and their two children.
