Sonja Mongar, MFA

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Due to technical changes in web platforms – my previous website is obsolete and no longer viable. I have shifted to word press which was supposed to be easy but turns out is way more complicated. Please bear with me while I push my learning curve to set up the site. Meanwhile you can contact me at – sonjamongar.author@gmail.com

The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Anais Nin

Take It as It Comes, a Montana Oral History by Olivia Hildahl

“In the face of loss, hardship, and the turbulence of early 20^th century Montana – they persevered.”

Born during the fleeting prosperity of World War I, Dan and Esther both grew up in the harsh realities of Montana’s environmental disasters and economic collapse. Their vivid, sometimes visceral accounts of life in early 20^th century Montana paint a dissonant landscape. But Take It as It Comes is more than an oral history. It is a collective, multi-generational ethnography that offers a vivid and deeply personal lens into the struggles and triumphs of what it means to carve out a decent life despite great odds. Read it as a testament to the resilience of the human spirit and a reminder that history is not just something that happens to nations, or leaders, or the rich and famous; it is lived in the day-to-day mettle of people like Dan and Esther, who take it as it comes. 

Reviews

“A vividly recalled, precisely documented account of one family’s experiences in the early twentieth century and depression-era West, especially in central Montana.” Mary Clearman Blew, Waltzing Montana (Bison Books, 2021)“In Hildahl’s artfully packaged oral history of her family’s remarkable struggle to exist in the primitive reaches of America’s northern plains, we meet life’s most brutal challenges. Threadbare lives stitched together along railroad routes blazed by underpaid workers of all races and creeds. These are stories that ache yet are ablaze with human grit and the redeeming interventions of grace.”  Tim Connor, Spokane writer and author of Beautiful Wounds (Countryman Press, 2022) 

“The author has woven a unified tapestry of recorded oral histories, her own remembrances, photographs and genealogical documents into a structure for the beautiful yet sometimes harrowing narrative. It illustrates the special kind of people who populated the post-frontier rural areas of Montana. A frank, collective surmise that drives living folklore and oral history of all sorts. …a lovely model for any family historian anywhere.” Philip Hiscock, PhD, Department of Folklore (retired) Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada)