Last Of The Dogmen Movie

UW teacher wins fellowship and awards for book

CASPER — Author Brad Watson once wrote a story about his widowed neighbor, only he didn't know her. She just seemed like she had a story, so he made one up.

He's a fiction writer, after all.

He wove a tale of her bittersweet marriage and her husband's early death.

By the time he finished he had learned more about her and felt odd publishing a story, even fictional, about her life without her knowing. So he asked her to read it.

She did and laughed. He was way off base, she had the happiest marriage in the world.But she does not care if he published the tragic love story based on his fictional life.

Watson, author of three books and an associate professor of English at the University of Wyoming, sometimes uses the people he has known in his stories, even if the connection is loose.

"One day, I can not base a character on a breeder I watched recently in jury selection, even though I was only with him for 30 minutes," he said.

He recently received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship after publishing "Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives" in 2010, and was a finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award, the largest peer-juried fiction award.

Watson, 55, grew up in Meridian, Miss. At 17 he made a pilgrimage to Hollywood, determined to be a famous actor.

"I turned out to be too small to be a jock so I had to switch to something else," he said.

As many of these stories go, instead of starring in the next blockbuster, or even a commercial, Watson worked as a garbage man for nearly a year.

A family death brought him back home to Mississippi. He'd lost interest by then, anyway.

He went to community college and took a southern literature class. There he read Southern greats like William Faulker, Robert Penn Warren and Flannery O'Connor. They inspired him to read more and try writing.

Watson went to graduate school at the University of Alabama and sent stories to any magazine he could. Some were published and some weren't.

In 1996, after a writing hiatus and a crushing rejection letter from a publishing house, Watson answered a call from and editor at W.W. Norton & Company. The editor also sat on a board for the magazine "Story" where he'd published a story already.

She wanted a book and a novel to follow. They published "Last Days of the Dog-Men" and his only novel, "Heaven of Mercury."

The first is not to be confused with "Last of the Dogmen," a movie with Tom Berenger about an American Indian tribe. Watson still hasn't made it to Hollywood.

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