A Simple Rick Barot Line Prompts Me to Dig Into the Past

29 January 2026

“I open a book I read in college” —Rick Barot, Moving the Bones

There it is. That’s the line.

Thirty seconds later, I’m digging through my bookshelf, pulling up the past. Scanning books I read in college for little left-behind scribbles. Stars in the margins. Sentences underlined and highlighted. Words that once-upon-a-time meant so much. And probably still do.

• My anthology of American Literature (1820–1865) with a painting by Asher Durand on the cover—a bookmark from my college bookstore tucked inside.
• My tiny copy of Catcher in the Rye—with a note from my sister secretly placed somewhere in the middle. “Amber was here.”
• My giant Gary Snyder Reader, which I distinctly remember ordering online—a novel option at the time—and shipping to my college apartment in Durant.

But the book that stands out to me the most from those years is The Man Made of Words by N. Scott Momaday. It was a gift from my creative writing teacher (thank you, Mrs. Cervantes) upon ending my days at Cowley College (the first time) in Arkansas City, Kansas.

It’s a beautiful book, one I believe my teacher believed would resonate with me and inspire.

And she was right.

Turning the pages today, The Man Made of Words is full of my own scribbles and stars, dashes and dots. There’s even an old receipt from the music store in Arkansas City inside, timestamped on my birthday: September 8, 2008 @ 5:32PM.

What was I up to that evening? What was I looking for?

The songs were slowly coming then. The poems. And all the miles of road out west that eventually landed me up here in Montana—they were coming too.

“Even as we look back,” Momaday writes and I’ve underlined, “the partitions of our experience open and close upon each other; disparate realities coalesce into a single, integrated appearance.”

It’s true. My college years have become one enormous collage of music, literature, and friends. 

A time of separate, beautiful moments, to be sure, but in my mind’s eye (a favorite phrase of Momaday), it’s all become one big “integrated appearance” to stare at and remember, place after place, book after book.