By Michael B. Riley
Book Information
• $20.00 paperback
• 282 pages, 5.5×8.5 in
• Published December 2024
• ISBN: 978-1-7334897-6-8
• Subject: Personal Memoirs, Western Essays, Montana
The Bat House, A Montana Memoir centers on Riley’s renovation of a 1917 farmhouse which he discovered was the maternal roosting space for little brown bats. Fifteen miles from where Riley was raised along the Yellowstone River in Montana, the two-story brick house is an icon in the county. Built by oil drillers where only a buffalo hunter’s cabin had been, it stood as a mansion close to the Milwaukee Railroad and a few hundred yards from the river. The memoir charts its changing environment as well as the author’s journey from loathing bats, fearing them, and wanting to eradicate them, to accepting and honoring them.
Four narrative threads weave through the memoir’s fifteen years in a vignette like structure: the challenging life of renovation, a professional life 200 miles away in Wyoming, family life, and the life of memories growing up in eastern Montana.
The book reveals the emotional trials of dealing with financial stress, his wife’s cancer diagnosis, drought and flood, resolving a violent addictive past, and loss of venerable history. Revelation arrives through learning the crucial role of bats in our ecosystem and the unexpected benefits of practicing yoga.
About the Author
Mike Riley grew up along the Yellowstone River in eastern Montana. He taught English and Journalism at Montana State Prison, Cody High School, the Texas School for the Deaf, Blackfeet Community College, on Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, the University of Montana, and Northwest College, and received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Journalism Education Association before retiring in Cody, Wyoming. He has an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Montana where he won the TransAtlantic Henfield Award for short fiction and fellowships from the Montana Arts Council and the Wyoming Arts Council, serving as writer in residence for both. He is at work on collections of essays and poetry, as well as a historical novel set in first century Rome.
Reviews:
“Riley’s generous and elegant memoir of marriage and house-holding is ceaselessly instructive and unflinchingly celebratory of both. Read it. Then give it to someone you love.”
— Richard Ford
“When Michael Riley bought a 1917 farmhouse on the Yellowstone River fifteen miles from where he grew up, he had no idea what he was getting into. Much of what was in store for him wasn’t exactly “a delight,” including the presence of an enormous bat colony and decades of guano. But luckily for readers, his memoir that chronicles reclaiming the house, evicting the bats, and contemplating the life that had led him to this post-retirement purchase is absolutely a delight. While he deftly uses his bat nemesis as a central axis to this moving memoir, the book is a love story about a forty-plus year marriage to a remarkable woman, about decades of teaching inspiring (and challenging) students, about rivers and mountains and dogs and poker, about sobriety and acceptance, and yes, even about a love affair—of sorts—with bats.
Written in sharp, smart, precise prose that is charming and genuine even in the moments when Riley is gruff, skeptical, or philosophical, he proves exactly the sort of friend you wish you deserved, the teacher you wish you had, and the writer who you wish could accompany you everywhere. The Bat House swoops and dives with grace through beauty, despair, and wonder, and readers will find themselves as plagued by the changing world and their place in it just as Riley is plagued by bats and lifted by memories.”
— Mark Hummel, author of Man, Underground
“In a time when things seem to be falling apart everywhere, this story of restoration is a gift: stunning in its prose, surprising in its turns, and reassuring in its affirmation of the human spirit. Many of the great themes of the American West are at play here — man against the wild, man against man, and man against himself; killing and nurture, numbness and vulnerability, isolation and connection. I was stunned time and again by Riley’s tender exploration of what it takes to heal both heart and hearth.”
— Teresa Jordan, Buddhist chaplain and author of Riding the White Horse Home
“The Bat House shines a golden wisdom throughout Riley's touching memoir. He expresses the heart of humanity and what a life well-lived feels like, one of courage, vigor, and wrenching pain of a broken childhood, and how he overcomes depths of sorrow by returning to the town of his upbringing into a home infested with bats, where he goes to war. The key to unlocking his discovery of his own light comes from a surprising source: Yoga. Everything opens once yoga allows space for healing, more sunshine, and even bats! A lovely tale within tales, of how yoga can heal all of humanity, as we lean into all experiences with trust, weaving a life with clarity.”
— Rachel Cieslewicz, Centered City Yoga owner in Salt Lake City