Author Talk with Canyon Hohenstein
August 13 @ 6:00pm
Country Bookshelf is excited to welcome local author Canyon Hohenstein, author of the novel Who Tames the Flames, on August 13 at 6pm.
About Who Tames the Flames
Fire has shaped Gully’s entire existence — his father died in the Yellowstone Fires of ’88, leaving behind a heavy legacy. Now, he is once again thrown into the flames, leading a group of criminal outcasts.
Through burnouts, bucket drops, and blistering heat, Gully gets to know the convict crew as the complex individuals they are. But what he doesn’t see is the thread binding this crew and the mysterious shadow surrounding his father’s death.
A wildfire does not just destroy — it reveals. And Gully will painfully discover this shadow was cast by those who used their internal blaze to incinerate another.
About the Author
Canyon Hohenstein was born and raised in Montana, where he spent seven seasons working as a wildland firefighter. The defining moment of his career came when he was assigned to lead a 20-man inmate fire crew — 17 incarcerated men and three prison guards from the Montana State Prison — as they fought to contain a wildfire deep in the Swan Valley.
What began as an assignment became a reckoning. Eight months later, Canyon sat down to look up the crimes of the men he’d worked beside. What he found staggered him. Several were convicted of serious violent crimes. One had a life sentence. And yet, on the fireline, he’d known them as kind, hard-working, and deeply human.
That contradiction — can you admire someone who has done terrible things? — became the engine of Who Tames the Flames? It’s a question Canyon is still answering.
After making the difficult decision to end his firefighting career before it ended him, Canyon turned his focus entirely to writing. He holds a degree in Political Science from the University of Montana, has done HIV testing in Uganda, was mugged in Nairobi, and now splits his time between Belgrade, Montana and Madrid, Spain.
He also publishes “The Burn Scars We Bear “— a newsletter offering dispatches on redemption, endurance, and courage for a burning world.
