Colorado-based essayist and poet Merrill Gilfillan will not be flying into Bismarck-Mandan for his reading at Bismarck State College at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 19 in the BSC Student Union Missouri Room. He'll be driving. That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has read his books.

His books explore the Great Plains, usually on the back roads, from behind a steering wheel. One can almost feel the plume of dust floating behind Gilfillan's car as drifts between wheat and sunflower fields.

Rolling landscapes along winding prairie rivers anchor his work.

Prairie people will find Gilfillan's observations delightful. Idid when I first discovered him a couple of years ago. Then, like a fervent evangelist, I passed on copies of "Chokecherry Places" and, later, "Rivers & Birds" to friends and fellow book people.

Reading Gilfillan's prose, a person can't help be struck by his use of the language.

"The Souris and its lush life is a pleasure to behold, but today the upland, the mixed-grass prairie, is magnetic. Maybe I have never seen it just right before, in just the right August mix, in full growth and color. I walked out earlier in the hot sun for a quick look. The grassland's proportion and intricacies are wondrous as trees are to children by their very looming and cut of leaf. Then, among the trees, we pressed their various leaves and climbed them and learned them in winter by their postures and their miens. Now it is the same for me with the grasses. To walk out among those tribes, as botanists call them, broaches a new array and enters a new scale to fathom and run."

That is from "Magpie Rising:Sketches from the Great Plain." It describes prairie in the J. Clark Salyer National Wild Life Refuge in North Dakota.

Gilfillan talked by phone from his Boulder, Colo., home last week.

"I wrote nothing but poetry until at least 40 (years old)," Gilfillan said. Until he moved west and began exploring the Plains. Then he "expanded into prose."

That early work in poetry clearly affected Gilfillan's writing style.

Poetry, he says, requires a higher degree of attention to language than does prose. There is a different ration between language and story.

"Some people say my stories are more language than plot," he said.

Gilfillan grew up in Ohio. Where the rivers and landscape are different than the Great Plains, in particulars the amount of space and number of trees. "I get a little claustrophobic in a campsite surrounded by pine. Space and sense of option get deep into your personality."

His nonfiction deals primarily with landscape, and his fiction folds in people and characters. And there's a certain element of solitude. It's a question of attention and concentration, he says.

"I love to travel with people," he said. But if the trip is a matter of "prospecting" for a writing project, then it needs solitude. Gilfillan says he has to be looking for and gathering details, he needs to be focused.

"When writing it's necessary to bear down," Gilfillan says.

Books of prairie essays by Gilfillan include "Magpie Rising" and "Chokecherry Places"; both have won prestigious awards. His short fiction can be found under the title "Grasshopper Falls." His most recent books of poetry are "Undanceable" and "Small Weathers."

Gilfillan works as a freelance editor for publishing houses and presses - he has all his adult life. It allows him certain flexibility.

He said, "Ispend the morning working on my own writing, and then do my wage work in the afternoon."

(Reach Managing Editor Ken Rogers at 250-8250 or ken.rogers@;bismarcktribune.com.)