Graham Beer read from his book ‘Cabin Whispers’ on Thursday at Fort Macleod Library.
As a young boy in his native England, Graham Beer didn’t dream of being a cowboy.
But it was a cowboy’s life that he lived after, at the age of 14, he immigrated to Canada with his family to live on a farm in Saskatchewan.
Now Beer has published Cabin Whispers, a collection of poems and stories he wrote based on his experiences as a cowboy.
“A lot of the stories are based on facts, through things that I experienced with colleagues, family and work, and some of them are just inspired by pictures,” Beer said.
Beer was at Fort Macleod Library to read from Cabin Whispers, which he wrote under the pen name Greyin Cowboy, and talk about his unexpected career path as a cowboy.
Beer spent the first six years of his life in Canada on the family farm in Saskatchewan before he came to Alberta at the age of 20 and got a job driving truck for a feedlot.
Later, Beer was put to work in the feedlot where he was shown the ropes by the older cowboys.
“I really got to enjoy cowboying, and over the years I got some ranch experience, Beer said. “I trained horses — I had my own training business — and really got into the cowboy thing and grew to love it.”
Beer’s first story was about his boss, poking fun at the way she lost her temper but admitting in the end it was because she had to work with the likes of him.
“So then I wrote a couple more for the guys at work and one day this guy, he was 72 at the time and still riding, still cowboying . . . comes up to me and grabs me by the shoulder and says, ‘You should write a book because you ain’t much good at cowboying’,” Beer recalled. “But he said, ‘No, you ain’t half bad at both,’ and that kind of planted the seed in my mind to write a book.”
The poems cover a wide range of western topics, including buying horses, cow dogs, cowboy gear, horses, auctions, farm and ranch wives, and of course, cowboys.
Beer talked about his writing process, explaining some of his stories take just 10 minutes to get down on paper, while others can take months.
Once, a good friend asked Beer to write a poem about another man who was ill and wasn’t expected to live very long.
The friend supplied Beer with a few details about the dying man and he set to work.
“Within an hour, I sent it back to him,” Beer said. “Within a few hours of his wife and family getting the poem, he passed away and they were talking about reading it at his funeral.”
Beer cowboyed for about a quarter of a century in the feedlots near Picture Butte, where he now lives.
Beer had a selection of about 70 poems from which to choose, and he selected 42 that he thought were best at that time.
“Now, in my estimation, I have better ones that aren’t in the book,” Beer said.
Those poems could make it into the next book Beer is considering publishing.
Each poem in Cabin Whispers is illustrated with a picture, some of which provided the inspiration for Beer’s writing.
Response to Cabin Whispers has been strong, with people praising the writing and even earning Beer an invitation to visit an Amish community in Minnesota where one fan lives.
Cabin Whispers is available at the Fort Macleod Allied Arts studio at Greenery On Main, and through Amazon.
