‘Is it ok to like a killer?’: Belgrade author finds fiction from firefighting with inmates

15 of the firefighters Hohenstein led were from The Deer Lodge Inmate Fire Crew, a joint wildland firefighting program run by the Montana Department of Corrections and the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. Active from 2002, the voluntary program uses screened state prison inmates alongside DOC and DNRC staff to suppress wildfires, manage fuels and complete community service projects.

Welsch previously interviewed Hohenstein for the Chronicle in late 2025. Hohenstein stopped firefighting after the 2022 season.

“As the editor of the Chronicle, we got all kinds of books that would cross our desk,” Welsch said. “We couldn’t respond to all of them or even most of them, but there was something about this one that really jumped out at me.”

Hohenstein, who applied to be a wildland firefighter while in high school, always had the desire to write but needed material.

A Lincoln firefighting unit called him back. Hohenstein got the job and the inspiration for his breakout book, which took him three years to write.

“Two days after graduating high school, I hit the road on this new adventure,” Hohenstein said. “Wildland firefighting was truly a transformative career for me, it really was a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood, boyhood to manhood.”

“Who Tames the Flames?” follows Hohenstein’s character ‘Gully,’ who left firefighting after trauma. Facing crisis, Gully returns to head a convict firefighting crew.

“Canyon is a big hole in the ground, Gully is a little hole in the ground,” Hohenstein said. “Gully is his own person, his own character. A lot of the issues he deals with, I dealt with. In the story, (Gully’s) dad dies in the Yellowstone fires of 1988. I have no personal experience with that.”

Hohenstein began the book with his main character having suicidal thoughts.

“For me, suicide was the only reality I could begin the story with,” Hohenstein said. “It’s this story about wildland firefighting, but also this story of a young man amid suicidal (thoughts).”

Wildland firefighters experience disproportionately high rates of suicidal ideation, attempts and psychological distress, compared to others in the industry. 35% to 55% of wildland firefighters report current or past suicidal thoughts, according to a 2025 study from the National Institutes of Health National Library of Medicine.

Hohenstein’s boss asking him to lead Montana’s inmate fire crew was a defining moment. Hohenstein initially hesitated on the offer before being persuaded to accept.

“They came out and it was just an explosion of energy,” he said, recalling his first day on the job. “Some of the guys were shadow boxing, others were wrestling each other. They were all saying profanities.”

A prisoner confronted Hohenstein on his second day.

“One of the prisoners tested me, he goes, ‘Man, you were so closed off,’” Hohenstein said. “I was like, ‘Yeah, well you guys are kind of scary.’ He goes, ‘Hell yeah we are.’ As we continued working together, I opened up more.”

Leading the inmate firefighting crew fascinated Hohenstein, who kept a journal. He wrote in it nightly, including on his second day, Aug. 7, 2021:

“Why are these guys in prison?” Hohenstein wrote from his tent at midnight. “When my boss offered me the squad position for the Deer Lodge crew, that’s the first question I wanted the answer to. I’ve only been with these guys for two days now. What am I going to do, walk up to the guy with tears tattooed on his face and say ‘so, ‘Deadpool,' why are you in prison?’”

Eight months after that summer, Hohenstein discovered the men’s crimes. He wrote in his journal: “Is it ok to like a killer?”

"These guys had done some really bad things,” Hohenstein said. “Yet, when I met them (fighting) fire, they were good men. They were the kind of guys that I’d go out and get a beer with. I sat down and said, ‘I’m going to write a book about this.’”

One of the men killed a woman while drunk driving before fleeing the scene. Another was doing time for 50 years.

“I was projecting villainy on these guys before I met them,” Hohenstein said. “I’d never met anyone in prison. I had this negative stereotype. I went there and I was afraid.”

When his team was forced to demobilize and leave the fire area due to a guard catching COVID, an older inmate crew member’s sadness left a lasting impression.

“Once we got the news...this older prisoner, he’s standing by a tree crying,” Hohenstein said. “He wiped away tears and said, ‘Coming out here, it’s an honor for us because prison is such a blow to your ego, your manhood. For us to be out here is an opportunity to prove ourselves.’

We hugged, said goodbye and I haven’t seen him since.”

The older inmate murdered a two-year-old in 2000. He is now in society on parole, according to Hohenstein, who learned of the man’s crimes after the deployment.

“When I met him, I could tell he was a vastly better man,” Hohenstein said, calling the U.S. an “unforgiving” culture. “We look at the one moment where they committed that crime. For them, firefighting was an opportunity to use their incredible strength of mind and body to do something productive...probably for the first time in their lives.”

For Hohenstein, the irony that fire destroys and clears a landscape, allowing it to regenerate, while the incarcerated men fought fires seeking renewal, was too powerful to leave off the page. Nature parallelled the prisoners’ attempts to rebuild themselves.

“Here in Montana, we have trees that literally only reproduce in the presence of wildfires,” Hohenstein said. “They need to be destroyed to be renewed. An ideal prison is where someone would go to destroy the worst parts of themselves so that the best parts have space to grow.”

The literal and historical meaning of the word redemption means ‘buy back.'

“With the prisoners, they’ve redeemed themselves in the sense that they paid back their crime by serving their sentence,” Hohenstein said. “The great injustice is that once they’re released, they’re not redeemed by society. They come back into society and what do we do? We don’t house them, we don’t hire them, and we don’t even look at them.”

Montana’s three-year reincarceration rate, the percent of inmates that go back to prison after incarceration, hovers between 36% and 39% for all released offenders. The national average is approximately 44%, according to the state legislature.

“If someone spends 30 years behind bars, we should welcome them back with open arms,” Hohenstein said. “Especially if they’ve taken courses, they get an education, they’ve worked hard, if they’ve apologized and they accept responsibility for their crimes. If they worked on a fire crew, they should have no problem getting a job, housing.”

The U.S. makes up 4% of the world’s population, but holds approximately 15% to 25% of its prisoners, according to The Sentencing Project, a national non-profit working to end mass incarceration, reduce extreme punishment and address racial and ethnic disparities.

Hohenstein learned leadership and gained confidence by earning the inmates' respect.

“If I ever feel self-doubt, I just remind myself, ‘You led murderers (fighting) a wildfire,” Hohenstein said. “The main currency in prison is respect. These guys have such big egos, and they don’t have a lot going for them. Respect is something that is very difficult to earn and very easy to lose.”

Welsch asked if, at the time, Hohenstein wanted to know about the inmates’ crimes.

“I didn’t want to know because it would have tainted my image of them in that moment,” Hohenstein said. “Had I found out that this older prisoner that I really liked killed a two-year-old while I was leading him, it would have been more difficult to have dinner with him, talk with and lead him. I needed to treat them like firefighters. They were not prisoners with me.”

Of the total inmates Hohenstein worked with, only two of them remain in prison.

“I’d say, ‘Guys, this is for you, this is your story (but) I'd remind them that it’s fiction,” Hohenstein said to laughter from the audience.