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Summary
Summary
This striking array of stories, essays, and poems reflects women's experiences in the American West. Though the tales they tell reflect a variety of viewpoints, these writers share the struggle against the overwhelming isolation brought on by gender and the physical environment. Book jacket.
Author Notes
Kim Barnes, Professor of English at the University of Idaho, lives on Moscow Mountain. She is the author of In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in an Unknown Country, which received the PEN/Jerard Award in 1995 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Hungry for the World
Mary Clearman Blew, also Professor of English at the University of Idaho, is the author of Bone Deep in Landscape, All But the Waltz, Balsamroot, and Lambing Out and Other Stories, all published by the University of Oklahoma Press
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Through poems, essays and stories from 35 contributors, readers can travel into a world of rodeos, saloons, canyons, sagebrush, isolation and wilderness, immersing themselves, like the narrator in editor Blew's piece, ``bone-deep in landscape.'' What Teresa Jordan calls the ``interior'' or ``hidden stories'' of family, loneliness and emotional trial have been largely passed over by traditional male Western storytellers, but this collection offers insight into more intimate epics like Jordan's story of an Indian girl and her father, an ex-convict unable to make a life for himself off the reservation, who teaches her to make her life ``her own.'' The collection starts with Blew's nostalgic blurring of dream and memory but ends with Terry Tempest Williams's ``The Clan of One-Breasted Women'' about a Utah Mormon who discovers that the flash of light she thought was a dream was a real nuclear explosion and breaks with conservative tradition by questioning authority when her mother, both grandmothers and six aunts develop breast cancer. Although there are flawed contributions, this evocative collection with works by Tess Gallagher, Melanie Rae Thon, Anita Endrezze, Gretel Ehrlich, Cyra McFadden and others, coheres in examining Western myths and traditions through the lives of women. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Library Journal Review
The editors have selected short stories, poems, essays, and excerpts from novels that present women's perceptions of the American Rocky Mountain West. These pieces, by writers as diverse as Tess Gallagher, Pam Houston, Gretel Ehrlich, and Deidre McNamer, are powerful, moving, and uniquely expressed. The common themes that thread through this collection include growing up, painful or strained family relationships, love for men and friends, and the West itself-mountains, forests, plains, rivers, horses, cowboys, and coyotes. The women describe the hardships that must be endured to survive the rugged terrain, harsh climate, and loneliness of the West. In their writing, past, present, memories, and dreams are reconciled. Recommended for most collections.-Cheryl L. Conway, Univ. of Arkansas Lib., Fayetteville (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Introduction | p. ix |
"The Sow in the River" | p. 1 |
"Woodcutting on Lost Mountain" | p. 10 |
"The Secret of Cartwheels" | p. 17 |
"Iona Moon" | p. 35 |
"When I Was Ten, at Night" | p. 53 |
"Luck" | p. 54 |
"The Just Rewards" | p. 56 |
"Changing" | p. 58 |
From Housekeeping | p. 62 |
"Rules" | p. 74 |
"Songs Were Horses I Rode" | p. 78 |
"They Keep Their Story" | p. 79 |
"For Mary, on the Snake" | p. 80 |
"Visiting the Hutterites" | p. 83 |
"Scale" | p. 101 |
From "Missing You" | p. 103 |
From the Jailing of Cecelia Capture | p. 108 |
"In the Hellgate Wind" | p. 133 |
"The Difference in Effects of Temperature Depending on Geographical Location East or West of the Continental Divide: a Letter" | p. 135 |
"It's Come to This" | p. 137 |
From the Jump-Off Creek | p. 158 |
"Bones" | p. 168 |
"Leaving Home" | p. 180 |
"What Comes of Winter" | p. 181 |
"At the Stockman Bar, Where the Men Fall in Love, and the Women Just Fall" | p. 183 |
From Rain or Shine: A Family Memoir | p. 186 |
"Entering Smoot, Wyoming Pop. 239" | p. 197 |
"Seasons" | p. 199 |
"Cry" | p. 212 |
"Tracks" | p. 214 |
"The Sawyer's Wife" | p. 215 |
"Fires" | p. 219 |
"In My Next Life" | p. 242 |
"Red Rock Ceremonies" | p. 258 |
"Claiming Lives" | p. 259 |
"Moving Day at the Widow Cain's" | p. 262 |
"Island" | p. 264 |
"The Force of One Voice" | p. 268 |
"Legend in a Small Town" | p. 269 |
From Relative Distances | p. 271 |
"The Other Side of Fire" | p. 278 |
"A Coyote Is Loping Across the Water" | p. 300 |
"The Hunsaker Blood" | p. 315 |
"How I Came West, and Why I Stayed" | p. 326 |
From Rima in the Weeds | p. 341 |
"Circle of Women" | p. 356 |
"Calling the Coyotes in" | p. 358 |
"The Smell of Rain" | p. 359 |
"The Clan of One-Breasted Women" | p. 362 |
"Breathing the Snake" | p. 372 |
Notes on the Contributors | p. 387 |