The nice thing about Kate's short story reading challenge is it gives me the perfect excuse to scan my shelves for books I've owned for ages, but not yet picked up and read (and I have lots of those). It's helped me in a small way break my habit of thinking I can only choose a book I plan on reading from cover to cover, otherwise it needs to remain on the shelves. I can read a story at random, get a taste of the book, and then put it back (or not) on the shelf until later. I decided I needed a little change of pace this weekend, so I chose a story from a collection I bought ages ago, Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers, edited by Kim Barnes and Mary Clearman Blew. Sorry the cover shot is not terribly clear. It shows this wonderful detail from a crazy quilt (no date given unfortunately), which is something I've wanted to learn how to do for a long time.
This is a collection of not only short stories but also poems and essays by women who have lived in the Rocky Mountain West. I have to admit I am a city girl even if I do live in a state where the vast majority of it is rural. So this collection is a bit of a diversion for me. I sometimes think I identify closer with books that don't exactly resemble my daily life, if that's possible. It's always good to get a taste of the unknown and unexpected.
"Though the tales they tell are different, these writers struggle against overwhelming isolation brought on by gender and physical environment; the desire to live in harmony with a landscape that is at once beautiful and threatening; and the impulse to give witness to the lives of women in a part of the United States where the stories and myths have traditionally been about men."
I'm drawn to a collection of work by women succeeding in environments not traditionally their own (or not traditionally believed to be their own). I read the first story in the book, "The Sow in the River" by Mary Clearman Blew. Actually I'm not even sure it would be considered a short story, it seemed very autobiographical, which just shows how much reality and fiction can be blurred. Essay or story I enjoyed reading it. Blew writes about growing up in central Montana by the Judith River. She reminisces about a scene from her childhood, a sow and her piglets that were caught on a pinnacle of dirt left standing in the bed of a river during a flood. It's funny how as an adult you are sure of a memory from childhood, only to discover your recollection is not entirely real and maybe even more a dream. Although the story is interesting, what I really liked was the sense of place that Blew evoked.
I love anthologies that give more information about the contributors. This was included about Mary Clearman Blew:
"Montana, her childhood home, elicits a mix of ambivalent emotions: 'I grew up on a ranch in central Montana, on the site of the homestead my great-grandfather filed in 1882. I feel as though I have been imprinted from birth by that landscape. Often I can see its low mountains, grasslands, buttes, and river against the backs of my closed eyes like the lingering effect of looking at the sun. But I also feel a kind of aversion, in that the human cost of the landscape, in terms of hopes and lives, displacement and loneliness has been so high'."
Mary Clearman Blew is also the author of All but the Waltz: A Memoir of Five Generations in the Life of a Montana Family, which also sounds good. Another anthology I wouldn't mind dipping into more.