Montana Women Writers
A Geography of the Heart


edited by Caroline Patterson

foreword by Sue Hart

published by Farcountry Press

  • The anthology features thirty-nine women writers representing a spectrum of voices and perspectives ranging from women of the 1800s to contemporary writers, and women of the plains to women in small towns. The collection includes works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

    Organized into sections featuring writing set in the plains, mountains, and towns, the anthology reflects the state's geography and a broad range of sensibilities, from Mary Ronan's depiction of life in "The Jocko Valley" in the early 1800s to Deirdre McNamer's vivid portrayal of a settler's train ride west at the turn of the twentieth century in One Sweet Quarrel; from M. J. Smoker's depiction of her dead mother in her poem "From the river's edge" to Melanie Rae Thon's mysterious Didi, a small-town woman who takes in the children that others abandon in her story "Heavenly Creatures". The anthology features book excerpts from Judy Blunt's memoir Breaking Clean, Maile Meloy's Half in Love, and Sandra Alcosser's "What Makes Grizzlies Dance" from Except by Nature.



416 pages, 6'' x 9'', 24 softcovers per case

softcover
ISBN 10: 1560373792
ISBN 13: 9781560373797
$7.95


IF YOU LIKE THIS BOOK, YOU MAY ALSO BE INTERESTED IN:

As I Remember, Volume I

As I Remember, Volume II

Evelyn Cameron

Gooosetown in Their Own Words

Long Way Home

Montana Stirrups, Sage and Shenanigans

Montana Women Homesteaders

My Hutterite Life

 

 

 

 


Montana Women Writers
A Geography of the Heart

There was the high gate that marked the road into the ranch. Will got out and swung the gate so they could drive through. The ranch house, looking more barren and flimsy than she had remembered reared up from the ground without a shrub around it. Some of the spindling cottonwood trees had died this summer. The curtain in the front window was torn.

"You can see the mountains from here, anyway," Will said with a kind of heavy jocularity. Back of the ranch there was an indistinct blue line that marked the mountains, to be sure, but even that looked faded from the sun. The mountains might be part of the Rockies but they weren't half the comfort a line of good green trees would be. She had never been one for looking at mountains.

Mrs. Miller, whose husband was Will's head man, came to the door to meet them, wiping her hands on a dirty apron. Will seemed embarrassed and went off to find Ed, leaving Bella there to make difficult talk with this gaunt, stringy woman.

"My, it's hot! I've been over the stove canning chickens," the woman offered. She talked in a loud voice but as though she were glad to talk, almost like Mina Gates when she had a piece of news to tell. "Hawks is gettin' 'em something fierce," she explained.

"You go right ahead. I'll just walk around," Bella suggested.

"Oh, I don't mind sitting a spell. You haven't been out but once this year, have you?"

"No," Bella answered. "I've been pretty busy."

At last the woman went back to the kitchen to get supper, saying so heartily as she went, "My, it'll be nice to get a meal for company for a change," that Bella felt lacking that she hadn't been more entertaining company.

The house was terrible. She couldn't imagine herself living here.

She fled out to the long narrow porch.

Now at five-thirty the sun had lost its glare. The hard outlines of the ruts in the road, the rails of the corral fence, the piece of farm machinery deserted in the dooryard were less blatant. Now the color of the mountains had deepened, turned to lavender. The worn, shabby look of the earth had changed to green, almost the shade of new sage plants. The heat was no less suffocating, but there was a smell of clover or alfalfa or perhaps only sage in the dust. Bella sniffed. She could look without squinting. But it was lonely even if it wasn't so ugly. And the loneliness would be stronger with dusk. It made her afraid.

Then she saw Will, riding slowly along on horseback, coming over the rise of ground back of the house. She could tell it was Will by his hat and the droop of his shoulders. He looked younger on a horse. She had forgotten that he rode much out here. She watched him coming nearer. He was bigger some way against his land than coming up the walk on Elm Street. The sight of him drew her queerly, as it had used to when she was young. He swung off the horse more easily than he got out of the car and came up on the porch. He took off his hat and rubbed his hand back across his hair.

"I believe it's a bit cooler," he said.

"I believe it is," Bella agreed. "It's not bad when the sun gets down a little." The loneliness of the wide earth fading into the mountains had disappeared with Will there or changed to something else.

Will laid his hand on her shoulder a moment before they went in to supper in the ranch house.

-from "Rancher's Wife" by Mildred Walker



 align= Caroline Patterson's work has appeared in numerous publications, including Epoch, Seventeen, Southwest Review, Via, and Sunset. She has an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Montana, was a 1990-1992 Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University, and has received fellowships from the Montana Arts Council and the San Francisco Foundation. She lives in Helena with her husband, writer Fred Haefele, and their two children.
 align= Sue Hart has been an English professor at Montana State University - Billings for more than forty years. She was an associate producer for the documentary Hemingway in Montana, Paradise & Purgatory and was scriptwriter and co-producer of Gravel in Her Gut & Spit in Her Eye. The winner of a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award for her short story "Star Pattern," Hart publishes frequently on Montana literary subjects.


Praise for Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart


Winner of the Willa Award for Creative Nonfiction, 2007
Silver Medal, ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards, Anthologies category, 2006


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