Bone Deep in Landscape by Mary Clearman Blew (review)

3 2 2 WAL 3 5 . 3 f a l l 2 0 0 0 Richard Ford’s “Great Falls,” from Rock Springs, his fine 1987 collection of western American short fiction, begins, “This is not a happy story. I warn you” (29). One should approach Proulx’s writing with equal care, for these stories contain images raw and bleak as a cold April day. Be prepared. The collection bucks and chafes, but for readers who hang on, these stories are a searing read. Her prose smokes with the heat of a branding iron, and the quirky, unsettling characters and her deft treatment ofplace are the marks of a writer at the peak ofher craft. For the reader ofwestern American literature, Close Range: Wyoming Stories offers a poignant look at hard lives in an unrelenting country. Bone Deep in Landscape. By Mary Clearman Blew. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. 208 pages, $22.05/$ 12.95. Reviewed by V an essa H all Utah State University, Logan Mary Clearman Blew opens Bone Deep in Landscape describing her process of quilting a Double Wedding Ring quilt, a process which serves as a metaphor for this interlocking collection of creative nonfiction pieces. Much as “piecing, quilting, and binding” ties the quilter to pieces evoking the past, and becomes a tangible link between her ancestors, herself, and future gener­ ations, Blew’s essays, told “in a voice that grew out of [her] own experiences and perceptions,” locate her own story in the West within the contexts of western history, the Montana and Idaho landscape, and her heritage in the West (5). Readers familiar with the lyricism and often harsh realism of Blew’s depictions in All but the Waltz and Balsamroot will recognize her exploration of the western landscape and how it shapes its inhabitants, particularly herself and her family, as well as her interest in telling the stories of western women, minorities, and others falling outside the boundaries of the traditional western mythos. Blew’s interest in tying the past to the present and showing how the west­ ern landscape shapes its inhabitants undersets and unifies the wide-ranging subject matter of this collection, which includes autobiography, literary criticism, nature writing, history, and biography. These themes become most apparent in “Crossing the Great Divide,” where Blew discusses the rewards and perils of her own numerous trips across Lolo Pass, linking these geograph­ ical passages to her psychological and internal crossings. Claiming that during one of these crossings “like . . . Turner’s frontiersmen, I was as much running from something as headed somewhere,” Blew revisits other historical landmark crossings by Andy Garcia and In Who Lise, Lewis and Clark, and others whose crossings were full of improbabilities and premonitions, murders and terror, and occasionally rewards, as her own. As is characteristic of Blew’s writing, her historical reconstructions move beyond stating facts and include personal speculation and a deep-seated inter­ BOOK REVIEWS 3 2 3 est in re-creating people’s emotions and motives, a technique that does not distort these often shadowy figures but imbues them with life. As she claims in “The Art of Memoir,” “When I speculate, I say so. . . . But any story depends upon its shape. In arranging the scraps that have been passed down to me, which are to be selected, which discarded? The boundary of creative nonfic­ tion will always be as fluid as water” (7). In one of her most compelling essays, “Mother Lode,” Blew examines female Montana writers, including writers as diverse as Dorothy Johnson, a bespectacled, slight Whitefish native who “wrote in the western genre better than any other western genre writer, before or since,” and Mildred Walker (97). Blew discusses, often humorously, how these Montana writers carved out a niche for writers like herself by parodying, subverting, and reconceptualizing previous western literary conventions—excluding perhaps Johnson, whose success as a writer, however, certainly encouraged later women. Unlike Wister’s The Virginian, whose protagonist, Blew avows, “would bore any girl with his rhapsodizing and drive her wild with his moralizing and his insistence on hav­ ing his own way,” Bertha Muzzy Bower’s concurrent novel, Chip of the Flying U, is “dusty and realistic...