Crazy Woman Creek: Women Rewrite the American West ed. by Linda M. Hasselstrom, Gaydell Collier, Nancy Curtis (review)

b o o k R e v ie w s 2 2 3 Overall, I felt some sections distracted from the personal writing evident here—there is a whole section on John Steinbeck, for example, which just seems too long, but at its best, this is a moving, witty book about identity and belonging, about the desire to find a “home” in a world of homelessness, to comprehend some sense of the West in the full knowledge that that quest is impossible, and, finally, it is a travelogue that understands how travel is so often about looking inward and backward rather than toward the next horizon. Crazy Woman Creek: Women Rewrite the American West. Edited by Linda M. Hasselstrom, Gaydell Collier, and Nancy Curtis. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. 296 pages, $14.00. Reviewed by Beth Kalikoff University of Washington, Tacoma A collection of prose and poetry about women of the West, Crary Woman Creek represents the third book in a creative trilogy edited by the same trio. With Leaning into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West (1997) and Women on the Wind: Women Write about Friendship in the Sagebrush West (2001), Crazy Woman Creek offers a mosaic of contemporary western women making their own history. It includes 158 works from 153 writers who hail from 21 states and 1 Canadian province, all “west of the Mississippi” (xxiii). The thoughtful introduction describes the collection’s themes and selection criteria, provides a history of the book’s evolution, and makes you wish you were up on the front porch with these three women and a hot mug of black coffee, watch­ ing the sun rise over the sagebrush and the Russian olive trees. The editors wisely determined the themes of the collection from the sub­ missions, and three ideas emerged. The first (“Women Driving Pickups”) rumi­ nates on “spontaneous” communities, those that come together without plan or forethought, like a pick-up basketball game. “Hallelujah and a Show of Hands” reflects the actions and implications of organized groups, “men and women who meet at set times for a specific purpose” (xxiii). Finally, “Cowgirl Up, Cupcakes” features prose and poetry about groups that choose us, where western women have sometimes found “possibilities we hadn’t considered” (xxiv). The section titles begin to suggest the energy and humor that pervade the collection. The selection criteria were “authenticity and quality of writing” (xxvii). Crazy Woman Creek is a good collection. Readers will, I believe, relish its geographical diversity: all readers will have walked somewhere in these essays, stories, and poems or somewhere like it. I personally have ridden my bike, like Daisy Lou of Virginia Bennett’s “Object of Affection,” around Twisp, Washington, stopping at the Farmer’s Market (May through October) near the Community Center, and I have a deeper understanding of that community when I return because of Bennett’s piece. The focus on community throughout the collection rises up like sweet bread, and here, too, readers feel a kinship, 2 2 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 6 as women come to terms with their pasts, their towns, their children, their parents, their work, and each other. I especially love the sideways glances in the book as well as the dead-on stares, moments that convey the richness of experience alive throughout these pieces. While the editors talk about the “diversity” in the collection, that diversity tends to be generational and narrative rather than stylistic or attitudinal. This is not, perhaps, a collection for readers who want a robust exploration of, say, women who don’t learn and grow and share and care and come together for the greater good and come to love the West. Readers will be hard-pressed to find women who are as mean as snakes or who fly back to Newark vowing never to set foot in Pocatello again. But this faint caveat should not discourage the prodigious number of readers who will delight in this book. DeVoto’s West: History, Conservation, and the Public...