(Kathy Fish, Pam Houston, Paisley Rekdal, Tamara Linse, Bonnie ZoBell) Five writers whose material couldn't be more disparate. What they do have in common is they're from the West, hailing from Wyoming and California, Utah and Colorado. Can we make generalizations about women's experiences in a place so vast? Five female writers will present diverse visions of the contemporary American West by each giving a one-sentence definition and reading from her work.

Published Date: July 15, 2015

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:04):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2015 A W P conference in Minneapolis. The recording features Kathy Fish, Pam Houston, Paisley Recal, Tamara Lindsay, and Bonnie Zobel. You will now hear Tamara Lindsay provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:35):

I would like to welcome you to Women Writers of the American West definitions and readings. Our panelists today are Kathy Fish, Pam Houston, Bonnie Zobel, Paisley Rectal, and myself, Tamara Lindsay. I'm so honored to be up here with these ladies. They're just so amazing and I've just been in awe of them up close and from afar for so long. The West means many things to many people. When Bonnie and I were first talking about this panel, I said that the West for me is a rural place because I was born and raised on a ranch. It's about ranching and cowboys and sort of being a woman in masculine culture. And for Bonnie it was more urban. It was about being an entity unto itself, not competing with anyone else. And so we thought it would be interesting to have this conversation. And because of Bonnie's great energy we're here. And so the panel is five writers whose material couldn't be more disparate. What they do have in common is they're from the west, hailing from Wyoming and California, Utah and Colorado. Can we make generalizations about women's experiences in a place? So vast five female writers will present diverse visions of the contemporary American West by each giving a one sentence definition and reading from her work. Each of us will read and then at the end we'll take questions. So we'll be thinking about questions because I'm up here. I'll go first.

Speaker 2 (00:02:08):

So I'm the author of a short story collection, how to be a Man and two novels, deep down things and earth's Imagine corners. I got my master's in English from the University of Wyoming where I taught writing and I work as an editor for a foundation. What I'm going to be reading today is the title story from my collection, how to Be a Man. And what you need to know is I was born a girl on a ranch. I was an intelligent little girl and I looked around myself and I thought the only people who have respect and power seem to be men. How can I as a girl have power and respect? And so I came to the conclusion I had to be a man. And I know many women like this. They drive pickup trucks, they drink beer, they know all the football stats. They go hunting and all their friends are men and they have any women friends. Oh my gosh. And they think of themselves as this third thing. They can't be a man and they're not a woman. So they think of themselves as a third thing. And then I will also say that I based this story on who know Diaz is, how to date a brown girl, black girl, white girl, a halfie. It's structured like that. So my definition, the American West is a text into which people project themselves.

Speaker 2 (00:03:31):

Okay? How to be a man. Never acknowledge the fact that you are a girl and take pride when your guy friends say you're one of the guys. Tell yourself I am one of the guys. Even though in the back of your mind a little voice says, but you've got girl parts. You are born on a ranch in central Colorado or southern Wyoming or Northern Montana and grow up surrounded by cowboys or maybe not a ranch, maybe a farm, and you have five older brothers. Your first memory is of sitting on the back of big cheese, an old sorrow gelding with a sway back, and you find out later when you regularly ride bareback, a backbone like a ridge line later, you won't know if this first memory is real or comes from one of the only photos of you as a baby. You study that photo a lot.

Speaker 2 (00:04:18):

It must be spring or late fall because you're wearing a quilted yellow jacket with a blue lined hood and your brother's hands reach in from the side of the frame and support you in the saddle. You look half asleep with your head tilted to the side against your shoulder, a little sec. Potatoes. Your dad is a kind man, a hard worker who gives you respect when no one else will when you're four. If he asks Birdie, do you think the price of hogs is going up? Ponder this a while. Take into account how Rosy has just farrowed seven piglets and how your bottle raising the runt and how you've heard your brothers complaining about pig shit on their boots that they wear to town. Think about how much jewel, that's what you've decided to name the pig means to you and say, yes, daddy, pigs are worth a lot.

Speaker 2 (00:05:03):

He'll nod his head but he won't smile like other people when they think that what you say is cute or precocious. Your mother is a mouse of a woman who takes long walks in the gray. Sage brushed hills beyond the fields or lays in the cool back bedroom reading the Bible. When your brothers ask Where's mom? You won't know. You don't think it odd when it five, you learn how to boil water in a big speckled enamelware pot and to shake in three boxes of macaroni to watch it turn from off yellow plasticity to soft white noodles to hold both handles with a towel and carefully pour it into the colander in the sink while avoiding the steam. To measure the butter and milk one of your brothers shows you how much and then to mix in the powdered cheese. When you learn to dig a dollop of bacon grease from the care jar in the fridge into the hot cast iron skillet, wait for it to melt and then lay in half steaks, the wonderful smell of fat in the popping of ice crystals filling the kitchen.

Speaker 2 (00:06:02):

When your brothers come in from doing chores, they talk and laugh instead of opening the cupboards and slamming them shut. And your dad doesn't clench his jaw while washing his hands with Don dish washing liquid at the kitchen sink and then toss big hunks of wonder bread into bowls filled with milk. When you wear hand-me-downs from your brother, be proud. Covet the red plaid shirt of your next older brother and when you get it a hot late summer afternoon when he tosses three shirts on your bed, wear it until the holes in the elbows decapitate the cuffs. If you go to town with your dad for parts, be proud of your shitty boots and muddy jeans and torn up shirts. It shows that an honest day's work work is more important than fancy things and you are not one of those nies who wear girly dresses and couldn't change a tire if her life depended on it.

Speaker 2 (00:06:50):

Be prepared when you go to school. You won't know quite where you fit. All the other kids will seem to know something that you don't. Something they whisper to each other behind their hands. They won't ever whisper it to you, but they won't make fun of you either because you'll get this right away and take pride in it. You are tough and you also have five older brothers in the Gunderson family sticks together. Be proud of the fact that in seventh grade social studies, you sit elbows on the table next to a boy about your size and he says, with a note of admiration, look at them guns. You got arms bigger than me. It's winter and you've been throwing bales every morning to feed the livestock. Your friends will be boys. You understand boys when you say something, they take it at face value.

Speaker 2 (00:07:34):

If they don't understand, hit them and they'll understand that for a couple of months until your dad finds out about it. Your second older brother will give you a dime. Every time you get into a fist fight, they'll look on your brother's face as he hands you. Those dimes will make your insides puff to bursting. Leave the girls alone and they will leave you alone when you have to be together. Like in gym class, they'll ignore you, which will be fine with you. Always take the locker by the door so you can jet in and out as fast as you can. You'll be mortified that they'll see your body, how gross and deformed it is. Be proud of the muscles, but the buds of breast and the peaking pubic hair will be beyond embarrassing still, you'll be fascinated with their bodies, not in a sexual way, but in that they seem to be so comfortable with them even to your disgust proud.

Speaker 2 (00:08:24):

They'll compare boobs in the mirror holding their arms up against their ribs so that their breasts push forward. One girl, Bobby Joe Blanchard won't stand at the mirror though because she'll get breasts early, big round ones. She'll quickly go from a slip of a girl who never says anything to the most popular because the boys pay attention and the attention of the boys is worth much more than any giggling camaraderie of the girls. You'll agree with this, but you'll also be mystified as to the boys' motivations. Ask your best friend Jimmy Mackler. What's up with that? He'll just shrug and smile sheepishly. But with pride too in middle school, don't be surprised if the guys who used to be your friends forget about you. They'll still be nice, but they'll spend their time playing rough games of basketball and daring each other to talk to this girl or that you won't be good at basketball.

Speaker 2 (00:09:15):

You're tough, but you don't have the height or the competitiveness. Plus they don't really want you to play. You can tell. Think about this a lot, how to regain their respect. So go so far as to ask the coach about trying out for football. He'll look at you like you're a two-headed calf and say, darling girls don't play football. You want to scream I'm not a girl. But you won't instead never tell anyone, especially the boys and hope to God the coach never mentions it in gym class, which he teaches, he won't. He'll agree with you. It's embarrassing. One day at lunchtime, Jimmy Mackler will tell a story to the other guys about Bobby Joe Blanchard and how he's asked her to meet him under the bleachers in gym during fifth period study hall. There's no gym During fifth period, he and Bobby Joe are going to get passes to go to the bathroom and sneak in when no one's looking. I bet she lets me kiss her. He says and laughs and the other boys laugh too. Then he says, maybe she'll even give me a hand job. He'll glance at you and this look of horror will come over his face. They'll all look at you right then. You'll know you've lost them.

Speaker 2 (00:10:32):

And next we have the fabulous Bonnie. Bonnie Zobel is the author of a Linked Collection, what Happened Here and a fiction chat book, the Wack Job Girls. She received an ne A grant, the Capricorn Novel Award, a Penn syndicated fiction award and an M F A from Columbia University. She teaches at San Diego Mesa College.

Speaker 3 (00:10:57):

Some say California is not the West, not true. We are the farthest west of the West. Some on the east coast. Don't believe the west should be taken seriously, not true. We are the frontier full of innovation and discovery. We can do anything we want. I'm going to read an excerpt from what happened here, my novella and stories. All you need to know is that John and Lenora are a couple and the main characters Archie's an annoying next door neighbor. He's talking about the 30th anniversary party. He's planning to honor the dead from the crash of P S A flight 180 2 into their North park San Diego neighborhood in 1978.

Speaker 3 (00:11:53):

Above us that day on the driveway, a flurry of color, scarlet turquoise mustard zipped past shrieking and hustling from one north park palm tree to another. The brilliance of these neighborhood macaw flying through our Southern California enclave in formation. 25 of them together to forage for dates would allow just about anyone to forget the rest of the world. Escapees from unlatched cages all over town, not to mention the zoo. They'd fled from doors left open only for a minute, chewed through screens when left alone too long and now banded together to make North Park their home. Wow. John said as he and I stared so as not to miss any of the colorful show. Amazing. I was enthralled diving out of the sky with all those intense colors. Cool. Heather called from her apartment balcony next door still in her pajamas. Her boyfriend wore a dog collar and waved the five of us, cranked our necks upward to watch the macaw until they'd all flown by shaking his head at the noisy birds.

Speaker 3 (00:13:14):

Archie opened his folder. Look what I found at the public library. He said pulling out copy after copy of aerial views of the airline crash. See right there. Bending 90 degrees beside my window. He pointed at a photo with our house in it right by the carport. He continued the people before you tore that down. See the crater on your lawn? Who knows what landed there. See, he pointed to a spot in our yard. John startled dropped the car keys on the front mat. He seemed unable to look away from our home's scar. September 25th, 2008. Everyone can come to my place for the anniversary. Archie said, we'll appease the God so it'll never happen again. Archie took off and we sat there. Time to go, John. I said, John, I repeated. Finally he snapped out of it, but then we switched places so he wouldn't have to drive.

Speaker 3 (00:14:21):

Who knows why that particular day was so hard when he already knew about the crash. Maybe it was because he now lived on the property making him a part of it. John didn't go down right away, just the opposite. A few months after moving in, we went out with Alexa, a Greek painter I'd met down the street. Her husband Eduardo had to work late. Is that a mustache? John asked Alexa in the loud restaurant, a piano player chinked out music on the other side of the partition and customers took turns singing with them. John, I said, what eyes twinkling? He seemed pleased with himself just stating the obvious. Why would you say something like that? I asked him. Alexa seemed unsure but laughed. That's okay, I can take it. Me and Frida Kahlo. Until recently, I'd never seen this new in your face behavior of John's before.

Speaker 3 (00:15:26):

Unable to sit still. He said, I'm going to go sing and wandered off soon. His voice was belting out after all the others. Fortunately it was a good voice. He sang a passionate I wish I was special creep by Radiohead. He's good. Alexa, shouted laughing. I wish I could get Eduardo to loosen up like that. John's so fun. She beamed towards him, don't you think? Sure. I said we left napkins over our dinners. John still hadn't touched his and leaned into the bar clapping while John sang stuck on you by Elvis. Now he was standing on his bar stool. The bartender didn't look pleased, but everyone was buying drinks so nobody said anything. Wow. Alexa said, I guess he's had a few. My stomach tripped over the food I'd just eaten. When an older woman argued with John over the microphone, I stomped over and took him by the arm.

Speaker 3 (00:16:33):

It's someone else's turn. The elderly lady asked him to dance. When the microphone moved on to someone else back at the table, I told him Alexa's got an early appointment. Aren't you tired? I'll take a cab. He didn't seem to mind at all that we were leaving him behind. Is everything okay? Alexa asked on the drive home. I shrugged at 3:00 AM a police woman dropped him off at the curb in front of our place. I didn't know what he might do next. As this energy continued, I became increasingly sure we weren't going to make it. I asked one morning, don't you think you should see a doctor? Hun? Most of our house had been redone since 1929 except for our kitchen. It wasn't quaint, it was small. With broken plumbing, we bumped into each other a lot. I don't see why is this mania. I waited until the microwave said my coffee was ready.

Speaker 3 (00:17:36):

Maybe he said it's exhausting. Remember what your doctor said? What goes up must come down. I feel great. No way. I'm coming down on purpose. He was off to take Abby for a haircut and then do a birthday party afterwards. He had a tea time with a friend In May, he became convinced he'd write a book. Plenty of journalists write them. Who else has the discipline? I write every day for work. I write songs a lot. You like my songs? This seemed fine until I got home one afternoon and he was at the dining table with legal pads scribbled all over. There were three half drunk cups of coffee. I found out soon enough that he was on the phone with Tim O'Brien. I was spell bound. How did someone get Tim O'Brien on the phone? I know John said into the receiver, but how did you go from the Washington Post to writing your first novel? I tiptoed away lay on the couch while they talked. Another half hour. Then he called Chuck Ook. I took a deep breath worn out from the last conversation. You were a diesel mechanic. John asked on the phone. Sometimes the thought of a boyfriend who liked to watch mystery movies together at night and doze off on the couch seemed tremendously appealing. How he got them to talk wasn't as confusing at full tilt. John was hard to resist. Had I ever been attracted to normal breadwinning logical men? He called Carl Hyon.

Speaker 3 (00:19:19):

A month or two later, John came home with five computers, one for him for work-related issues, one for his personal use, one for me, one for Abby, and one for guests. Where are we going to put them all? I asked. We'll use them. You'll see. That's what I'm going to read. Thanks. It's my pleasure to introduce Paisley rectal and she's the author of four books of poetry, two books of nonfiction, the most recent of which are Animal Eye poems and Intimate and American Family Photo album she teaches at the University of Utah.

Speaker 4 (00:20:16):

Thanks for waking up with me. My definition of the west is pretty simple and I guess fairly complex at the same time. I just think of the West as any place that's defined by its relationship and anxieties around water and we're done. I myself don't tend to write much about the west in any obvious way, but I have three monologue, well, two monologues, well I guess three monologues by women who were living in the west around the 19th and early 20th centuries. One is in the voice of Olive Oatman who you may or may not know about, but her story is in the poem so I won't go into it, but there is a character on a T n T show called I think Hell on Wheels or something like that. The woman with the tattoo marks this way. Olive Oman was one of the famous subjects and writers of a captivity narrative. She lived among the Mojave for eight years. The second poem is by the first white woman who lived on the POF islands with her husband hunting seals and the third one is in the voice of May West, all of Oatman in Texas. Sherman 1865.

Speaker 4 (00:21:34):

These blue black lines have faded over time, feathered into my chin like newsprint dropped in water and the dress I wore for the portraits. My brother chose its pattern. It's rick rack track, its sleeves and hem. The silks which hissed whenever I walked without a mirror, I might forget why. I inspire crowds to gather. My marks have eroded only to marks curl cues of smoke beside the scar. I still remember raised along my sister Marianne's cheek cut with a knife by a yavapi during our struggle. Marianne was the one who bore our pain without crying. Sister, she soothed me as I stanched the blood beside all the things we've lost. What now as a cut, she was right. What we'd lost was greater yet harder too. To imagine the red threads webbing our mother's eyes and how our father stared unblinking down the valley's desiccated length in the hopes of finding his family.

Speaker 4 (00:22:36):

Its promised home. In truth, we'd run into trouble long before the yavapai attacked my father, having prepared for our journey poorly so that after a week we'd eaten through our supplies, then split the last of our water barrels, two of our cattle died, and then my father himself succumbed to those fits of weeping prayer that led us first out into the desert where my siblings learned to catch desert grouse and I lance the heart colored cactus flowers like boils for water. Maryanne said it was our father's burden to lead ours to follow Only in our suffering could God's truth in him be revealed. What truth I know is how we clung to each other, hearing the cries, circling our fires. Watching Lorenzo, our youngest brother, clutch a knife and claim he'd kill any Indian who came near the desert Night Group. Chill a white sun rose and the rest has been written about in the papers.

Speaker 4 (00:23:40):

But of all these things it is my face about which strangers wish to hear and not how we walked past the bodies of our parents, our siblings, like people we recognized but had no relation to. Marianne and I tied and taken as slaves until some passing group of Mojave taking pity on us, purchased our freedom for the next eight years we lived with them, but why had we let ourselves be marked like them while I still for the quills struck repeatedly into our chins. Its sting of Cole Smuts scrubbed into the welts. Once I thought these filigrees had always existed inside us, showing the pattern from which we were made. Not a new version of ourselves but the original as if we too were composed of our father's weakness and belief. But Maryanne said they were signs only of a willingness to live. We could not be accountable for our appearance here she said, nor more truly each other's sisters.

Speaker 4 (00:24:43):

For now, our resemblance to each other had been made complete. Still when I passed the sudden shock of a mirror or finger, the black rise of skin on skin, I'm amazed and knew at how a person can be so overwritten. Only what we greatly love or greatly fear makes us anyone's. And so I learned to love and fear my liberators, especially as spano, a childless woman. I called mother watching her try to nurse Maryanne through the fever I survived. Why else should I have run upon seeing Lorenzo years later at the soldier's trading post, my brother who'd survived and groan, who tracked me through news of us in the markets. What other reaction would be natural than flight? Seeing the wild blue lights of his eyes staring out at me from that unfamiliar face, the long pale hand stretched out for mine. Once my father warned me of the savagery that churns inside the heart of nature.

Speaker 4 (00:25:48):

The sky groan so enormous with light. It would take all our strength not to dissolve inside it. And when I lay down in aspen's arms and felt the sweet stinging ache of fever rushed through me, I thought I understood this wildness, this place where God's love spreads As far as we can imagine that when my father's sickness came upon him, this thinking changed. It was God's rage. He said that spreads farthest. And it was fear of this that kept him driving us out into the desert. I shall take you to the very edge he'd said of what you can withstand and pain shall be your freedom. But when I saw the yavapi blade slice my sister's cheek, I understood pain was not the edge of mastery or the requirement of freedom but merely pain. Though if pain accompanied freedom, it might have some value in it.

Speaker 4 (00:26:44):

I would be marked as Maryanne had been and my mother and brothers by my own hand or someone else's. For this reason, it was easy to lie down and let Aspen beard me in the custom of her nation as my brother has written about for the papers taking my portrait and his parlor with its rugs swirled through his chevrons, the fire dead in his grate, the book he made of my ordeals tucked upon a shelf olive. He tells me now if you like, we can have your marks scratched out of the negative, but to me it makes no difference. I confess I see only the tight braids my brothers made has bound to my scalp. The wallpaper with its fists buds, its water stain from a summer storm that spread to the shape and size of a body to the size almost of Aspen who cried the day the soldiers came for me saying she could not bear to lose another daughter. I think of her only sometimes as I run my fingers over my face feeling the little ridges across my chin like the scar. I traced a final time on Maryanne's cheek Maryanne, my true sister who burned three days to blindness with the fever from which at the last neither Aspen nor I could save her.

Speaker 4 (00:28:13):

Ms. Palm is the one from Libby Beman. It's another monologue and it's in. This is Libby Beman to her sister POF Islands. July 13th, 1880. One thing you need to know, Maka is and the name for seal blunt bullying. This season's bachelors climbed the rocks near na spiel, sleek backs blackening the waters inside their sea, catchy the old bulls line up in roses at a burlesque house while their MoCAs roll in surf thrash upon the parade grounds volcanic sands turned glassy from the constant passing of seals. One by one the bull slipped the line to claim their females each dragging his choice to a private catch. As the bull gathers what he can, the moka cuffed and bitten on the throat if she struggles the bull shaking her, banging her down upon the rock until she rolls her belly up, eyes wet in supplication, this is how I imagine it.

Speaker 4 (00:29:21):

The event being no sight a lady should witness. The senior agent forbids me from the rry John, my husband. Now these 13 months must privately describe it. Libby, he tells me You should see how soulful they are. It is amazing to watch them weep. He takes joy in their qualities, recalls tales of silkies who turn to seal girls and surf braiding their hair and seaweed plates to chain and errand sailors' legs. And yet in seasons such as this, he goes out with company men to kill the mating seals in their rooks, drive them to ground with wooden clubs. I've heard the sounds and smelled grease. Fires smoking after skins are flinched. Seeing John creep back from work clothes spattered with blood. How many months to be endured and all before winter comes? It's long months un punctuated by sun and yet I can't complain having begged John to take me a lone white woman at these edges of the pribilofs, reluctant first.

Speaker 4 (00:30:28):

Now I think he's proud of me without a maid. John is the one to tighten my stays, fetch me paper, drawing pencils, tea. When he's gone I walk as far as his officers will let me to sketch a little of the mots and their young. Yesterday a shape disturbed me at the game. Some rath shadowing noss bes rocks. I noticed light absorbed by the sight of two bulls hissing and spitting at each other. While a third made off with the spoil, they longed for the maka flattened on the glassy ground. Interesting, isn't it Elizabeth? The rathe addressed me. I looked. It was the senior agent. He is as I wrote above that dark one who follows me on my rounds complaining of my presence here he charts my walks around the island once in the mess hall, pinched my arm in passing, hissing selfish to remain at home.

Speaker 4 (00:31:27):

I raged at John who shook his head but will say nothing. How can it be selfish to claim my rights beside the one I love? A loud groan. The seas kaboom. And one of the bulls, his shoulder pierced deeply struggled off. I watched his slow creep back into the sea, his shape dissolving inside a curl of blood. When I looked up, the senior agent was gone. Tonight I send along a sketch I've done of a bowl with its sleek, maka, half drawn, only the head and eyes completely finished. That peculiar quality to their gaze. I struggled to capture that clear yet fathomless, unblinking from which occasionally come to John's. Continued astonishment, real tears. This last poem is a very quick sonnet. It's an anagram of one of Mae West's famous one-liners and I will be doing my Mae West impression at one point. This is self-portrait of me as Mae West one-liner.

Speaker 4 (00:32:35):

I'm no moaning, blew it. Mountable linet, mumbling none. I'm tangible. I'm gin, able to molt in toto to limb. I'm blame and angle. I'm lumbago. An oblate mug. Gone. Notable, not glum. I'm a taboo tuba mogul. I'm motile. I'm nimble. No gab on wee no bagel bun boat. I'm one big megaton bold, able to bail men out gluten. I am male bong unit. I'm a genial bum mental ob genital montage. I'm agent limbo. My blunt bio and amulet and enigma omit lan omit bingo, alien mango. I'm glib lingo untangle me. Angelo. Oh well, I'm no angel.

Speaker 5 (00:33:24):

Oh yeah.

Speaker 6 (00:33:30):

Kathy

Speaker 4 (00:33:31):

Fish has published three short fiction collections. Together we can bury it wildlife and a chatbook in a peculiar feeling of restlessness for chatbooks of short fiction by four women.

Speaker 6 (00:33:49):

Thanks Paisley. Like paisley. I don't write specifically about the west, but I did pick a story. But first of all, my definition of women writers of the west are storytellers who are imbued with or who are influenced by everything the west signifies. That is adventure, tradition, openness, the power and strength of the individual at odds with herself and with her environment and the challenges of being the greenhorn, the immigrant or the oddball. And with that in mind, when we first moved to Colorado, soon after that, I experienced a Colorado winter, such as I've never seen before in my life. It began with a blizzard, followed by another blizzard, followed by another blizzard. And what I was struck by was how hearty coloradoans are. They love it. The more snow the better. And I just thought that really struck me in the behavior of the people in a snowstorm.

Speaker 6 (00:35:02):

And then I took off from there. So my story is called snow. The snow started late Friday afternoon and everyone struggled driving home. Cars moved few nearly up the cul-de-sac turning into driveways, into garage doors opening like miles. It snowed through the night while the people slept and they woke to 10 inches and it was still coming down, drifting and swirling now up against the north sides of the houses and the fences, and you could only see the smoke coming from the chimneys and the muffled jaundice light from the windows. Nobody emerged, no garage doors open, even the children stayed inside and oh, the novelty of it. Everyone had prepared and brought treats and snacks and brought home stacks of DVDs from the video store and stayed in their pajamas and played board games. And the parents said, isn't this great? We're spending time together as a family.

Speaker 6 (00:36:00):

Patio tables resembled huge frosted layer cakes and second story windows were blocked from the snow on the roof. Finally, on Sunday just before dusk, the snow stopped and the sun shone a weary sputter light on the horizon and the people started to come out of their houses thickly bundled with their shovels and their snowblowers. They waved to each other across the cul-de-sac and called, isn't this something but it's good exercise. And the driveways and the sidewalks were cleared in the morning. The snowplow cleared the roads and every cul-de-sac then had its own private mountain and the children climbed it and tunneled through it and slid down it and made forts and pummeled each other with snowballs. And the brilliant sun shone strong and the people marveled at the pristine beauty of it all of white snow against a blue China plate sky. And then come Friday the clouds rolled in the forecasters broadly smiling, said more was on the way. And by Friday afternoon it was coming down hard again and the people shook their heads in line at the grocery store and at the liquor store and said things like, here we go again and laughed as they walked away with bottles of wine and expensive liqueurs to warm, the blood must stock up on essentials they said.

Speaker 6 (00:37:21):

And by 10 o'clock the Patterson's front door was completely blocked. Jenny Patterson phoned her neighbor across the cul-de-sac, look out your window. She said, can you believe this? They laughed and talked about what they were going to eat and drink that night. Trading recipes Saturday it was still snowing and the children who had siblings were fighting and the children without siblings were crabby from having no one to play with. So the parents bundled their children and told them to go outside but stay close to the house. All the snowmen now had large erect penises and Rick his smiles on their faces, the snow was drifting as high as 10 feet in some places and those who emerged to shovel only nodded to each other grimly through their balaclavas. Margaret Grayson was standing at her kitchen sink when she heard a muffled noise and looked out the window and saw her son Josh up to his neck in snow, screaming she could not get the window open to yell out to him, but sent her older son out to rescue Josh.

Speaker 6 (00:38:28):

The older brother dragged a toboggan up the snow, drift the snow coming to his knees, lifting a leg and plunking it down, lifting plunking doggedly. As Josh continued to scream and cry, the older brother stopped and buried his hands into the snow and under Josh's armpits and pulled him straight up out of the snow drift. One of Josh's boots came off in the snow. The brother couldn't retrieve it. He put Josh on the toboggan and pulled him by its rope up. The snow drift and backed down to the front of the house. The weather repeated itself again the next weekend and the weekend after that, the parents laughed and poured Amber liquor into their sniffers. Let's invite the neighbors. Let's feast against the winter. And so they put 12 year old Annalise in charge of all the kids. The neighbors came over on snowshoes with poles in their hands and their children strapped to their backs inside. They shed their gear and sent all the children to the basement with Annalise who had never before been in charge of anyone besides her little brother Cal. All 12 children sent to the basement and the music was turned up loud and the adults did shots and cursed the snow and Bill Watley pissed out the back door watching to see if his yellow stream would harden into ice in midair. It did not.

Speaker 6 (00:39:56):

The snow covered the windows and blocked the front door and the adults laughed and danced and paired off. While Annalise corralled the children and the babies in the toddlers in the basement, she made them all watch Oceans 11. Even the baby propped up with pillows and crept upstairs and stole a bottle of spiced rum and took it down and sat in the flickering light of big screen and took little sips every time one of the children whined and little Logan crawled on top of her when she'd passed out and stuck her finger in her nose. The couples paired and repaired and the children came up and raided the cupboards in the fridge and ate standing up at a loss. And while the snow plows didn't bother to come and the newspapers stopped, the presses and the male ceased and the cold moon rose over the wide expanse of frozen crusted snow every night until seven months later when it had finally melted off in the LightUp Christmas deer and the LightUp Christmas angels emerged hole and undamaged and Josh Grayson's boot lay on the cool frightened grass. But nobody looked for it and nobody cared.

Speaker 6 (00:41:13):

That's such a lovely story. I just love telling that story. Okay, so the next reader needs no introduction, but I'm going to introduce her anyway. Pam Houston is the author of five books of fiction and nonfiction, including Cowboys are My Weakness and Contents may have Shifted. She teaches in the creative writing programs at Pacific University and the University of California Davis and directs the literary nonprofit writing by writers.

Speaker 7 (00:41:52):

Thank you Kathy, and thank you for coming and thanks to my fellow readers. It's been a pleasure to hear you all this morning. My sentence about the American West sort of I was thinking along the same lines as Paisley. I said the part of America where it has always been and will always be most evident that mother nature bats last.

Speaker 7 (00:42:18):

I live on a ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado, but I'm from Trenton, New Jersey, so I am an adopted woman of the American West. I'm going to read a very short excerpt from a memoir of place that I'm working on about this ranch that I live on, this homesteaded ranch. And then I'm going to read just a little section from a short story. So this is from a chapter called A Kind of Quiet. Most people have forgotten Time to move On this point. All selves are in agreement. Put the smart wool on lace, my boots don my barn coat. Cut the apples, cut the carrots, feed the equines from my hands. Cut the string that holds the bale of grass hay together, two flakes for the mini donkeys, six for the horses, everything that is left for the sheep. Top off the horse water. Top off the sheep water.

Speaker 7 (00:43:20):

Double check the heaters in the troughs. Listen to the reassuring thump of cold boot soles on frozen ground. The comforting crunch of equine teeth grinding hay. The other worldly whoosh of wing beets overhead. The bald eagle who winters up river back after his one year hiatus. The forecast is calling for wind and possibly snow tonight, but right now it is perfectly still and almost 20 too warm for my heavy barn coat. The creek at this time of year with all the freezing and unfreezing is an ice sculpture. The willows that line it pencil drawings the mountaintop beyond it already feet deep in snow. The puppy is charging and leaping to see above what's left of the tall grass while William, the three-year-old patrols the perimeter. From here, I can see Middle Creek Road, lime Creek Road as well as the state highway across the river.

Speaker 7 (00:44:24):

And though this represents some fairly large percentage of all the roads in Mineral County for the hour we'll be walking. Not one car will come by out here on this acreage, I've learned not only to hear my own voice, but to recognize what makes my heart leap up and then go towards it. The snow shoe hair halfway through his biannual color change that William scares up along the back fence, his big white feet flashing as his still Tawny body gains distance. A coyote sitting dignified and still as a church, 200 yards across the pasture, watching us make our way to the wetland. And then the flash when William sees him and he sees that William sees him, his total evaporation into thin air like a ghost dog come from some other plane of being. These are the things that have always healed me. It just took me half a lifetime to really trust them to understand how infallible they are moving through space, preferably outdoor space, preferably outdoor space that maintains some semblance of nature, if not this nature.

Speaker 7 (00:45:41):

Some other nature. When I'm happy it's a carnival out here and when I'm sad it is almost too beautiful to bear, but not quite. It is definitely too beautiful to contemplate leaving. I climbed the hill where the homesteader Robert Pinkley, the first man to build a cabin on this land is buried. And I know well that when I claim this 120 acres, it also claimed me we are each other's mutual saviors. And then this is from a story called Maggie on the road. And Maggie on the road is a trip ticket. It was actually published in Plowshares a couple of months ago, and so it's not brand new work. And this is the middle panel of the triptych and it's called Baby is the New Happy. The billboard said breastfeeding, let's talk about it. And the picture was of a corn fed family, kids so indistinguishable from one another that Maggie couldn't count them all, even though the billboard was so massive, the fat faces of the children 20 times life-sized that she had at least 10 seconds viewing before her rent.

Speaker 7 (00:46:58):

A Chevy Cruz passed by the cruise wouldn't let her go more than 75 miles an hour and it wouldn't let her turn up the stereo past 35. It was okay to listen to Ashes of American flags and Jesus et cetera at 35. But when it came to heavy metal drummer or I'm trying to break your heart, you had to have 60 or 70 or whatever number she was being kept from by the Hertz Safety Police and the inventors of my key system for teenage proofing cars. The next billboard said, baby is the new happy. It seemed if possible, bigger than the last. In fact, Maggie was pretty sure she had never seen billboards this big and her entire life. And here came another one, a squirming newborn. This one with the caption. I had hiccups before I was born. Somebody had dropped a lot of change out here in nowhere Missouri.

Speaker 7 (00:48:01):

Was this the kind of thing that Koch brothers were up to these days? And who was their target audience? Exactly, not the industrial farmers who seemed to be the only people living out here near the Kansas border. Not the long haul truckers all cranked up on Red Bull who didn't blink twice between the edge of the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi, and certainly not Maggie, who'd made a solemn promise to her 15 year old self that she wouldn't ever have children. And who had kept that promise? A decision that 10 years practicing clinical psychology on the team at Pelican Bay maximum security prison confirmed over and over again. Now Maggie was 50, a consultant. Private practice had exhausted and depressed her in ways prison work never had, which is what found her on this mini tour. Talking to teams of young psychologists who'd gotten their first jobs in correctional institutions in five Midwestern states, Maggie, it turned out liked working with the relatively mentally healthy, which was how she began all her seminars there.

Speaker 7 (00:49:09):

But by the grace of you had to be careful with God in Missouri, Maggie thought the crews slipping through the shadows of the largest billboards of all a set of two at the gates. What will you say to him if he asks? Did you defend unborn children? Maggie sighed tried for the millionth time to turn up the Wilco. How many of you got beat as a child? She had asked the auditorium full of freshly minted psychologists, SDS and Lws who sat before her in Jefferson City, startling them out of their post latte, lull a few tentative hands a few more. Eventually the majority, they closed the walls in 2004, but this new facility was still pretty hardcore. How many of you were sexually abused? The Kansas border seemed to mark the end of the giant billboards. El Dorado was the next place she would light for three days, maximum security, but not supermax, which would be the next stop in Florence, Colorado.

Speaker 7 (00:50:17):

Ted Kaczynski's, new digs not new, she thought more than a decade now she still remembered the Times photo, how groomed he'd looked, how sexy her first thought. Harrison Ford will play him in the film. She was nearing the Flint Hills, the tall grass prairie, which would cheer her up after all that rectitude. It was late September, but in the creek bottoms, the cottonwoods were still vibrant, green and giant clouds dotted and otherwise corn, flower sky rolling all four windows down, letting the wind toss her hair around. Maggie thought maybe it was the world's bright beauty that hurt her most of all. Look around you. She would tell the team and El Dorado after they'd put their hands in the air. Your father beat you with his belt. Your mother put her cigarette out on your forehead. Your father made you suck his dick in the shower every Saturday night from the time you were nine until you turned 15 while your mother lay passed out drunk in the guest room, there would be a nod, a wince, some nervous laughter you think that makes you special.

Speaker 7 (00:51:30):

Look around a head, shake a grin. One guy might reach out to squeeze the shoulder of another. The answer is yes. It does make you special. However common your trauma, your pain is unique to you and because of your pain, you are uniquely equipped to empathize with the pain of the men out in that yard whose struggle is not unrelated to your struggle. Their pain led them to make some very bad choices and your pain led you to them. Here's what Maggie learned in her decade at Pelican Bay. There was no bottom. No matter how spectacularly horrific a thing was done to one child, there was always another child who'd had it even worse. It seemed to be unlimited ownership. Parenthood a particular kind of no holds barred. The Chevy Cruze was deep into the prairie. Now blue stem verbena Timothy Rye and the wind was making some ineffable thing of the grasses coneflower sunflower prairie clover blazing star. On a late September afternoon, it was possible that the Flint Hills were the most beautiful place on the planet. Another billboard loomed on the horizon and Maggie braced herself. She had worked so hard to love the world rather than fear it. She did a pretty good job. But it took practice. It took practice every single day. Put more pressure on the corn earworm, the billboard said. And Maggie smiled, floated her arm out into the hot slipstream fucking corn earworm, she said grinning and tried to turn up the Wilco. One more time.

Speaker 7 (00:53:24):

Thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:53:30):

Okay, we are ready to take questions. So anybody have questions?

Speaker 8 (00:53:38):

Yes. You're supposed to repeat

Speaker 4 (00:53:40):

The question. The question was what preparation went into writing the Olive Oman captivity narrative? It's been a long while since I wrote that poem, so I can't remember everything. But I did read a couple of things. First of all, there's a wonderful book called The Blue Tattoo by somebody really good University of South Dakota Press, I think put it up, or Nebraska. No, Nebraska. They have a wonderful series of western writers, western Americana studies and it's, yeah, the blue tattoo. And it's a story of olive oatman and it's a really good, very comprehensive biography. Olive Oman is a fascinating figure because she at one point was sort of taken around the country and toured as a sort of object of display because of her tattoo or time at the Mojave. Her story was supposedly co-written by her and this reverend, actually, I changed it to her brother, but there's sort of interesting slippages in the narrative that suggests that she was unwillingly returned to white civilization.

Speaker 4 (00:54:49):

She was sort of essentially dragged back. And then as I said, she was taken as this object display around the country. She married a man in, lived in Texas, a very wealthy man. She spent the rest of her life in a kind of semi-retirement. And the Mojave didn't tattoo anyone unwillingly. I mean you choose that lifestyle from other accounts. The Mojave had a very sexually free, they lived in a kind of free love society in a way. She obviously enjoyed those pleasures very much because one of her nicknames they think translates basically to rotten crotch. So sounds awful, but I didn't put that in the poem. I figured we'd lose certain things out. All of Oman's STDs will be the follow-up poem I guess. But anyway, so those are the things I read. But I did read the Reverend's sort of take on her life bits and pieces and it's a very classic captivity narrative and it's sort of filled with this kind of t trickle and religious T trickle and then also this sense of course, that white people are supreme and the natives are living at that savage weird life.

Speaker 8 (00:56:05):

Yes.

Speaker 2 (00:56:08):

The question is, what writers or books did we read early on in our lives that influenced our writing into and to become riders, especially dealing with the West?

Speaker 7 (00:56:23):

I can start, I actually went to college in Ohio and that was my first step west from New Jersey. And then when I graduated from college, I went to Colorado. But the two authors I read that pulled me west that I read in college in particular were Willa Kaher and Edward Abbey. So very different writers, but both of them super important to me in those terms.

Speaker 3 (00:56:57):

I would say Joan Didion had a big influence on me, just her sensibility and the way I felt like she understood the West better than others.

Speaker 7 (00:57:12):

Yeah. Lemme just add to that. I just happened to teach the white album last week and I came to Joan Didion later than formative years, but nobody writes California like Joan Diddy. I mean, it's almost like you just want to quit before you even start the white album. If you have not had the pleasure of reading the whole book called the White Album, including I might recommend the section on women in particular. It's so deliriously smart that anything you read after it, you just think, anyway, just wanted to enthus. Right?

Speaker 6 (00:57:49):

Young Didia,

Speaker 2 (00:57:52):

My two writer Gods are Hemmingway and Virginia Wolf and Hemmingway is a very classic, I mean, it's our natural heritage from the west. And I very much inherited that sort of pulled back emotion and the clipped sentences. And many people write long when they write first drafts. I always write really short and I have to come back and keep adding and adding and adding because I've got that close to the chest thing. And then my other writing, God is Virginia Wolf, but that's not the West.

Speaker 6 (00:58:25):

I'm going to go way back and say that the first books that struck me were the Little House on the Prairie Books. I absolutely loved those books when I was growing up and it was so exciting to me to see this family that was striking out all the time and finding new lands and building houses and doing crazy things. And I thought those books were really good and they got me interested in that type of literature. And Willa C too. Wow.

Speaker 4 (00:58:59):

So I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. I was born and raised in Seattle, and I think I was always very influenced by some of the stuff that took place around the coastal areas. One of my favorite books as a child was the Island of the Blue Dolphins, and the other one was actually a collection of Tlingit myths that my grandmother, me and I grew up reading those and reading those and just being fascinated by all of those transformation myths.

Speaker 7 (00:59:29):

I would just add two other writers that I came to in graduate school, which I went to in Utah, but two writers that maybe don't get read that much by people who don't live in the West, William East Lake and El Dr. O. Hugely influential on me as a young writer in grad school once I had already gotten to the West.

Speaker 4 (