What Wildness is This: Women Write About the Southwest
Susan Hanson, editor Senior lecturer, English Hanson and fellow editors Jan Epton Seale, poet and fiction writer; Paula Stallings Yost, personal historian and publisher; and Susan Wittig Albert, author and former VPAA at Texas State, bring together emerging and established writers. prose, poetry, creative nonfiction and memoirs to explore both the outer landscape of the Southwest and their own inner landscapes as women living on the land. Nearly 100 pieces showcase voices such as Joy Harjo, Denise Chávez, Diane Ackerman, Naomi Shihab Nye, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gloria Anzaldúa, Terry Tempest Williams and Barbara Kingsolver. This anthology from the Story Circle Network—a nonprofit organization founded by Albert and dedicated to helping women share the stories of their lives—is part of the Southwestern Writers Collection Book Series. (University of Texas Press)
"How this land embedded its face in my own, I'll never know. It crept up from behind. I wear creases the way arroyos cut across a mountain, the way rugged cliffs rim the skyline...I've come of age here, in the enticing, high desert mountains of northern New Mexico." (Cindy Bellinger)
When nearly 100 women write about the Southwest, the picture that emerges is one of Mother Earth as she was intended—beautifully aged and spiritually youthful. From the flatlands of Texas to the ocean vistas of California, the land is bathed in a feminine adoration that transcends male-driven nature-speak.
In essence, this anthology explores the feel of a lonely trail and depth of a slumbering desert in the forms of poetry, creative nonfiction and personal memoir. Some of the area's most talented writers appear in What Wildness is This, including Denise Chavez, Barbara Kingsolver, Joy Harjo and Ann Zwinger. Along with a group of literary artists, they explore several poignant themes: the way we live on the land, our journeys through the land, nature that sustains us, our memories of the land, what we leave on the land when we are gone, nature at risk, nature in cities and our kinship with the animal world.
While this type of work could easily turn into a sentimental trap of abstract experiences, it remains real thanks to the honesty of its writers and intent of the editors (who asked members of the Story Circle Network how "women experience the vast, rugged land of the American Southwest").
What emerges is a look at the dirty, delightful clash of fantasy and fact...or culture and nature. This is a book where none can escape the truth of the land. These women, more than most, appreciate the expierence of a life that is untamed. They show us how to balance duties and dreams until we walk with confidence, knowing how "each step deliberate on the skin of the earth, we pick our way across a plateau stewn with wildflowers and bones." (Patricia Wellington-Jones)
Men led the first expeditions to the Southwest. They reshaped its frontiers with war, commerce, politics and grand and often greedy schemes. Men also dominated the first writings about the Southwest's unsettled splendors, its unforgiving climate and its wide array of wildlife. Even today, men's names dominate the list of writers associated with modern descriptions of nature in the Southwest: John Graves, J. Frank Dobie, Walter Prescott Webb and Roy Bedichek, to specify a few.
That dominance is the driving force behind this powerful and important anthology of prose and poems by nearly 100 women who write about the Southwest. While men often see and describe the grand sweep and surge of things, women tend to look much closer to the heart and soul. This is an oversimplification, of course, but the female voices in these works express little fear of standing alone, whether to face frightful creatures or their own isolation and mortality.
They celebrate red dirt, repeated encounters with one owl, and the stubborn survival of persimmon blossoms. And they don't hide their beliefs that even the meanest and deadliest of God's creatures may have feelings, personalities and perhaps even souls.
"Truth be told, one advantage women gain from being traditionally denied membership in the nature-writing club is that they don't have to follow the rules," Kathleen Dean Moore notes in this book's foreword. She is founding director of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word at Oregon State University.
The four editors of What Wildness Is This used e-mail and the Internet to gather works and overcome their Texas geographical separations. In her editor's note, Susan Wittig Albert writes: "When we finished, we saw that the work seemed naturally to arrange itself into eight different sections: the way we live on the land; our journeys through the land; nature in cities; nature at risk; nature that sustains us; our memories of the land; our kinship with the animal world; and what we leave on the land when we are gone."
Some authors in this anthology, such as Diane Ackerman and Naomi Shihab Nye, are well-known, and some works have appeared in other publications. However, the editors thoughtfully have included many essays, memoirs and poems by previously unpublished writers. The Story Circle Network, the University of Texas Press and the staff of the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University helped produce the book.
What Wildness Is This lovingly explores a congruence, the moment when where we are meets who we are, and how everything is connected and changed.
A Brazosport College creative writing instructor is celebrating a year of milestones, including seeing her essay included in a major new anthology published by University of Texas Press.
Joy Kennedy-O'Neill, a Brazosport College assistant professor of English, has been published in What Wildness is This: Women Write the Southwest. The book features writings by women celebrating their diverse experiences in the landscapes of the Southwest.
Kennedy-O'Neill, the daughter of Howard and Nina Kennedy of Sweeny, has celebrated other major milestones in the past year. Last summer she married Brazosport College math instructor Kevin O'Neill, and she just completed requirements for her doctorate degree.
After graduating from Sweeny High School in 1988, Kennedy earned bachelor's and master's degrees in English from Southwest Texas State University.
She completed her Ph.D. through Indiana University of Pennsylvania, with a dissertation on "The Sacred and the Sublime: Caves in American Literature." She will send her research to University of Kentucky Press for consideration as a book.
Kennedy-O'Neill is completing her sixth year at Brazosport College, and is currently teaching a nature writing course. She said years spent exploring caves in remote wilderness led her to write her anthology essay, titled What We Leave Behind.
She will participate in a book signing at Texas State University in San Marcos on June 8. Her rough drafts will be housed in the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State's Alkek Library.
For Kennedy-O'Neill, the essay captures complex emotions.
"The essay is about loss and hope in caves, about the death of a good friend, so it's tough to talk about," she said.
The Writers' League of Texas awarded Kennedy a creative non-fiction fellowship for nature writing in 2002. Her works have been published in such journals as Organization and Environment, Petroglyph, Southwestern American Literature and ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies for Literature and the Environment.)
What Wildness is This includes a variety of literary forms, including memoir, creative nonfiction, essay and poetry.
The editors selected 100 pieces by emerging and established writers from some 450 submissions.
Well-known authors selected include Terry Tempest Williams, Leslie Marmon Silko, Naomi Shihab Nye and Ann Zwinger.
Additional information about the book is available online. The site includes an order form to purchase the paperback anthology for $19.95.
Proceeds and royalties support the Story Circle Network, a nonprofit international organization founded in 1997 that is dedicated to encouraging women to write and share their stories.
You can't go wrong spending time with Janice Emily Bowers and Nancy Mairs, two essayists whose engaging, thoughtful (and sometimes funny) work is included in "What Wildness Is This: Women Write About the Southwest" (University of Texas Press, $19.95). Altogether there are a dozen local authors. And it was good to see an excerpt included from Ann Woodin's long-ago lovely "Home Is the Desert" (1964).
WHAT WILDNESS IS THIS: Women Write about the Southwest, edited by Susan Wittig Albert, Susan Hanson, Jan Epton Seale and Paula Stallings (University of Texas Press, 336 pages, $19.95 paperback). While not technically a Latino book, this anthology of nearly 100 pieces about the rugged American Southwest includes new and reprinted pieces by some of the most acclaimed Latina writers, including Denise Chávez, Pat Mora, the late Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa and Tucson-based writer Leslie Marmon Silko. Dozens of women writers are represented in this collection created through the Story Circle Network, a national organization that solicited work for the book.
In the poem "Working Cattle," Carol Fox finds herself in a familiar position—the only woman in a group of men—braced to inoculate and castrate a herd of cattle. Fox, who has worked on a ranch since girlhood, watches her son learning the ropes and asks, "What is this mystery my son is entering into and I am excluded from?"
While Fox must endure the sexism of ranch life, she enjoys a more congenial environment as a contributing writer to What Wildness is This, an anthology of poems and essays written by women about the American Southwest.
The 100 works were put together by four Texas editors as part of the Story Circle Network, an Austin nonprofit that promotes female writers. The collection includes stories by such well-known authors as Barbara Kingsolver and Observer poetry editor Naomi Shihab Nye, and writers with only a few titles under their belts.
Women have been "traditionally denied membership in the nature-writing club," Kathleen Dean Moore writes in her introduction. These women write about living on the land, solitude, and overcoming obstacles—the kinds of experiences that inspired Roy Bedichek, J. Frank Dobie, John Graves, and other notable male writers who have covered the Southwest.
But these female writers break new ground, as Moore says, because "they don't have to follow the rules" of a historically male genre that has long portrayed man as being "separate from nature, its conqueror, its lover or rapist." Instead, the writers take a more humble and personal approach, honoring nature, longing to understand it, and, for some, becoming a part of it psychologically and metaphorically. Readers learn as much about the authors as the landscapes they describe.
In her essay "The Land's Song," included in the book's section about living on the land, Judith Ann Isaacs describes her awe of nature. Taking a bath outside at night in New Mexico, she sees stars reflected in the water: "I'm up to my neck in hot water as planets, meteor showers, and constellations spin through the seasons." Isaacs is fascinated with changing light—she tracks the seasons by marking where light hits the mountains—yet humbly foregoes trying to understand her place in the world. "I feel the transience of this existence," she writes. "I can live in wonder without knowing why the world is wonderful."
Embracing nature's isolation and solitude and leaving behind the stresses of urban life are compelling forces in several pieces. "I shed the dross of certain beliefs and boundaries, customs and niceties, as well as the spell of 'thingness'," writes Joanne Smith in "Seasons of a Hermit," as she describes her off-the-grid home in the Prescott National Forest of Arizona. It is a welcome sacrifice for Smith, who "was called to live, work, and commune with the empty space on the map" to study hawks. Her love of birds goes well beyond the scientific, and she describes them with the enthusiasm of a sports color commentator: "A hawk's looping flight shapes a huge four-leaf clover in the sky. I gasp at this first sighting of a Krider's red-tail, angelic in feathers the color of fresh country cream. Exhilarated, I return to the cabin, sit down to a cup of tea, and look up to see spring at my window. Gleaming ruby and white and green, a broad-tailed hummingbird officially announces the season's opening day."
Some writers overcome fear after enormous challenges. In "Coming of Age in the Grand Canyon," Susan Zwinger attempts a harrowing hike along the Colorado River. "My sandals disappear from sight; my feet creep by Braille over stones slippery with algae... The water roars higher and higher on my chest... A slip, a break in the human chain could mean being swept downstream and pummeled on large boulders."
Others face different contests. In "Writing West," Nancy Mairs, who is confined to a motor-driven wheelchair, struggles to find inspiration in Tucson where she cannot explore nature beyond asphalt paths. After a miserable camping trip, she gives up the romantic notions of the West that were holding her back. So "instead of loping on Old Paint across the lone prairie, I may be heading my Quickie P100 on down the alley and out to Bentley's for an iced cappuccino, it's an honest-to-God western adventure I'm having here."
Even in the book's section dealing with urban stories, the writers remain close to their natural surroundings. Judith E. Bowen discovers the satisfaction that comes with a full day of mowing; Connie Spittler makes it her mission to locate a scarlet-colored flower that attracts hummingbirds to her garden; and Lisa Shirah-Hiers offers her appreciation for Austin's Central Market Pond on a sweltering summer day.
"The People and the Land ARE Inseparable," by Leslie Marmon Silko, offers a lesson in anthropology. Silko writes about driving past a settlement of Arizona Yaquis, an aboriginal group, soon after a community member had died. All at once, the residents—who possess no telephones or computers—emerge from their homes and walk to the home of the bereaved to pay their respects. "I understood then," she writes, "that this is what it means to be a people and to be a Yaqui village and not just another Tucson neighborhood."
In the section titled "Earth is an Island: Nature at Risk," the authors honor and mourn the passing of precious animals and culture. In "Coyote Mountain," Julia Gibson buries two coyotes that have been poisoned and come to her property to die. Carol Coffee Reposa is sickened by trash left near centuries-old paintings created by cave-dwellers in "In Parida Cave."
Some writers reflect on their own survival. Nancy Linnon compares the dismal fate of endangered desert plants to her own fragile mental health in "Surviving: What the Desert Teaches Me." A victim of severe depression, Linnon follows a tour through the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, where the docent explains how invasive grasses are killing native cactus. But Linnon is also amazed at the hardiness of these plants. "I wonder if it is the same with my brain, its delicate ecosystem assisting my survival with adaptations that prick and spear... Is this apparent faultiness in my brain a tactic to help me survive, a way my body has of telling me that something in my life has to change?"
Food is a common theme in the section, "The Sustaining Land." In Joan Shaddox Isom's essay, "Gathering at the River," she recalls growing up in a colorful family that allowed anyone to grow peaches in its orchards "long as you're fambly." Sandra Ramos O'Briant describes how she began her childhood dependence on very spicy peppers in "Chile Tales: The Green Addiction." And in "Poem in which I Give You a Canyon," Sandra Lynn compares a canyon to an ice cream sundae.
Teresa Jordan's essay, "Sustenance," speaks to a different kind of consumption. While on a river trip, Jordan, a painter, learns how to take in beauty. At first, she admonishes herself for being "drunk with visual excitement, engaged in a gluttony of looking." Then she finds herself becoming more and more selective about what she paints. On the last day, she paints something she finds truly beautiful—black, rubber garbage bags. "In awe, I realized I had never seen them, really seen them, before."
Growing up in the Southwest also provides these women with lessons about poverty and racism. "Red Dirt: Growing up Okie," by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, tells the painful tale of a tenant-farmer family that uproots itself for a better life tending a horse ranch after the landlord promises "two milk cows, two hogs to breed, and two dozen chickens." The family struggles to live off the land, only to be sent away after a wildfire ravages the area.
The book culminates with the section, "Eagle Inside Us," which further tightens the connection between writer and nature. Here the authors often achieve such a near-perfect understanding of nature as in Joy Harjo's "Eagle Poem":
To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you...
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
In "The Raven," Marie Unini uses bird sounds to let a beloved bird know its mate is dead. In "Alamo Canyon Creek," Kathleen Dean Moore at first fears snakes, but then studies them carefully. "So I come the closest to thinking like a snake, to seeing the world through the brain of a toad, when my body reacts to a stimulus with terror or elation and leaves my conscious mind out of the process."
And in "Water," Terry Tempest Williams finds redemption. When she was young, her brothers would torment her by hurling frogs at her. Despite her efforts to save them, the frogs died on impact. Then she would wash away the remains in a creek. Years later, Williams finds a dead, dried frog, strings it around her neck and bathes with it in a river. At one point she has part of her body on land and the rest in water. "Half in. Half out. Amphibious."
With so many rich pieces, the editors probably had a difficult time sorting them. Ultimately, they grouped them by subject matter or location, and this does not always work well. Some pieces do not seem to fit in a section or could fall under several sections. It might have been simpler to name the chapters according to the feelings that the landscapes evoked, such as "love and wonderment," "fear and courage," or "mourning and honor."
But the women who have contributed to What Wildness is This have been given a channel for sharing their clear, and often startling, visions. In doing so, they have carved out a domain of their own.
Men led the first expeditions to the Southwest. They reshaped its frontiers with war, commerce, politics and grand and often greedy schemes. Men also dominated the first writings about the Southwest's unsettled splendors, its unforgiving climate and its wide array of wildlife. Even today, men's names dominate the list of writers associated with modern descriptions of nature in the Southwest: John Graves, J. Frank Dobie, Walter Prescott Webb and Roy Bedichek, to specify a few.
That dominance is the driving force behind this powerful and important anthology of prose and poems by nearly 100 women who write about the Southwest. While men often see and describe the grand sweep and surge of things, women tend to look much closer to the heart and soul. This is an oversimplification, of course, but the female voices in these works express little fear of standing alone, whether to face frightful creatures or their own isolation and mortality.
They celebrate red dirt, repeated encounters with one owl, and the stubborn survival of persimmon blossoms. And they don't hide their beliefs that even the meanest and deadliest of God's creatures may have feelings, personalities and perhaps even souls. "Truth be told, one advantage women gain from being traditionally denied membership in the nature-writing club is that they don't have to follow the rules," Kathleen Dean Moore notes in this book's foreword. She is founding director of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word at Oregon State University.
The four editors of What Wildness Is This used e-mail and the Internet to gather works and overcome their Texas geographical separations. In her editor's note, Susan Wittig Albert writes: "When we finished, we saw that the work seemed naturally to arrange itself into eight different sections: the way we live on the land; our journeys through the land; nature in cities; nature at risk; nature that sustains us; our memories of the land; our kinship with the animal world; and what we leave on the land when we are gone."
Some authors in this anthology, such as Diane Ackerman and Naomi Shihab Nye, are well-known, and some works have appeared in other publications. However, the editors thoughtfully have included many essays, memoirs and poems by previously unpublished writers. The Story Circle Network, the University of Texas Press and the staff of the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University helped produce the book.
What Wildness Is This lovingly explores a congruence, the moment when where we are meets who we are, and how everything is connected and changed.
Si Dunn writes about Texas and Southwest Books for The Dallas Morning News.
The Rio Grande Valley's most prolific writer, Jan Seale, has her hand in yet another publication. Seale helped edit What Wildness Is This: Women Write about the Southwest (University of Texas Press, $19.95). The book is a collection of female writers writing from or to the Southwest. The contributions include poetry, prose, creative nonfiction and memoir. Seale worked with three other editors across Texas to complete the project.
"I was invited to co-edit this book as a result of belonging to the Story Circle Network, an organization that encourages women telling their stories," Seale said. "The other editors know me as a poet and they needed my skills in that."
Separated by hundreds of miles, the four editors worked mostly by e-mail, which offered its own unique challenges.
"We got mountains of work done without distractions which often occur in face-to-face editing. The downside was that every time I opened my e-mail for several months, I had from two to eight e-mails on the subject to react to expeditiously," she said.
Seale is proud of the work, an eclectic mix of writers from all different perspectives. "I enjoyed being part of a larger community, in dialogue with a great many women I may never meet in person, all of us echoing the vastness and consonance of personal experience on the land," said Seale.
In the introduction, one of Seale's co-editors Susan Wittig Albert explains the purpose was to "collect not just nature writing, but writing through which the writer revealed essential parts of herself, describing transformations brought about by her experience in the natural world."
"So much of women's experience and writing has been situated indoors, mainly because women's roles have dictated they be inside, in the kitchen and the nursery," added Seale. "For various reasons, women have been barred from say...the world of Hemingway's hunters, fishers, and warriors. To experience what is going on in a woman's heart and mind when she is fishing, or branding cattle, or mountain-climbing: this is exciting and new for many readers."
Alongside such literary heavyweights like Barbara Kingsolver, Denise Chavez and Gloria Anzaldua, Seale contributes her own written memory entitled "Palapa" to the collection of stories.
"To be a 'woman writing about the Southwest' feels regional, in the best sense, as all writing is 'regional,' needing setting, background, roots. It also means joining in to celebrate a vast territory of the United States, with its unique cultures, topography, and history," she said.
Seale's son Ansen, a professional photographer based in San Antonio, contributed the cover photograph, a stunning shot of rock art framed by transformer towers in the background. "The Press chose it over some softer ones because, they said, they wanted something edgy. It has engendered a lot of comment," said Seale.
Texas State University is sponsoring a conference, "A Land Full of Stories," June 8-9 to celebrate the publication of the book. For more information, go here.
Martin Winchester is a book critic for The Monitor. He is an English teacher at the IDEA Academy in Donna.
The University of Texas Press brings us What Wildness is This: Women Write About the Southwest ($19.95 paperback) edited by Susan Wittig Albert, Susan Hanson, Jan Epton Seale and Paula Stallings Yost.As the title makes clear, the editors gathered the works of women writers who have ventured to put the spirit of the Southwest into words. The editors wisely divide the 100 or so essays and poems into eight categories such as "Geographies" and "The Nature of Urban Life." This allows the reader to navigate with greater ease through these vibrant, evocative and often moving pieces.
In Sandra Ramos O'Briant's wry essay "The Green Addiction," the writer recounts how her paternal grandmother "didn't like it that Daddy had married a Mexican." After her parents divorced and she left Texas with her mother for New Mexico, she was introduced to the exquisite pain of eating chile, something her non-Mexican relatives "didn't have the cojones to deal with."
And in Nancy Mairs' moving "Writing West," we get a taste of what it is to live and travel in the Southwest in a wheelchair. Her prose is spare, tough and unsentimental.
Pat Mora's "Voces del Jardín" is a homage to both the legacy and pleasures of her walled garden, which, she notes, is a "design indigenous to Mexico ... brought to the Americas by the Spanish ... a tradition Moorish and Mexican."
And, of course, there are descriptions of nature, wild and free, as in Sandra Lynn's "Poem in Which I Give You a Canyon": "Notice that this canyon is comprised of / two strata of volcanic origin: / a dark bitter chocolate and an airy vanilla."
It is a daunting task to describe fully the contours of this anthology, because so many fine writers are represented here—including Joy Harjo, Denise Chávez and Barbara Kingsolver.
What Wildness is This is a fitting tribute to the rugged complexity of the Southwest from the pens of a diverse group of women writers.
[This is shortened version of the full review by Daniel A. Olivas that first appeared in the El Paso Times.]
When I got my copy of What Wildness Is This, an anthology of women writing about land and life in the Southwest co-edited by WWW member Susan Wittig Albert, my jaw dropped. It wasn't just the wide range of writers represented, including Barbara Kinsolver, Leslie Marmon Silko, Teresa Jordan, Naomi Shihab Nye, Luci Tapahanso, Denise Chavez, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer—nearly 100 in all. Nor was it the inspiring range of genres and cultures and languages; nor even the fact that it includes an essay of mine. It was the sheer beauty of the words and the design. Anthologies can be throw-away volumes, catchalls of unrelated writing hastily thrown together. Not this one: everything from the cover photo to the paper, ivory and a satisfying weight, with a lovely ragged outside edge, to the order of the voices and the writing itself, is beautifully done and inviting. Inviting readers to take it home and curl up in a favorite reading spot, and let the pages fall open to sample the voices of women speaking eloquently and passionately for land, culture, self, and place.
What Wildness Is This was just released by University of Texas Press. "Land Full of Stories," a writing conference inspired by the book will take place in San Marcos, Texas, June 7-9, 2007.