No Country for Old Women: “New Stories from the Southwest”

By Jenny Shank, 3-28-08

New Stories from the Southwest
Ed. D. Seth Horton
Swallow Press, 285 pages, $16.95

Swallow Press recently published the first edition of New Stories from the Southwest.  This collection, which editor D. Seth Horton drew from stories that appeared in hundreds of literary magazines in 2007, is diverse and diverting, including a variety of writing styles, taking place in Arizona, New Mexico, west Texas and the southern parts of Utah, Colorado, Nevada, and California. 

The thirsty, dusty landscape is a common feature, and some familiar Southwest icons turn up, such as the famous Ansel Adams photograph in Alan Cheuse’s story “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941,” which imagines the picture’s genesis, and the St. Francis of Assisi church in Ranchos de Taos, frequently depicted by Georgia O’Keefe and Ansel Adams, which plays a role in Matt Clark’s “The Secret Heart of Christ.”

Clark’s story is one of the most striking in the book, a meandering metafictional novella, in which Clark tells several stories at once—that of a college teacher supervising students on a summer campus in Taos, the story that the teacher writes, about a woman who oversees a church’s relic, and bits of advice on story structure, flights of fancy, and observations mixed in.  The narrator faces some complications—as he writes, “Confession and clarification: I’m gay.  Nobody out here knows this.  The administration would be very unhappy to learn of my aberrant lifestyle.”
At first I was wary to wade into this metafiction with all its stops and starts, but each of Clark’s asides, journal entries, and notes about the students’ petty complaints were so astute and entertaining that he quickly won me over, and by the end of this 60-page adventure, I was genuinely saddened to turn to the contributors’ notes and find that Clark had died in 1998 at age thirty-one.

It may be just a coincidence unrelated to the southwest setting of these stories, but many of them feature ailing or dead mothers, wives, and grandmothers.  There’s Maury Sandoval’s dead wife in Alan Elysevitz’s “Hermano,” the loss of whom has left Maury cranky and hostile to the wishes of the community.  Charles Kemnitz’s “The Fifth Daughter” features a woman suffering from cancer caused by uranium mining on the reservation where she lived.  There’s the unnamed “old man’s wife” in S.G. Miller’s “Old Border Road” who takes to her bed and dies in this bleak story featuring abundant dust and rotten luck with in-laws. 

And in the most shocking dead mother example, in Elmo Lum’s “What I Never Said,” a family van trip through the southwest goes horribly wrong, and ends with a father instructing his three sons to help bury their mother in the desert.  I enjoyed this story for the way it began as a tale of a typical experience—car trouble and disagreement among the parents on a road trip, told from the perspective of a young boy—and then took a fork in the road to some unexpected, macabre territory.  Judging from the stories in this collection, the southwest is no country for old women.  Or even middle-aged ones with a slight cough.

Thankfully, there are plenty of lighter moments mixed in among all these tales of dying women, such as “Cowboys and Indians” by Lorien Crow, which, okay, does take place on the day of the funeral for the narrator’s grandmother, but features two winning and believable characters: the narrator, who is Navajo, but looked on with suspicion by her family because she lives on the east coast, and her cousin David, who “is six-foot-six, owns four motorcycles, and works for one of the big oil companies.” Upon her request, David whisks his cousin off on his Ducati to escape the stifling atmosphere of post-funeral formality, and they cruise the beautiful landscape together and end up at a bar.  There’s some great dialogue, such as David’s line, delivered during a reflective moment, “I’ve seen the world, but I just can’t seem to get the fuck out of here.”

I loved John Tait’s “Reasons for Concern Regarding My Girlfriend of Five Days, Monica Garza,” which chronicles the brief fling of a divorced, middle-aged, white, community college teacher with a young, beautiful Latina.  The story cycles from the “Reasons for Concern,” to “Notable Insecurities at the Two-Week Mark with New Girlfriend, Monica Garza,” such as “Because I am so white and so lame at times when I’m with her that I feel like Lawrence freaking Welk,” and:

“Because my best friend is named Doug, who is an actuary who is married to another actuary, and they live with two golden labs in a gated community called Idle Pines, and Monica’s best friend is named Analeticia, who is a manicurist who dates a guy I think is named Puppet who drives a chopped Civic with ‘¡Chingalo!’ in gothic script on the back windshield, and both Analeticia and Puppet stared at me with stony incomprehension the only time we met.”

The story is daring in its humor, unafraid seek the truth that can be hidden amid stereotypes. 

Horton doesn’t make it clear whether or not another edition of New Stories from the Southwest will appear every year, but hopefully it will, because it would be a welcome edition from the West to the to the annual group of short story anthologies, such as New Stories from the South, which has been going strong for decades.