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Western Writers

A Chat with Mary Clearman Blew

By Jenny Shank, 4-14-08

Mary Clearman Blew grew up on her great-grandfather’s original homestead, a ranch in central Montana, and she wrote and taught in the state for many years before moving to Idaho, where she is currently a creative writing professor at the University of Idaho.  She has published many award-winning books of short stories, memoirs, and essay collections, and the University of Nebraska Press recently published her first novel, Jackalope Dreams, the story of an aging country schoolteacher who is forced to confront the changes her rural Montana community is undergoing in part because wealthy newcomers are buying the land.  It’s a funny, sad, and keenly observed tale of the old West clashing with the new, and Blew succeeds in busting many Western myths in the process of telling her story.  I recently interviewed Mary Clearman Blew via email about her novel, the myth of the Jackalope, “the West as glitz,” and how the West has “become fashionable” in publishing.

New West: You’ve published many nonfiction books and short story collections, but Jackalope Dreams is your first novel. What prompted you to write this novel?

Mary Clearman Blew: I’d always wanted to explore the possibilities of the longer narrative.  Some of these characters had been in my mind for a long time, and I wanted to give them voices.

NW: What were the distinct challenges of writing a novel as compared to your experiences writing nonfiction books and short story collections?

MCB: Because I’ve been teaching since I was twenty and a single parent most of those years, I’ve never had the luxury of uninterrupted writing time.  Short stories and essays are easier for me, at least, to complete in the odd hours of the day or night.  A novel is longer and more complicated and harder to pick up again after it’s been laid aside.

NW: In Writing Her Own Life, you chronicled the life of your aunt, Imogene Welch, who was a schoolteacher in rural Montana.  In I>Jackalope Dreams, your protagonist, Corey Henry, is also a rural schoolteacher.  What is it about rural schoolteachers that intrigues you and makes for good characters?

MCB: For my aunt, teaching in rural schools was one of the few ways a woman of her time and place could support herself and live independently.  Her salary during the 1930s and 1940s often was less than $70 a month, but one summer, when she hadn’t yet landed a teaching job, she checked at a laundry for work and discovered that it paid a dollar a day.

Teaching in rural schools was considered a safe and respectable profession for women.  Many high schools in Montana offered teacher-education programs so girls could go out to the little schools right after graduating high school.  My aunt started teaching when she was only 16.  A future sister-in-law was one of her first students and has written to me how they tormented my aunt and how little control she had over them.  She had to learn to teach on the job.

My parents expected me to become a rural schoolteacher, as my mother and aunts and both grandmothers had been.  Two factors they didn’t consider:  first, the rural schools were disappearing along with the high school or normal school teaching certificate, and second, when they sent me off to college to get that teaching certificate, I would run off to graduate school instead of coming home to work.  I’ve always wondered what kind of person I might have been if I’d been a good girl and done as I was expected to do, and that’s where Corey Henry comes in.

NW: Why did you decide to use the Jackalope as a recurrent symbol and image in your novel?

MCB: The Jackalope is a Western icon, a joke, a way that Westerners have of assuring themselves that they are insiders and those who don’t get the joke are outsiders.  In the novel, Corey Henry comes to wonder who the joke really is on.

Beyond the joke, the Jackalope is a monster, an unnatural being.  In the Latin, monstrum might be a monster in our sense of the word, but also it might be a portent or a prodigy. 

NW: I enjoyed the technique you used of having Corey’s dead relatives’ voices always speaking to her.  How did you come up with this idea?

MCB: Don’t we all hear the voices of the dead?  Don’t we all carry a parent’s voice in our heads, and doesn’t that voice carp and criticize and, let’s hope, occasionally offer a kind word?

NW: Is the character of Loren Henry, the sharp-tongued rodeo hero and rancher, based at all on your own father, who also was a rancher?

MCB: Loren Henry and my dad have some characteristics in common, particularly their devotion to a past West that they mythologized.  As a rancher, my dad was in a vital occupation during WWII and never saw service, although one of his cousins was in the Montana National Guard that was called to New Guinea and experienced dreadful casualties.  And while my dad broke horses and ran cattle, he was never a rodeo cowboy.  If he had known a man like Loren Henry, I think he might have admired his dignity but would have thought him too extreme in his views.

NW: It seems like many of the characters in Jackalope Dreams move to the area seeking to escape the problems of the modern world.  For example, the lawyer John Perrine moves from Denver because he can no longer stand the crime.  But plenty of crime follows him to Montana.  Do you think some people come to Montana because it symbolizes a romantic idea of the unspoiled West to them?

MCB: God yes, and if they have money enough they move into gated communities to keep themselves safe from local crime and also from the dangers of local people ruining their romantic idea of the West.  Religious withdrawal from the world is the reason for some of these communities, like Almost Heaven in my part of Idaho.  Often there’s no real community, only a collection of expensive vacation houses that are occupied a few weeks out of the year for the skiing or the upland game bird hunting.  Prices of real estate go up and jobs are mostly in service and long-time residents can’t afford to live near Big Sky or Sun Valley or Jackson Hole on a waiter’s pay.

NW: Ariel Doggett is a troubled thirteen-year-old at the center of many of the plot complications of Jackalope Dreams.  Although she comes alive as a real person, do you also think she serves as a symbol for the problems that beset children today?

MCB: I raised a foster daughter who was fourteen when I took her in.  Between my daughter and her various social workers and probation officers (I joke that I’m the only person I know who ever knitted a pair of bootees for a pregnant probation officer), I had my eyes opened to just how wretched a child’s life can be.  I wouldn’t call Ariel a symbol, but I would say that there are way too many kids who have to deal with problems like hers.

NW: In Jackalope Dreams, wealthy outsiders are moving into rural Montana and driving up land prices, while pioneering families are forced off their land.  Did you base this on observations you’ve made in a particular area?

My first experience with the West as glitz was up in Whitefish and Polson.  Since then I’ve visited Jackson Hole and Sun Valley and McCall, Idaho, which I would describe as located on a lake entirely surrounded by money.  Recently I listened to two of my friends reminiscing how they sat on a riverbank near Coeur d’Alene thirty years ago and talked about what a sleepy, quiet little town it was.  The West today seems a long way from where I started, as I’m reminded by Barbara Mandrell’s lyrics:  I was country when country wasn’t cool.

NW: All of your books have been set in the West, and you have participated in many anthologies featuring stories and essays set in the West.  Do you consider yourself a Western writer?  If so, what do you think that means?

MCB: I suppose I’m thought of as a Western writer.  I’ve lived in Idaho for twenty years, but I’m thought of here as a Montana writer.  All the label means to me is that I write about a place I’m centered in.  Not to place myself in exalted company, but I’m reminded that Faulkner wrote about Mississippi, Willa Cather wrote about Nebraska, William Trevor writes about Ireland, Alice Munro writes about Ontario.  The danger of the regional label is that it can be dismissive, or exclusive, or more about territorial rights than literary quality.

NW: You have been writing and publishing for decades.  Has the publishing process changed over the years?

MCB: Since the days when a New York editor told Norman Maclean he never published anything with trees in it, the West has become fashionable, along the lines of the fashionable South in the days of the Fugitives.  This is to the Western writer’s advantage, up to the point where she’s expected to write about the West as New York editors imagine it to be.  Meanwhile, as New York publishing has become more and more a corporate enterprise, the university and other small presses are publishing fine novels and essays and poetry.  The slicks—The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s—aren’t reading unsolicited material, but literary quarterlies and journals are bringing out a wide array of short stories and essays and poetry from various regions.  Students of mine in the past year have published their work in Shenandoah and River Teeth and The Black Warrior Review, to name a few.  Also, many more quarterlies and journals are based in the West than there were when I began publishing.

NW: What are you working on now?

MCB: A collection of essays about my experiences as a very young assistant professor at Northern Montana College in the 1970s.

Mary Clearman Blew will read from Jackalope Dreams at Chapter One Book Store in Hamilton on April 23 at 7 p.m.

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