Western Book Roundup

Laura Pritchett’s Call to Dive in Dumpsters and Ditch Western Women’s Stereotypes

By Jenny Shank, 4-22-09

Just in time for Earth Day, the University of Oklahoma press is publishing Going Green: True Tales from Gleaners, Scavengers, and Dumpster Divers edited by novelist Laura Pritchett, a woman with a keen eye for useful trash.  Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman calls it a “spiky collection of personal essays about going green the old-fashioned way” and says “these tales from the scavenging front are unexpectedly philosophical, confiding, funny, and affecting.”

If you haven’t heard of Pritchett, it’s high time to check out her work, which includes an award-winning novel (Sky Bridge) and story collection (Hells Bottom, Colorado) and two nature-focused anthologies that she’s edited (Home Land and Pulse of the River).  (If I were a river, I’d want her on my side.)

Pritchett also writes for magazines, including Denver’s 5280, which ran a great essay of hers in its April issue called “The Girls’ Guide to Myth Bustin’” (alas, not online).  Pritchett writes that she doesn’t like to gut fish, and so must be dismissed from “the Cool Western Women Club.” (My sole qualification for that club: I like rocks.) She calls for literature set in the West to acknowledge that not all women here have a weakness for cowboys or a penchant for calf-roping.  She writes:

“I write about the West and the people out here, and read books about us, and have to say I’m fascinated by the women I find.  You know, the tough broads who populate the pages of books about the West.  Women who hunt, camp, ride horses, and gut fish—and relish it all.  The women who live on ranches or fall in love with ranchers.  Or the women who have a kayak on their Subaru and suntan marks on their feet from their Chacos, or the women who fall in love with suntanned kayakers.”

Even though she is “in part, this sort of woman…Women of the West are a lot more than what I sometimes find on the page.” Pritchett thinks it’s time to break the cycle of Western books featuring only this rough-and-ready type of woman, which may be tricky, given, as she writes, that Westerners’ self-identities are so bound up in those myths, and New York publishers seem to like them.  Her essay is much more eloquent than my paraphrasing of it, so check it out.

Pritchett has a number of readings planned in Colorado for Going Green, including an April 24 appearance at the Colorado State University Eco-Fair in Fort Collins (2-4 p.m.), a book release party on April 26 at the New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins (3-6 p.m.), and readings at the Boulder Book Store (April 29, 7:30 p.m.) and the Tattered Cover (LoDo, May 2, 2 p.m.).

Speaking of Western stereotypes, here’s a great poem called “Comic Book West” by Keith Ekiss on The Rumpus in which “Smiles reveal rotten teeth, bandits who cavort with the wrong kind of dentists.”

And speaking of stories about Western women, the April 20 issue of the New Yorker includes Dorothy Wickenden’s “Roughing It: What Two Young Women Found in the Rockies,” about two Smith-educated New York ladies who decide to journey to Colorado to become schoolteachers in 1916.  (One of them is Wickenden’s grandmother.) There’s a related audio slideshow on the magazine’s website.

As usual, I am eons behind on my New Yorker pile, and I just read a terrific article by Rebecca Mead in the April 6 issue (”Couplet”) about a couple of Oregon poets, twin brothers Michael and Matthew Dickman.  I really loved the excerpt from the title poem in Michael’s new collection, ”The End of the West,” and Matthew’s poem “Slow Dance.”

The University of Nebraska Press’s blog noted that A. B. Guthrie Jr. has been inducted into the Montana State Historical Society’s Gallery of Outstanding Montanans.  This spring the press will publish Jackson J. Benson’s biography of Guthrie, Under the Big Sky, and offered this “synopsis of why he’s notable”:

“Shortly after graduating from college with a journalism degree, Guthrie took a job with the Lexington Leader, in Kentucky, and worked there for 30 years. In 1944, 18 years after he started at the paper (and when he was 43 years old), he received a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard University, where he wrote his first novel, The Big Sky. Many other titles followed, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Way West, and The Blue Hen’s Chick and Murders at Moon Dance, both of which are available in Bison Books editions.”

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