The Stories That Shape Us: Contemporary Women Write About the West : An Anthology - Hardcover

Lambert, Page

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393037231 ISBN 13: 9780393037234

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1995

Synopsis

An anthology of twenty personal essays by contemporary women writers ranges across cultures and regions of the West, proposing a revised narrative of the Winning of the West more appropriate to a world facing harsh limits and ecological disaster.

About this title

About the Author:

Judith Freeman, the author of Red Water, A Desert of Pure Feeling, and Set for Life, lives with her husband in Los Angeles and Idaho.

From Publishers Weekly:

This collection of some 25 essays about the West, most original and all written by women, is sharply detailed and evocative. Many of the pieces capture a pivotal point in the life of an adolescent; most are ambivalent about the treasured Western myths of new frontiers and pride in rugged individualism. Judith Barrington ("Poetry and Prejudice") is a poet-in-residence at a small-town high school in Oregon. A lesbian, she is shocked when her most promising student pens, "Go out and find all the gays and kill them." Yet her reaction dismays her. Several of these authors are descended from pioneers and have returned to their ancestral homes. But, as Mary Clearman Blew cogently points out in "The Unwanted Child," sometimes one must escape to find a life of one's own. Deeply moving essays by Mary Crow Dog, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and Mary Helen Ponce focus on the prejudices against Native Americans, Japanese and Mexicans. The background may be South Dakota, Utah or California, but these fervently expressed feelings about family, gender and search for identity are universal. Jordan is the author of Cowgirls; Hepworth teaches literature at Lewis Clark College in Idaho.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0393037231
• ISBN 13: 9780393037234
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 393
• Editor: Jordan Teresa, Hepworth James R.