Literature of the American West Series

Mary Clearman Blew's aunt Imogene Welch embodied the hard-working values of depression-era western America. In Writing Her Own Life, Blew builds a narrative around excerpts from the diaries Imogene kept during World War II while she taught in rural Montana schools and later in Washington State. Through her diary entries we learn of the war's effects on Imogene as she moved from rural, family-centered life in Montana to independent if somewhat lonelier life in Washington State.

After growing up on an impoverished homestead in Montana, Imogene enjoyed the modest comforts of living in a small town in Washington, including electricity and running water. And she experienced the dramatic changes in a school system under stress from the war: separated families, crowded classrooms, and an increasingly mobile population. Imogene's diaries find her exploring a new landscape, worrying about distant friends and family, coping with her newfangled automobile, enduring roommates, and eventually learning to cherish her independence.

Blew explores the transitional experiences of the young schoolteacher and examines traditional and non-traditional ways in which fiction and creative nonfiction recreate the life recorded in the diaries. Moving beyond Imogene's experiences, Blew asks what an inheritance of family stories and text means to a generation of readers who are experiencing transitions different from Imogene's but no less intense.

Bone Deep in Landscape

by Mary Clearman Blew

Published 15 September 2000

Great-granddaughter of homesteaders in north-central Montana, Mary Clearman Blew grew up in one of the last vestiges of the rural frontier. Her girlhood chores--hauling water and rounding up cattle--were remote even to her town-bred classmates in the forties and fifties. It was a girlhood she now recalls realistically, with affection but without nostalgia.

Many others have written about this land, its people, and its history, and Blew examines portrayals of the West in some of their writing, including B. M. Bower's Chip of the Flying U and the novels of Dorothy M. Johnson and A. B. Guthrie, Jr. Always her discussions are permeated with landscape and memory.

Her essays interlock nature writing, autobiography, literary criticism, and history in a collection that reflects a woman's life in the Rocky Mountain West. Blew immerses readers in a landscape of mountains and prairies, blizzards and scorching sun, and in a regional history in which Indians lose the landscape to white settlers, who find the living tough.

Bone Deep in Landscape demonstrates Mary Clearman Blew's commitments to place as a source of knowing and to living consciously--as writer, mother, scholar, and western woman.