What Wildness Is This: Women Write about the Southwest

What a treat! Not only are the stories and poems inside the cover delightful, passionate, insightful and/or all of the above, but handling the book itself is a delight. From the picture on the cover connecting past and present to the decaled edges and the weight of the pages, What Wildness is This is a pleasure to handle. Inside, riches flow. Here you will find women who pour out their passion for, and their connection with places in the Southwest. The places vary from solitary canyons casting protective shadows from the blazing sun through open prairies with dancing grasses to city backyards shielding home-nests of families from urban chaos. The women who write these words write with deep feeling, fine writing and connections to Nature. These are not mere descriptions; in many cases, they are love songs. About half of the almost 100 writers in Wildness were chosen from a call for entries by Story Circle Network, a national organization dedicated to helping women tell their stories. The others are previously published writers including Joy Harjo, Terry Tempest Williams and Barbara Kingsolver. In the introduction, Kathleen Dean Moore writes, "the women write with a heady freedom from definition and expectation, exploring the folds and shadows of the whole geography of language and land, heart and mind." The writings are arranged into themes such as: how we live on the land, our journeys through the land, nature uncovered in urban life, our kinship with the animal world, what we hope to leave behind and other related topics. Cindy Bellinger says it well in her "This Land on my Face", "It seeps under your skin, coursing through your veins like footsteps following old mountain trails. Before you know it, the land settles on your face. And you know you're home." There are so many delicious quotes that I can not include them all. The poetry, much of it written by First Americans, soars. As I read, I look into my own backyard, and nod my head in harmony with the writer. I remember the trails I've hiked in Bandolier National Monument in New Mexico. I am given the feeling of having been where I will never, in this reality, go. And, I, always a city gal, can taste the honeysuckle, experience the dust and feel the sweat provided by vivid memories of rural life in the Southwest, What Wildness is This takes you not only deep into the Nature of the Southwest but also into the natures of many selves. Ry reading this anthology, you will find yourself visiting your own inner landscape as well. by Judith Helburn for Story Circle Network Book Reviews www.storycirclebookreviews.org reviewing books by, for, and about women

As the title makes clear, the editors gathered the works of women writers who have ventured to put the spirit of the Southwest into words. The editors wisely divide the 100 or so essays and poems into eight categories such as "Geographies" and "The Nature of Urban Life." This allows the reader to navigate with greater ease through these vibrant, evocative and often moving pieces. In Sandra Ramos O'Briant's wry essay "The Green Addiction," the writer recounts how her paternal grandmother "didn't like it that Daddy had married a Mexican." After her parents divorced and she left Texas with her mother for New Mexico, she was introduced to the exquisite pain of eating chile, something her non-Mexican relatives "didn't have the cojones to deal with." And in Nancy Mairs' moving "Writing West," we get a taste of what it is to live and travel in the Southwest in a wheelchair. Her prose is spare, tough and unsentimental. Pat Mora's "Voces del Jardín" is a homage to both the legacy and pleasures of her walled garden, which, she notes, is a "design indigenous to Mexico ... brought to the Americas by the Spanish ... a tradition Moorish and Mexican." And, of course, there are descriptions of nature, wild and free, as in Sandra Lynn's "Poem in Which I Give You a Canyon": "Notice that this canyon is comprised of / two strata of volcanic origin: / a dark bitter chocolate and an airy vanilla." It is a daunting task to describe fully the contours of this anthology, because so many fine writers are represented here -- including Joy Harjo, Denise Chávez and Barbara Kingsolver. "What Wildness Is This" is a fitting tribute to the rugged complexity of the Southwest from the pens of a diverse group of women writers. [The full review first appeared in the El Paso Times.]

Although I am a New Yorker by birth and now live in Pennsylvania, I am drawn to the Southwest by the stories in What Wildness Is This. Years before, I was attracted to that part of the country by the conferences and retreats held by Story Circle Network. When I opened the book, I turned first to the stories by women I've met through this organization. Then I searched the index for stories about places I've been: the Texas Hill Country, Austin, Phoenix, the Grand Canyon. Then I read about Utah where my husband lived for twelve years before we met and a place that remains a part of him. Almost three hundred women sent personal stories or poems for this anthology and fifty pieces were chosen. The editors then added another fifty pieces of previously published work by writers such as Diane Ackerman, Barbara Kingsolver, Terry Tempest Williams and Naomi Shihab Nye. The result is a hundred pieces exploring the relationship of a woman's life experiences to a place, the American Southwest. The works are arranged in eight sections: the way we live on the land (A Land Full of Stories;) our journeys through the land (Geographies: Journey Notes;) nature in cities (Home Address: The Nature of Urban Life;) nature at risk (Earth Is an Island: Nature at Risk;) nature that sustains us (The Sustaining Land;) our memories of the land (The Key Is In Remembering: Growing Up On the Land;) our kinship with the animal world (Eagle Inside Us;) and what we leave on the land when we are gone (What We Leave Behind.) The poems, essays and memoirs I read drew pictures for me, taking me back where I've been and showing me new, yet unseen landscapes through the writers' eyes. These word artists showed me what the Southwest looks and feels like - big dangerous snakes; hot, humid summers; endless wind; parched desert; small deer and short trees; distant horizons. We only have one of those in Pennsylvania - the humid summers. This is a rough, un-softened land unlike the Northeast where I've lived all my life. The writers' words made me want to see the river that flows through a canyon, to watch the blackbirds, to feel the "muscular wind" of Linda Joy Myers' Oklahoma ("Song of the Plains."). I want to eat tortillas in Santa Fe like Sandra Ramos O'Briant ("Chile Tales: The Green Addiction.") My ethnic and immigrant roots pulled on me when I read about the hope of a young Jewish couple in Davi Walders' poem "Big Spring, Fifty Years After." A line from her poem "Jewish Oil Brat" could serve to summarize the whole book: "...courage rooted deep here, gushed high and fierce here..." Reading, I pictured oil wells and gas wells and dogs in the yard. I felt what it was like to be the part-white child in an Indian school like Leslie Marmon Silko in "Not You, He Said." I laughed at the cunning of Patricia Nordyke Pando's grandmother in "Dumplings Come to Town." So many other images remain with me: Ironwoods and cactus and dust and "the occasional elm." The lives in these stories and poe