In language reminiscent of the wild beauty of Big Sky Country, the author gives readers a glimpse into the lives of her family as she traces their connection to Montana's natural and human landscape. Beginning with her great-grandparents' arrival in 1882 in Montana--still a territory then--Blew relates the stories that make up her life. Illustrations.

Midwife Mildred Harrington is riding back home one evening after checking on one of her pregnant neighbors when she stumbles upon an injured stranger. She soon realizes it's her old sweetheart, Pat, from country school-and he may not be telling the full truth about how he was injured. Set in rural Montana in 1925, Waltzing Montana follows Mildred as she grapples with feelings for Pat while also trying to overcome the horrific abuse she suffered as a young teenager. Ultimately Mildred must decide whether to continue her isolated life or accept the hand extended to her. Inspired by the life of midwife Edna McGuire (1885-1969), who operated a sheep ranch in central Montana, Blew has turned the classic Western on its head, focusing on rural women and the gender and diversity challenges they faced during the 1920s.

At age seventeen Tam Bowen left her Montana home in disgrace after giving birth to a son out of wedlock. After working her way through college, she settled in Portland, Oregon, where she began making a living for herself and her son by writing soft-porn romance novels. Now, at fifty, Tam is estranged from her son and deeply depressed. She has returned to the cabin in Montana's Big Snowy Mountains where she grew up, to ponder the choices she has made in her life. At first dismayed by the many changes she finds in the mountain community, Tam gradually makes a few friends and becomes increasingly involved in the lives of two troubled teenagers, who draw her back into the horsemanship she turned away from so many years ago. For Tam, horses provide a sense of stability amid the uncertainty of her new-old life and expose the vulnerability of all the folks who struggle with the vagaries of a tough place.

Melding past and present into a moving narrative, Mary Clearman Blew imaginatively recreates the dry, dusty, sparsely populated Montana of the early homesteaders and of her aunt Imogene's young womanhood. Striving to understand why her aunt chose a life alone, away from the ranch where she grew up, Blew evokes the rigors of her own growing-up years. We witness her yearnings for independence and escape; her own choices regarding marriage, divorce, and single parenthood; and the poignant reconnection with her daughter. A rich and unforgettable blend of intimate reflection, diaries, history, and local legend, Balsamroot reveals one of our top writers at her most personal and compelling.

The short fiction of Mary Clearman Blew, set in Montana, reflects the brutality of the region as seen in the mountains, the severe weather, and the personal hardships of the people living there. In each of these seven stories, the characters, driven to hurt or be hurt, reflect a range of violence--in their interaction with each other, their relationships with animals, or the effect the harsh environment has on their lives. Whether the turmoil is external (the snowstorm in "Lambing Out") or internal (the sisters' memories in "Paths unto the Dead"), its toll on the person touched is clear and sharp. The result is an acceptance of--even a love for--the cruelty of the harsh environment.

Fire has always gripped our imaginations. To quote Mary Clearman Blew, ""It warms us, frightens us, and entertains us."" In Forged in Fire, Blew and coeditor Phil Druker have assembled twenty gifted writers who explore the element from various perspectives.Living as they do in a state that nearly every summer faces the threat and challenges of wildfire, Idaho writers are exceptionally well equipped to recount firsthand experiences. Featuring essays by both established and novice writers and including two prize-winning stories, Forged in Fire covers topics from escaping forest fires and smoke jumping, to fighting house fires and making campfires. The authors deal with human responses to fire - fear, courage, sadness - and the environmental response of regeneration. As Americans grapple increasingly with the proliferation of forest fires and the environmental consequences, this collection has an especially timely resonance. ""These dramatic, self-reflective, and descriptive essays represent new understandings of fire and fire awareness in the American West."" - Andrew Gulliford, author of Sacred Objects and Sacred Places: Preserving Tribal Traditions Mary Clearman Blew is the author of Writing Her Own Life: ImogeneWelch, Western Rural Schoolteacher. She resides in Moscow, Idaho. Phil Druker writes for general audiences in natural history, natural-resource management, earth science, and geology. He resides in Moscow, Idaho. This book sponsored by the Idaho Humanities Council

B. M. (Bertha Muzzy) Bower was the first woman to make a career of writing popular westerns. And what a career it was--more than sixty novels published from 1904 to 1940, the year of her death, and still more posthumously. In the western orbit, Bower was--and still is--a star. Her first, "Chip of the Flying U," lays out a ranch in Montana and introduces the Happy Family, the bunkhouse gang that reappears in her later books. Chip is the typical woman-shy cowboy, but he is also a gifted artist (reputedly, Bower based the character on Charles M. Russell, who illustrated "Chip"). Della, a doctor, is the young woman who disrupts his solitary life. The result as a quality ranch romance. "Chip of the Flying U" was a great success that led to several movie versions, one of them casting Hoot Gibson as Chip. Today's readers who grew up watching westerns on television will appreciate Bower's cinematic style. After living much of her life in Chouteau County, Montana, she moved to Los Angeles, close to the movie industry that increasingly fascinated her.

Diana Karnov came to Versailles to uncover secrets. Teaching college history in remote northern Montana offers the opportunity to put distance between herself and her overbearing great-aunts and to uncover information about her parents, especially the father she can't even remember. At first overwhelmed by the brutal winter, Diana throws herself into exploring mysteries her aunts refuse to explain. Eventually, she befriends several locals, including a student, Cheryl Le Tellier, and her brother, Jake. As Diana's relationship with Jake deepens, he discusses his Metis heritage and culture, exposing the enormous gaps in her historical knowledge. Astounded, Diana begins to understand that American narratives, what she learns about her father, and the capacity for women to work and learn is not as set and certain as she was taught. Mary Clearman Blew deftly balances these 1970s pressure points with multifaceted characters and a layered romance to deliver an instant Western classic.

Music, whether a Debussy étude or Gram Parsons’s “Hickory Wind,� has been a constant in Ruby Gervais’s life. After Ruby helps fuel a paranoid fervor that spreads like wildfire throughout her rural Montana community, her home life deteriorates. As a sixteen-year-old high school dropout busing tables at the local bar two nights a week, her prospects are uncertain. So when, after her shift one night, the Idaho Rivermen invite her to join their band and head toward fame and fortune, Ruby doesn’t think twice. In Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin Mary Clearman Blew deftly braids together memories of the past with the present, when the Rivermen have imploded and a severely bruised and disillusioned Ruby returns to her hometown to find everything she ran away from waiting for her. In lyrical yet muscular prose, Blew explores women dealing with the isolation of small towns, the enduring damage done when a community turns against itself, the lasting effects of abuse on the vulnerable, and our capacity to confront the past and heal. Throughout, Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin is underscored by the music that forms inextricable bonds between Blew’s fascinating characters.

Lost for almost half a century and never before published, When Montana and I Were Young is a remarkable primary account of a child s life in the early part of the twentieth century. Margaret Bell (1888 1982) was a rancher and horse breaker whose memoir tells the story of a frontier childhood on the high plains of Montana and Canada. Hers was not a typical childhood. Bell was barely seven when her mother died, and her stepfather, Hedge Wolfe, moved Bell and her three younger half-sisters far from their nurturing grandmother to the Canadian plains and a life of extreme poverty, hardship, and abuse. Mary Clearman Blew is a professor of English at the University of Idaho in Moscow. She is the author of Balsamroot and Bone-Deep in Landscape. Lee Rostad is the author of Honey Wine and Hunger Root.

The departed men in her life still have plenty to say to Corey. Her father, a legendary rodeo cowboy who punctuated his lifelong pronouncements with a bullet to his head, may be the loudest. But in this story of Montana--a story in which the old West meets the new and tradition has its way with just about everyone--it is Corey's voice we listen to. In this tour de force of voices big and small, sure and faltering, hers comes across resonant and clear, directing us to the heart of the matter.
Winner of the 2008 Western Heritage Award, "Jackalope Dreams" plays out against the mythology of the Old West--a powerful amalgam of ranching history, Marlboro Men, and train robbery reenactments. This story of the newly orphaned, spinsterish Corey is a sometimes comical, sometimes poignant tale of coming-of-age a little late. As she tries to recapture an old dream of becoming a painter--of preserving some modicum of true art amid the virtual reality of modern Montana--Corey finds herself figuring in other dramas as well, other, younger lives already at least as lost as her own.

In this series of linked stories the child narrator, Veve, cannot fathom all the mysteries of her family's life together, but by watching and listening she pieces together a painful past. Played out against the backdrop of rural hardship and deprivation on the family's Kansas farm, the secret in her father's previous life eventually explains his harsh treatment of the three older children and her mother's bitterness over his countless misunderstandings and slights. When originally published in 1931, a reviewer of "Black Cherries" commented that there is "a sharpness about all impressions in the book, a keenness of sensuous and spiritual apprehension that leaves brilliant after-images with the reader." Another described the series of sketches as "exquisite in texture and so faithful to the childish mind that one derives a warm impression of the imagined young narrator." Grace Stone Coates (1881-1976) spent most of her life in the tiny ranching community of Martinsdale in southwestern Montana. During a seven-year period, twenty of Coates's short stories were cited in the annual Best American Short Stories as Distinctive or Honor Roll stories, and John Updike chose Coates's "Wild Plums" for inclusion in Best American Short Stories of the Century. Coates also published two collections of poetry.

The Curlew's Cry is the story of three decades in the life of Pamela Lacey and a Montana town. Descended from pioneers and the daughter of a rancher, Pamela lives according to her own script, and nothing seems to happen as expected. The world beats on - World War I, the influenza epidemic of 1917, the Great Depression - and local fortunes rise and fall with the price of beef. For Pamela the fight that counts is defined by a sense of independence and pervasive loneliness, by the twists and turns of love and friendship. Tragic events transpire, but by the end of The Curlew's Cry it is clear that, if Montana brings out the best in man, it is also a place where women like Pamela can achieve power and magnanimity.