Reivews -- The Way We Live



	The Way We Live Stories by Utah Women

St. George Spectrum
Women have a different story to tell about Utah than do men. "Contemporary women aren't content to settle on a man's frontier," wrote Ellen Fagg, editor of the newly-published The Way We Live: Stories by Utah Women.

In the New West women are "staking out claims to the emotional landscape," Fagg writes. Rather than mythical tales of taming the wilderness, women write about "suffering in the promised land and why a woman might stay. Or leave."

"Why I Left Paradise," by Katherine Coles, encapsulates this ambivalence. In her story, hope and alienation compete in the mind of a woman trapped in a small Utah town. As ranchers and environmentalists battle for turf, Coles' character feels aligned with neither. Coles is a professor of English at Westminster College.

Fagg, a former editor of Salt Lake City Magazine, said, "The Way We Live includes contributions from twelve of Utah's best female writers. The most prominent are national bestselling author Pam Houston, Flannery O'Connor Award winner Diane Nelson, Association for Mormon Letters Best Book Award winner Pauline Mortensen and nationally published Patricia McConnel.

Houston, in her story, tells of a young woman on the death of her mother who finds that she "doesn't have any true memories of her parents touching each other." Nelson's story, set against the backdrop of nuclear testing in southern Utah, explores the dynamics of a family caught in the middle of this silent horror. Mortensons's character in "Blue, Blue, My Love is Blue," is a single mother of six. And McConnel's character in the title story, "The Way I Live," is a recluse living on the high desert.

How much of an author's consciousness resides in her characters, readers may ask. Jan Stucki includes an intriguing clue in her story, "Calla Lilies." At one point her character says, "Yes. It was like that. If that's what you think." Stucki is pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Utah.

Fagg's career, after graduation from Brigham Young University, began as a reporter for the Deseret News. She then worked for the New Times in Phoenix.

Private Eye Weekly, Betsy Ross
If you are, as I am, one who likes to give books as holiday gifts, consider The Way We Live, a collection of short stories by Utah women writers, edited by Private Eye Weekly contributor, Ellen Fagg. As the title of the collection suggests, these are stories that explore the physical, cultural and emotional landscapes of 12 Utah women writers.

Eleven of the 12 contributors live in Utah. Some of the authors are familiar, notably Dianne Nelson, whose collection of short stories, A Brief History of Male Nudes in America, won the 1993 Flannery O'Connor award for short-fiction. Also included is Pam Houston, who has published a collection of short stories titled Cowboys are my Weakness. Even more exciting are some of the newly published authors in this collection, particularly Marcelyn Ritchie, from whom we have purchased books at the Waking Owl for years.

The themes of the stories in The Way We Live are varied—love and death, loss and acceptance. If they share anything in common, it is a certain matter-of-factness, an ability to detail emotion almost emotionlessly, a self-assuredness and awareness. In this collection, paradox seems a recurrent mode of expression.

In "Why I Left Paradise," Katharine Coles writes about Small Town, Utah. The story has that almost haunting matter-of-factness to it. Fires keep erupting around town, the same places burning over and over. Everyone knows the targets and the arsonist, yet there is no movement toward stopping the fires. It is as though the small town is resigned to accepting what is, as is. Dawna, local bar owner and narrator, warns her lover, as they step out into the desert, to watch out for rattlesnakes. He replies: "There's a lot of poison out here." And Dawna captures the story in just one sentence "It's everywhere. Here you just know where it is."

In a clever interplay of cards and life, Marcelyn Ritchie offers a view of love from the blackjack tables of Nevada border towns. Double entendre rules, with nothing taken at face value. The simple sentence, "Audrey, just take my hand," is no longer simple—yet it is. And there lies the paradox of this short tale— though the form and metaphor can be quite complex, the subject is very simple. In this story, love is indeed a gamble.

At the end of this collection of stories are biographies of the contributors, and a note from each author, often adding a clue to the meaning of the story. Hallelujah in the case of "Some Body Parts Remember a War." It, too, concerns love, in this case adoration of a singer (k.d. lang, it is revealed in the post-notes) by a young woman who is rejected (actually, not noticed at all). Nicole Stansbury explores the feelings elicited by that rejection, comparing them to her feelings at the bombing of Iraq, perhaps suggesting that such feelings are so intense, that they cannot be absorbed by the mind, but are expressed through body parts.

Not surprisingly, divorce plays in some of these landscapes. In "Mouth to Mouth" by Shen Christenson, a divorced mother of three embarks into a new life, doing all she can to forget images of the old, retreating from Price, Utah, for Berkeley. There are attempts to repress the pain of loss by attempting to revel in what the family has. Legs, for instance, unlike the little girl they encounter on the playground: "See, I said. There are worse things . . . We've all got our legs." Not very convincing.

And in "Blue, Blue, My Love is Blue," by Pauline Mortensen, Lena does all she has been taught, yet inexplicably comes up empty. She helps raise six siblings, has six children of her own, and what does she get, as she says, for doing what she is told? "I got a bad report card and I got kicked out of the house. And now, what it comes down to is this: I have a husband who enjoys sleeping with men better than me and has no intention of paying child support . . ." Lena, however, is a different kind of survivor than the mother in "Mouth to Mouth." Though she has played others' games up to this point in her life, she's ready to live—not to withdraw, not to resignedly accept her lot. She has been beaten down, but is not beaten. One senses a spark in her, a dance awaiting just the right choreography.

Perhaps my favorite of the collection is "The Way I Live," by Patricia McConnel, a mother-daughter story of the usual variety. You know, mother can't understand how daughter lives and daughter echoes the sentiment in reverse, with some resentment thrown in. In this case, daughter lives in a 19-foot trailer in Dead Cat, Utah. Mother lives, and daughter was raised, in Las Vegas. The banter between the two is often quite witty. Witness mother, about daughter living in a trailer in the middle of nowhere: "What if you get seriously ill? What would you do? What about snakes and cougars and tarantulas?" Daughter replies: "The answer to the first one is die, I suppose. The answer to the second is, you live in a city where the black widow population is so dense they have seats on the city council." The grin spreading across one's face only broadens as the gap between the two shrinks, and mother and daughter connect, in the end, in their differences.

In editing this collection, Ellen Fagg has brought together these wonderful stories by women we see in our daily lives. And there is some importance to the fact that they are so close to us, for they experience often what we experience. In describing the way they live, they help us define better who we are and how we live, too.

Network, Marilyn Abildskov
You should know this: Ellen Fagg is a friend of mine. That may make you wary of what I want to tell you about her book The Way We Live: Twelve Stories by Utah Women ($14.95, Signature Books). But you should know this too: I am, like many women, openly adoring of my friends but secretly fearful that they're as flawed as I am. That's why when Ellen came up with the idea to gather the kind of short stories she loves to read—"good old-fashioned yarns," as she puts it—I said, "You can't." Ellen asked, "Why not?" And all I could come up with was some lame response about how the only editors I knew of lived in New York, not Salt Lake City, and lunched in swanky restaurants wearing linen jackets that never wrinkle.

In characteristic fashion, Ellen went ahead. She did so with the same fearlessness that prompted her to hop into an 18-foot U-Haul last summer as she drove from Salt Lake City to the Midwest, where she's now attending the University of Iowa's writing program. She collected short stories from some of Utah's finest writers—some of whom are as yet undiscovered but probably won't remain so for long—and she put them together in a collection so fine that I feel compelled to brag about it, though I've no right to do so.

Some of the writers included in the collection are friends of mine as well, either in person or through the printed word. I've played poker with three or four of them, losing every time. And I've followed the careers of Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness, and Dianne Nelson, whose stunning collection A Brief History of Male Nudes in America won the 1993 Flannery O'Connor Award for short fiction. More to the point, though—and the reason you might want to pick up a copy of The Way We Live—is that all 12 authors have created narrators so resilient, so honest, so appealing, that it's hard not to think of the women on these pages as come-to-life friends.

There's Audrey in Marcelyn Ritchie's "Nevada Border Towns," for example, a young woman trying to navigate her way through the geography of love. Audrey's stuck in some in-between place trying to play the odds in a universally risky business, considering advice like that from her grandmother Rose, who says: "Love is only a decision to stop moving." There's the small narrator of Dianne Nelson's "In the Shadows of the Upshot Knothole," and the baby's slender tornado of a mother and her Tony Curtis-look-alike father.

"I was a year old, just a small flowing river of sounds, words that spun unrecognizable, but my mother and I had complete conversations anyway. She says that she had been waiting her whole life for me. When I arrived, there was a lot for us to talk about."

There's a lot to talk about in Nelson's story too, which is about passion and heat and a mother's desire to protect a child and the kinds of things people are willing to do to escape, even if that means returning. It's also about the seductive power of bright lights—in the movies and on a morning in 1953, at ground zero, when some say the sky turned to liquid from atomic testing.

Seduction is a theme in "Sisterwives: The Order Things Took" by Lynne Butler Oaks, a story as memorable for its use of language as for the larger themes it explores about the weight and comfort of belonging. The narrator is a 15-year-old girl who has parted with her past and now lives near Bear Lake, Utah, the newest wife of polygamist Reuben Powers. Reuben exercises his power to seduce even while teaching the teenager to pick berries—as simple as "slipping off a shoe," he says.

"I watch while Reuben lifts my two hands up. He wraps one set of my fingers around the thorny stem of the bush, holds them there till I get stinging little cuts. He takes my other hand then, the fingers of it, and places them, very lightly, around the berry. And then it is us, together, sliding the berry off its bulb."

Shen Christensen's "Mouth to Mouth" is a startling story that opens with the narrator remembering an event most Utahns recall: the time a woman threw her children off the balcony of a high-rise hotel in Salt Lake City. From there, Christensen segues into a cryptic and aching narrative that hints at sexual abuse, serving as a reminder that, even in this age of Oprah-Sally-Donahue-Ricki-Montel-and-Jenny-inspired tell-alls, there are unmentionable acts of monstrosity. The way the children in this story talk—offering prayers that begin with "Our father who art in heaven" followed by "A fart in heaven?"—begs the question: How can a mother protect her young in a universe where god and goodness may amount to a foul odor and not much else?

Caring for another is the theme of several stories. Pam Houston's "Waltzing the Cat," for example, is about the urge we all have to feed one another, fill each other up, love wisely. And it's about how difficult that is in families, like most of ours, that often get things wrong.

Despite how often things go wrong, many of these stories focus on life's rich possibilities. In "Blue, Blue, My Love is Blue," Pauline Mortensen writes about a divorced woman with no education and six hungry kids. But before you jump to the conclusion that hers must be a sob story, listen to how she explains herself. "Things just happened," Lena says. "But me, I wanted those babies, every one. Every one was a little bit special. A little shaving off the soul of God. And my only regret is that Freddy took off before I had any more." She's the real thing, this girl, and she knows it—a sucker for a slow dance, a woman whose husband prefers men, one smart, sweet cookie who knows she can still swing her hips mighty fine and plans to do so, come what may.

These stories (also by Katharine Coles, Nicole Stansbury, Jan Stucki, Helen Walker Jones, Patricia McConnel, and Shelley Hunt) remind me of something I read a few months ago in the New Yorker about George Sand and Gustave Flaubert. In correspondence, she chided him for his monastic writing life, his cult of "sacrosanct literature." By contrast, Sand took pride in the fact that she had always loved someone more than literature. "I like sewing and wiping babies' bottoms," she wrote Flaubert. "I have a touch of the servant."

The Way We Live has a touch of the servant in it, too, meaning that its stories don't shy away from the messiness that turns up in real women's lives. Stories that trace connections of the heart, as my friend Ellen says, they're about "women who aren't content to settle on a man's frontier."

Taken together, they create an emotional landscape so stark and beautiful it's hard not to want to see more. I've talked to Ellen about that. She looked at me as if I were crazy when I suggested she start another collection right away. Here's one more thing you should know: with writers this good, you'll be hearing more from them.