cover image The Stories That Shape Us: Contemporary Women Write about the West: An Anthology

The Stories That Shape Us: Contemporary Women Write about the West: An Anthology

. W. W. Norton & Company, $23 (393pp) ISBN 978-0-393-03723-4

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. (Jan.)