Walking the Twilight: Women Writers of the Southwest

by Kathryn Wilder (Editor)

A collection of 33 pieces of short fiction by women who are either from the Southwest or who lived there for a significant period of time, and in whose stories place is nearly a character. The selections come from widely published authors as well new, even unpublished writers. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Genres: Short Stories

220 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1994

About the author

Kathryn Wilder's The Last Cows: On Ranching, Wonder, and a Woman's Heart, is out now from Bison Books, with a starred review from Booklist! Her previous memoir, Desert Chrome: Water, a Woman, and Wild Horses in the West, won the 2022 Colorado Book Award in Creative Nonfiction and a Nautilus Book Award in Memoir. Additional awards include the Western Heritage Award, Ellen Meloy Desert Writer's Award, and others. Wilder holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She writes and cowboys in southwestern Colorado.

P.S. The Fractured Sky is not by this Kathryn Wilder.

Reviews

[Sherry Kadlec · Rating 5 out of 5]

The stories in this book were very evocative of the Southwest-gave me that tingle up my spine and made me feel as if I were right back out there. I am headed to the Southwest again this summer and will be bringing this book to my bookclub this autumn to share with them!

[Karli · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was so good! Stories from women in all different life experiences... from birth to death, to solitude to imprisonment... to sex. It’s all here, all an absolute honor to read.

[Yve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Walking the Twilight is fairly inconsistent, as seems to be the nature of an anthology, but also gets a surprisingly wide range of writing for such a specific topic. Of the thirty-three authors included, I'd only heard of three: Sandra Cisneros, Barbara Kingsolver, and Linda Hogan, and as a result I'm thankful to this book for introducing me to more than a few intriguing new names.

My favorite story is Lisa Lenard's “Acts of God and Mortal Men,” which is the account of the aftermath of a woman’s affair with a Santa Fe priest (who looks a little bit like William Hurt). A close second is Lucia Berlin's "Strays," about a methadone clinic outside Albuquerque.

There's also a lot of stories that are visual and sensual in the extreme, that really stand out for their technique, including “Effie’s Garden” by Teresa Jordan (a surreal sketch inspired by the thin, thin high-altitude air of Wyoming), “My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn” by Sandra Cisneros (a highly inventive and dizzying whirlwind of bright childhood impressions), and "Out There, In The Hills" by Della Frank (which relies on an irregular yet strictly imposed rhythm enforced visually by long spaces rather than the poetic convention of line breaks).

My other favorite pieces are “Coyote Woman” by Sharman Apt Russell, "El Ojito Del Muerto" by Melissa Pritchard, “The Man Who Loved the Rain” by Marilyn Taylor, “A Mean Eye” by Barbara Kingsolver (an excerpt from her novel Pigs in Heaven), “With Fire” by Debra Hughes, “That Horse” by Linda Hogan, “The Mark of the Serpent” by Linda Theresa Raczek, and “Not Just Red” by Jo Ann Freed.