Bone Deep in Landscape: Writing, Reading, and Place

Literature of the American West Series

by Mary Clearman Blew

Great-granddaughter of homesteaders in north-central Montana, Mary Clearman Blew grew up in one of the last vestiges of the rural frontier. Her girlhood chores--hauling water and rounding up cattle--were remote even to her town-bred classmates in the forties and fifties. It was a girlhood she now recalls realistically, with affection but without nostalgia.

Many others have written about this land, its people, and its history, and Blew examines portrayals of the West in some of their writing, including B. M. Bower’s Chip of the Flying U and the novels of Dorothy M. Johnson and A. B. Guthrie, Jr. Always her discussions are permeated with landscape and memory.

Her essays interlock nature writing, autobiography, literary criticism, and history in a collection that reflects a woman’s life in the Rocky Mountain West. Blew immerses readers in a landscape of mountains and prairies, blizzards and scorching sun, and in a regional history in which Indians lose the landscape to white settlers, who find the living tough.

Bone Deep in Landscape demonstrates Mary Clearman Blew’s commitments to place as a source of knowing and to living consciously--as writer, mother, scholar, and western woman.

208 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1999

About the author

Mary Clearman Blew is the author of the acclaimed essay collection All but the Waltz and the memoir Balsamroot. She is the editor of When Montana and I Were Young: A Memoir of a Frontier Childhood, available in a Bison Books edition. Her most recent novel, Jackalope Dreams, is also available in a Bison Books edition. She is a professor of English at the University of Idaho and has twice won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, once in fiction and once in nonfiction. She is also the winner of a Western Heritage Award and the Western Literature Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award.