Montana Women - Softcover

Volk, Toni

3.37

19 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0939149893 ISBN 13: 9780939149896

Publisher: Soho Press, 2003

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Pearl leaves her sister to marry a handsome rancher in Great Falls, Minnesota, where she discovers that she is handy at running the ranch, but her marriage falters and jeopardizes the lifestyle she has come to love

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From the Publisher:

Montana Women is a deeply affecting novel about the inextricable bonds of family and place--how they define and limit us, but also how we can find ourselves within them if we survive long enough. It is a complex story, beautifully and simply told in a voice that is at once as lyrical as the mountains, and straightforward as a prairie.

From the Author:

Where I come from there are two points of view, one from the perspective of dense forest and high altitude, and the other looking up from the flat open lands of wind and prairie. Here landscape of one extreme or another shapes everything: the region, the people and, surely, my writing. All weather reports where I grew up began with "east (or west) of the Continental Divide." It's a polarity that stays with you wherever you go, one I no longer try to shake.

I did not intend to become a writer and certainly not a writer of fiction. Unless one of us kids brought it in, no work of fiction could be found in our home. Our bookshelves held titles like Mysteries of Genesis, Twelve Powers of Man and Reflexology: Stories the Feet Can Tell. More appealing stuff could be found at my friend's: True Romance, True Confessions and the like. When I was 16, I got pregnant, a likely story I suppose had anyone been reading either those magazines or my feet. Otherwise, it was not expected.

Six years later, I was a divorced mother of two living with a friend, a divorced mother of one. We were poor, as young, uneducated, divorced mothers usually are, so poor that once our gas was turned off for nonpayment. I came home to find my friend heating water on the stove and running it down the hallway to the tub. She was not in a good mood. To lift her spirits I said, "Marlene, one day we'll look back on this and laugh. You'll see. Someday I'll write about it." It was a strange thing for me to say and I did not believe I ever would.

I did want an education though, and I borrowed Marlene's car and went to the local high school to inquire about something I had read about, a GED test. The woman there said to give her a minute to see if they had such a thing. They did and I sat down to take it. I passed.

Several years later I signed up for my first college class, Introduction to Philosophy. The nun in charge was quick to point out that this would be too difficult for me since I had only completed my sophomore year of high school. To annoy her, I enrolled anyway. Wasn't Mysteries of Genesis preparation for something?

I am always haunted by longing on the prairie, a feeling that I can only compare to grief. So after a failed second marriage, I packed up my three children and moved from the prairie to the comfort and security of Missoula where there were mountains in any direction I looked. I took classes at the University any chance I got. It took me a while to get through. But one day I was startled to realize I was actually going to graduate from college! I began wondering what I might accomplish if I were to invest all the time and energy I had been putting into relationships into me. I had never gotten involved with anyone who had encouraged me or my interests. I knew that for my own well-being I had to sort of quit men--rather like quitting drink. I was a journalism major at the time and the only writers I knew in Missoula were men. I hadn't the confidence to try to write fiction there. I had to leave Montana.

In Portland, Oregon after the company I worked for went broke, I wandered around trying to figure out what to do next. In a bookstore I saw a flier on a writers' conference. I sat down to write an entry and, as an afterthought, I decided to try for graduate school too. I had heard of the Iowa Writers Workshop and I applied.

My first story at Iowa was about a woman who took her husband to lunch to tell him she had decided to give up sex. She found it tedious. Reactions were mixed. One of the men actually pounded the table and yelled at me. It was then that I committed to writing. That someone took my writing seriously enough to pound a table impressed me, cheered me on.

I used to believe certain things about writers. One of these was that if you ever got too happy, it would ruin your writing. Another thing I used to think was that you had to be a little crazy to write, maybe a lot. I'm not crazy enough, I worried. I have since come to see that, no, you do not have to be crazy to write and that, yes, I am crazy enough, indeed!

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