Local Arts & Culture
(2009-11-11)
Mary Clearman Blew: "I could never have predicted a west with gated enclaves. I would never have predicted a fashionable west."
Or people walking around Moscow with cell phones glued to their ear. Today, Blew's brother-in-law and her nephews stage train robberies for tourists near the land where her family homesteaded in the early 1800s. There used to be real hold ups in central Montana. Now tourists pay nearly a hundred bucks for a prime rib dinner and a good show by her relatives.
Mary Clearman Blew: "And they come tearing in you know in these outfits that they've put together you know and shooting off their guns. And my brother-in-law had a sawed off shotgun and he was getting more fun out of that especially if it got dark the blaze that would come up from it and every window just filled with a camera."
Now at 69, Blew remembers a west that wasn't so in vogue - a time when you wouldn't get caught dead wearing cowboy boots to school. Her West is one where you hauled your own water, entertained yourself and worked for everything you had.
Mary Clearman Blew: "It was such an isolated life that I was brought up in."
No cell phones. No Internet. No TV. Blew was riding horses before she could walk. Her father put her to work on his small cattle ranch doing everything from training horses to stacking hundred pound hay bales.
Mary Clearman Blew: "He had no sons so he brought my sisters and me up as boys and put us to work."
Blew would have her head in a book when she wasn't working .
Mary Clearman Blew: "And I would venture to say that I read my friend Flicka nine or 10 times. I would often get to the end of the book I hadn't read before and turn immediately to the first page and start reading over again."
She didn't have enough books. So her answer was to write some.
Mary Clearman Blew: "And so I would write some and my rancher grand mother being thrifty would write letters to relatives on backs of stories that I had started and hadn't finished and she'd occasionally get inquiries from her relatives."
Blew never imagined the life she now has. It wasn't part of her parent's plan.
Mary Clearman Blew: "They had high expectations of me but not as a professor and a writer but as a cowboy and a rural school teacher and they were disappointed in me."
Disappointed because Blew had no intention of following the Montana norm this idea that ranch girls would get just enough education to teach in a rural school until they got married. Blew wanted nothing more than to be a professor and go to a real university. She ended up at the University of Montana.
Mary Clearman Blew: "I got through the first year and met a young man and married him and instead of dropping out to put him through college kept going which caused a lot of ripples in those days. And then I had a baby nine months after we were married and I still kept going."
Blew had another baby before she moved the entire family to Columbia, Missouri to get her Ph.D. in English. She says growing up on the ranch and learning to be a boy, helped her forge a career in academia.
Mary Clearman Blew: "You know we were taught don't ask whether you could do it or not just go ahead and do it. And I have thought sense that it was not the worst training in the world for a Phd program especially in the 60s when before affirmative action took hold when it was harder for women in graduate programs and harder for women beginning to teach."
Her academic career took her back to Montana and eventually she found her way to Moscow where she teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho. Now some forty years later, Mary Clearman Blew is turning some of her early essays about teaching at a state college in rural Northern Montana into a book.
Mary Clearman Blew: "I guess my life long educational experience is what it comes down to. The working title is This is not the Ivy League'."
That book is due out sometime in 2011.
Mary Clearman Blew: "But what I really want to do, I've got a failed novel that I want to go back to."
It's a bit of a departure from her memoirs about her family in rural Montana or her experiences as a professor. Blew wants her next work of fiction to be about country western music.
Mary Clearman Blew: "Well it's just got to do with this woman who's been in a country western band and followed a bunch of guys out of town with a country western band and what happened to her then and what happens to her when she comes home."
This novel, like most of her stories, will pull heavily from her family and her western roots. Mary Clearman Blew plans to enlist her son-in-law's help this time. He was a steel guitarist in a country western band. © Copyright 2012, idaho
