A woman’s home office is enveloped in books, articles, and scraps of paper from the floor to the ceiling. Literary awards and promotional posters line her walls, framing her in her seat and seemingly consuming her figure into a million words on a page.
Mary Clearman Blew, an emerita professor at the University of Idaho and renowned author specializing in creative nonfiction, fiction and Shakespeare, has a longstanding history with the Pacific Northwest.
Blew, 82, is a fourth-generation Montanan who spent her childhood on a homestead in rural Montana, originally established by her great-grandfather, working as a railroad surveyor in 1882.
Blew described life on the homestead as an experience truly from another time, detailing a lack of electricity, running water, and very little technology, as rural Montana was far behind the rest of the state in terms of industrializing and moving into an era of modern technology. “Raised as a boy” by her father along with her other sisters, in her words, Blew helped her family with homestead chores and duties, and was expected to fulfill the expectations of staying within the homestead as an adult woman as well.
However, Blew, from a young age, felt that she had a different future in mind. From a young age, Blew expressed a talent and passion for reading and writing, often finding “strange reads” leftover from cowboys and other eccentric community members. Publications such as the National Geographic gave her a “picture of another culture,”, and these childhood reads fueled her interest in combining fiction and nonfiction writing to express her connection to Montana and beyond.
Blew went on to study at the University of Montana, receiving her bachelor’s degre , as well as her master’s, eventually earning her Ph.D. from the University of Missouri in 1967. Blew has taught at Northern Montana College, Pacific Lutheran University, Lewis and Clark State College, and, finishing out her career, the University of Idaho. Several of her published works focus on her personal connection, as well as fictionalized accounts, of life in Montana through several different time periods, ranging from 1925 to modern times in a series of works she refers to as a “Montana quartet.” Blew’s influences and inspiration draw from specific Montana experiences, as well as feminist and gender-equality focused schools of thought that came to a head during her career as an educator.
This quartet consists of four separate installments detailing stories of livelihood in rural Montana. Firstly, there is “Waltzing Montana: A Novel,” a fictionalized story based on the life of midwife Edna McGuire. Following, there is “Sweep Out the Ashes,” a story about a woman teaching college history courses in northern Montana in the 1970’s. Next comes “Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin: A Novel,” detailing a young woman dealing with the isolation of small-town life and the powerful bonding capacities of music. Lastly, “Think of Horses: A Novel” will conclude the quartet with its release this fall, chronicling the journey of a romance novelist who returns to her family’s homestead in Montana to restart a life in spite of several challenges that await her.
From a life of rural simplicity to a whirlwind career of success in literature, it is clear that the Pacific Northwest has stayed with Blew through her entire life, enriching her works and inspiring her to create stories that not only express her personal experiences, but realize the stories and perspectives so often needed in modern literature today.
The stories of the Pacific Northwest stretch far beyond Montana, influencing literary professors and authors from the great surrounding states as well.
Scott Slovic, a UI professor teaching courses in interdisciplinary environmental humanities, American and comparative literature, environmental writing, and nonfiction writing, gained his inspiration from growing up in Eugene, Oregon. Apart from growing up in Eugene, Slovic also has a longstanding history with the Pacific Northwest, earning his M.A. from Stanford University in California. Additionally , Slovic has taught in Reno, Nevada, and has been a professor at UI since 2012. However, it is clear that Eugene holds a special place for Slovic when it comes to inspiring his academic teachings and personal works.
“Eugene has always had a kind of strong environmental ethos, a strong sense of its connection, not just to human culture, but to the natural landscape,” Slovic said. “I really grew up in the midst of a community that was strongly oriented toward the nonhuman world. I had a strong sense of personal connection to the physical landscape by growing up in a place like Eugene, and then I was also growing up during the relatively early years of the modern environmental movement in the United States.”
It was not until Slovic moved away from the West Coast to pursue an M.A., as well as a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Brown, that he truly realized his identity as a Westerner, and understood that he wished to incorporate his experiences into his academic journey and writing interests.
“I wanted to be in this kind of environment as much as possible, and also to do a certain type of academic and artistic work that enabled me to think more deeply about these relationships that we have with place,” Slovic said. “In a way, I say it was going into exile, away from the West, and especially away from the Northwest. That made me care even more about this part of the world.”
Slovic’s idea of “place”, as he describes it, derives from the thoughts of Wendell Berry, a writer he often references in Literature of the Northwest, a class he teaches for UI. The idea behind this concept is that one can’t know where they are and can’t know who they are until you know where they are physically or geographically. By disrupting your complacent view of place, as we take for granted what is always around us, one can cause a kind of disorientation or a sense of being lost by going somewhere new and intensifying effort to figure out where you are and who you are.
“I think by studying place literature, you can carry those skills to read place, literally to understand its nuances and its peculiarities, even as you travel to completely different places not only Alaska to Idaho, Oregon to Idaho, but much more distant and different places become increasingly legible to you,” Slovic said. “So, by studying the literature of place, you do learn things that can then apply to your life, regardless of where you end up in the future.”
Slovic’s classes look at a wide range of literary texts from multiple states that are more or less within the Northwestern region. From this, as he states, his students start to realize that there is no single Northwest, and if there are any themes that may exist that define the literature and the culture of the region, their relevance does not stand the test state by state, or even community by community. Slovic says that it is through his teachings that he emphasizes the diversity between each area we may call the collective Northwest, highlighting their unique differences that makes it unrealistic, or nearly impossible, to place it in a box based off of an area of the United States.
“Even in a class like mine with a lot of readings, we can’t capture every single social component, cultural component, geophysical component of the Northwest- there are microclimates and various types of subcultures that we’re not able to capture, but we can produce a kind of smorgasbord of many different samples,” Slovic said. “As we look at this array of different Northwests, we get the impression that there are many different facets to this region called the Northwest and it’s more complicated than it might seem when we say we’re going to define it.”
Mike McGriff, an assistant professor at UI specializing in poetry and creative writing, grew up as a fourth-generation Oregonian in Coos Bay, Oregon, a well-known logging community.
McGriff received his B.A. in English literature as a nontraditional, first-generation student over the course of a decade at his local community college and at the University of Oregon. Afterward, he studied creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers and at Stanford University.
“I fell in love with writing in community college, where I took classes from John Noland, a wonderful and wonderfully unpretentious creative writing teacher and gifted essayist,” Mcgriff stated in an email. “The day he showed me some poems by the Chilean writer Pablo Neruda pretty much changed the course of my life.”
McGriff’s books, including four books of poetry and one book of short stories are, according to him, set in a place that looks an awful lot like the rural America he grew up in, including Oregon, California, Utah, and Idaho.
“Those places, as different as they are, tend to show up in my work as amalgamations of rural spaces and experiences that haunt me,” McGriff stated.
McGriff describes himself as a very particular kind of writer, sometimes described as a regional writer. He tends to read work that does not resemble the subjects of his books, and is often moved and inspired by a multitude of topics and subjects.
“I’m moved by all sorts of things, from depictions of Black life in the Rust Belt (Lucille Clifton) to books alive with postwar European surrealism (Vasko Popa) to the heartbreaking accounts of Native life in contemporary America (Adrian C. Louis) to the stalwarts of Western Literature (Wallace Stegner),” McGriff stated. “Everything excites me, in a way, and I learn so much from writers whose lives, aesthetics, and histories look nothing like mine. In the classroom, I throw everything at my students to see what sticks. You just never know what a student is going to latch onto, so I teach from all over the map.”
McGriff has a close-held connection with his past and current identity as a writer, hardwired from his life growing up in a rural logging town.
“Like any writer worth his salt, I lean into the images that made me who I am: gravel roads, clear cuts, all kinds of broken-down machines and the folks who knew how to fix them. That stuff doesn’t get into my writing intentionally, it just seeps in from my subconscious (or something like that),” McGriff stated.
When discussing the definition and incorporation of themes that relate to the Pacific Northwest in his writing, McGriff does not have a cut-and-dry description for what something must be for it to be considered Pacific Northwestern, or even Western.
“In a way, I think it’s impossible to write about the PNW without writing about the complexities and histories of industry, land use, eminent domain, water battles, and the tensions between the haves and have-nots. People in the West tend to romanticize what it means to be from out here,” McGriff stated. “Everyone I grew up with, regardless of how they voted or what they believed in, was wonderfully contradictory and complicated. People and their stories are wonderfully messy. I lean into the messiness.”
There is clearly something deeply special about the Pacific Northwest that inspires authors of all subjects to express their connection and passion through their works. Whether they find their expression through the region’s homesteading roots, environmental connection or artistic outlets, a common factor between them is that this region inspires through meaningful experiences and memories, and their creative abilities allow us to keep in touch with ours as well.
Katarina Hockema can be reached on Twitter @kat_hockema
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