Books

Men led the first expeditions to the Southwest. They reshaped its frontiers with war, commerce, politics and grand and often greedy schemes. Men also dominated the first writings about the Southwest's unsettled splendors, its unforgiving climate and its wide array of wildlife. Even today, men's names dominate the list of writers associated with modern descriptions of nature in the Southwest: John Graves, J. Frank Dobie, Walter Prescott Webb and Roy Bedichek, to specify a few.

That dominance is the driving force behind this powerful and important anthology of prose and poems by nearly 100 women who write about the Southwest. While men often see and describe the grand sweep and surge of things, women tend to look much closer to the heart and soul. This is an oversimplification, of course, but the female voices in these works express little fear of standing alone, whether to face frightful creatures or their own isolation and mortality.

They celebrate red dirt, repeated encounters with one owl, and the stubborn survival of persimmon blossoms. And they don't hide their beliefs that even the meanest and deadliest of God's creatures may have feelings, personalities and perhaps even souls.

"Truth be told, one advantage women gain from being traditionally denied membership in the nature-writing club is that they don't have to follow the rules," Kathleen Dean Moore notes in this book's foreword. She is founding director of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word at Oregon State University.

The four editors of What Wildness Is This used e-mail and the Internet to gather works and overcome their Texas geographical separations. In her editor's note, Susan Wittig Albert writes: "When we finished, we saw that the work seemed naturally to arrange itself into eight different sections: the way we live on the land; our journeys through the land; nature in cities; nature at risk; nature that sustains us; our memories of the land; our kinship with the animal world; and what we leave on the land when we are gone."

Some authors in this anthology, such as Diane Ackerman and Naomi Shihab Nye, are well-known, and some works have appeared in other publications. However, the editors thoughtfully have included many essays, memoirs and poems by previously unpublished writers. The Story Circle Network, the University of Texas Press and the staff of the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University helped produce the book.

What Wildness Is This lovingly explores a congruence, the moment when where we are meets who we are, and how everything is connected and changed.

Si Dunn writes about Texas and Southwest Books for The Dallas Morning News.

Women Write About the Southwest

Edited by Susan Wittig Albert, Susan Hanson, Jan Epton Seale and Paula Stallings Yost

(University of Texas, $19.95)

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