Walking the Twilight: Women Writers of the Southwest ed. by Kathryn Wilder

Abstract

Reviews Walking the Twilight: Women Writers ofthe Southwest. Edited by Kathryn Wilder. (Flagstaff, Arizona: Northland Publishing, 1994. 220 pages, $14.95.) Too often, anthologies intended to reveal something uniquely true about a certain region (or nation, culture, gender, and so on) turn out exclusive, even specious, and selfabsorbed . Too often, it seems that only white men are guilty of cruelty, only women are capable of flighty inconsistency, only Native Americans meet life’s hardships with drink and doom, only Easterners callously destroy the land west of the Mississippi, only South­ erners can be charmingly eccentric, and so on ad nauseam. Thankfully, Kathryn Wilder, in search of a specific type of literature from a specific group of writers, never sacrificed good art for the sake of proving some point, for, most importantly, the stories in this new anthology are well written, entertaining, thoughtful, and thought-provoking. What they may or may not tell us about “women writers of the Southwest” is, ultimately, only secondary to what they achieve as works of art. However, they do reveal a great deal about both place and person, particularly the stories which feature narrators—young girls, in many cases—whose strong, true voices describe lifechanging events. There are thirty-three stories in Walking the Twilight, and the authors range from the familiar (including Terry Tempest Williams, Pam Houston, Sandra Cisneros, Barbara Kingsolver, Lucia Berlin, and Linda Hogan) to the less known and emerging. Indeed, this new collection offers a few first publications by writers of much poise and promise. Marilyn Taylor’s “The Man Who Loved the Rain,” for example, the author’s first pub­ lished fiction, is a fine, funny, poignant piece, a first-person account of a young girl’searly years “in the Arizona desert where there were fewwomen, even fewer children, and lots of men.” Another first publication, “Angels,” by Ana Consuelo Matiella, is a haunting, magical, poetic tale about death and hope, family and myth. Walking the Twilight also features beautiful short stories bywriters—Rita Maria Magdaleno and Luci Tapahonso, to namejust two—more known for poetry than prose. Kathryn Wilder has, to be sure, deftly selected stories with convincing and interesting characters who are irrevocably connected to and influenced by southwestern landscapes. These authors eloquently capture the dust of the desert, the cool of the soft rain, the graygreen of far horizons. However, with but one or two exceptions, the stories in this anthology transcend the limitations of regionalism; they reach toward truths that are beyond gender, beyond culture: universals. Walking the Twilight: Women Writers of the Southwest is an excellent collection; it is a book to buy. ROBERT HEADLEY Southern State Community College, Ohio ...