Mary Clearman Blew - 1939
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Advanced English 3
Emmett High School, Emmett, ID
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Allison McClean.I. Personal and Professional Biography
Mary Clearman Blew is one author who could, frankly, be called the epitome of the western writer. She was born in Montana and since leaving there has lived in Idaho where she continues to write stories about the life and the landscape of the western terrain where she has lived all of her life. Blew is a well-established author, as well as a literary asset to the arts and humanities of the Intermountain West.
Born December 10, 1939, in Lewiston, Montana to Albert and Doris Hogeland, Blew grew up in pre-TV Montana on an isolated farm, leading her to explore reading and writing. She eventually left Montana to pursue college (McClean). Her attempt to gain a college education was impeded for a short time, however, when she got pregnant from her first marriage at a young age. She divorced her first husband and married again. She had another child by her second marriage. Her husband became ill, however, and before her second daughter reached twelve, he died of a fatal lung disease (Meldrum).
Having written a number of books including Lambing Out and Other Stories, Runaway, All but the Waltz, Balsamroot, Bone Deep in the Landscape, and Sister Coyote, Blew is well-versed in the writing profession and has been publishing for some time. Her writing has been influenced by other Montana authors and the novels of Mildred Walker that she read when she was younger (McClean), but she gives much credit to the influence of William Kittridge. "Bill is a terrific friend and teacher who encourages all younger writers and he encouraged me" (interview). When asked how writing has contributed to her life Blew replies, "Writing is my life. I teach writing, I think about writing, I hang out with writers---and I write, I'm happiest when I'm writing" (interview).
Writing short stories and essays that take place in Montana or Idaho, Mary Clearman Blew's style is a mixture of creative nonfiction based on the realities of her life and her own relationships. Blew says that the most difficult of her works to write was All but the Waltz because she was breaking new ground with the personal essay. "The topics themselves were at times painful," she states, "and I wasn't sure the reading public would want to read about my family, although my editor assured me otherwise" (interview).
In her book, Balsamroot, and in many interviews, Blew states that a "code" of her family was, "Never speak aloud of what you feel deeply" (Peradotto 3D), and when asked how that has played a part in her writing, she says that writing has been a way for her to explore her own feelings and try to understand all those feelings that were never spoken of. In All but the Waltz and Balsamroot , she concentrated on uncovering secrets and hidden layers in family and feelings and says, "Now that I've done it, I've become more interested in other topics" (interview).
Because she writes mainly about her own life experiences and relationships in Montana and Idaho, she writes almost entirely about the past. "I know that once I've written about the past," she says, "I will have changed it, in a sense set it in concrete, and I will never remember it in quite the same way." I asked her why this is, and she replied that she doesn't know why it happens, but you start remembering what you wrote instead of the original memory--and because writing is selective, you've shaped your memory differently than it was in the first place (interview). "Certainly, something personal is being sacrificed," she says, "for when I write about myself, I transform myself just as I do the past. A side effect is that although the writing process itself can be painful, I experience a detachment from the finished essay because I have come to exist in it as a character, as separate from myself as any fictional character" ("Art of Memoir"). She can read her own essays to audiences with very little emotion, but when reading an essay by Annick Smith to a creative writing class, she began to cry because Smith's nonfiction character moved her in a way her own could not ("Art of Memoir").
When writing, Blew tries to set a few hours a day aside to work and concentrate on her current project. She agrees that solitude when writing can be helpful if you can get it, but solitude is one thing and isolation is another. "Writers need to talk to other writers, to get out and about when they are not writing. Real isolation is very destructive" (interview). Unlike many writers, Blew does not keep a notebook of ideas or thoughts to inspire her writing. Not because she hasn't tried, but because every time she does she loses the notebook and then finds it again a few years later and wonders what on earth she was thinking about. She also doesn't have a set amount of time she spends pre-writing and polishing and making a final copy. "Some pieces are very difficult to write, and others seem to write themselves," she says. "I do revise and revise and revise, and I don't exactly keep track. Using a computer, I tend to revise on the screen and keep going over it." Blew feels that the best advice she can give to aspiring writers is "to hang in there. It doesn't come easily. You have to be prepared for rejection after rejection after rejection, and you just have to keep writing and keep writing" (interview).
In 1987 at age 54, Mary Clearman Blew was the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northern Montana College. She was ready for a change and called her friend Bill Kittridge (a Montana writer and teacher) and asked about Lewis and Clark State College in Idaho (where she would later come to teach). He told her that Bob Wrigley was there and that he was the best young poet in the Northwest, so it must be pretty good (Proctor), thus beginning her career in Idaho. A former chair of both the Idaho Humanities Council and The Montana Committee for the Humanities, Blew is currently a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Idaho.
II. Works Cited
Blew, Mary Clearman. Balsamroot. New York: Viking, 1994.
E-mail interview by Echo Savage. 16 April 2001.
"The Art of Memoir." Idaho Humanities. Newsletter of the Idaho Humanities Council. 4.2 (spring 2000); 1+.
McClean, Allison. US Literary Map Project.
Meldrum, Barbara. "Creative Cowgirl. Mary Clearman Blew's Herstory." South Dakota Review. 31.1 Spring 93. 63+.
Perodotto, Nicole. "The Melding of Memories." Lewiston Morning Tribune 17 Jun. 1994. 1D+. Proctor, David. "Circle of Writers." The Idaho Statesman. 2 September 1994: 3D+. Rev. of Balsamroot, by Mary Clearman Blew.
This essay was submitted by a student of Joanne Davis, an English teacher at Emmett High School in Idaho.