The Wind Books Website

by Linda M. Hasselstrom, with Gaydell Collier and Nancy Curtis


The First Anthology
Leaning into the Wind
Women Write from the Heart of the West

We three editors are ranch women who write and read as part of our daily lives. Gaydell Collier knew as a child that she wanted to live in the West, and has spent most of her life on a Wyoming ranch. Nancy Curtis grew up on the Wyoming ranch she now helps operate, and publishes books from her High Plains Press. Born in a Texas city, Linda dreamed of black stallions before moving to the South Dakota ranch she now owns, though she lives in a Wyoming city.

Whenever we read a new story about the rediscovery of the West-- our home-- as a potential site for recreation, making movies or dumping national waste, we'd shake our heads and go on chasing cows. We chuckled at drop-ins, folks who gallop through the plains and scuttle back to a metropolis, abruptly becoming authorities. "Bungee-jump journalists," Nancy calls them.

We commented to each other that, even though we had new neighbors, few of them helped brand calves or shovel manure out of the barn. We commended ourselves on our ability to laugh, joking that if weren't so busy, we could tell true stories that would astonish readers of those phony stories.


The Decision

None of us can quite pinpoint the moment we decided to create an anthology. But we told ourselves we had to find a way to show readers how the land shaped Western women into unique characters. We wanted to challenge stereotypes that portray Western women as either slim blondes in tight jeans or muscle-bound heifers who look and smell like old leather.

While collections of Western writing are as plentiful as real estate agents, or lice on a sick cow, they're usually edited by college professors. Smart editors write a proposal to several publishers, and wait for enthusiasm, a cash advance, a contract, and maybe expense money. Then they collect material in an orderly way, and stick to deadlines, whipping through the project in a year or two and moving on to something else.

We skipped the proposal, doubting it would impress a publisher who'd never heard of us. We couldn't prove we'd even get material, let alone enough for a good anthology.


The Structure

Separated by several hundred miles, by blizzards and the complicated lives most middle-aged women lead, we conducted editorial meetings by telephone and mail. We wanted writing by ranch and farm women, but-- realizing how quickly the West's population is changing-- we also wanted the views of women whose heritage, culture and opinions differ from ours. We needed the views of animal rights activists, vegetarians, women transplanted from cities, a diverse collection of voices that would become part of an ongoing dialogue about how we ought to live in the West.

After lengthy discussion, we discarded many standard rules for publishing an anthology. No editor in her right mind would accept (shudder) handwritten manuscripts. Most set word limits, require lists of previous publications, demand a particular form of presentation. We decided to invite essays, articles, reminiscences, diary entries, or poetry from women who now live, or once lived, in a working connection with the land. But no fiction; the West has been subject to far too many fictions already.

We chose to ask a series of questions devised hoping to solicit answers from contemporary women who would actually write the book. How would these women evaluate their lives and their place in modern society? What do they think of their companions, both animal and human? What conditions-- weather? isolation?-- affect them most? What do they think when a friend remarks how they're wasting their lives or their educations in a barren land? We wanted women to think deeply and then reveal their thoughts.

Still, we admitted we all grew up in a culture that taught us not to talk much about trouble. How would we solicit writing, persuade women to write to us the truth about their lives?

Instead of sending information to magazines read by writers, we wrote a one-page news release and sent it to agricultural weeklies, to stock-raisers' newsletters, to small-town newspapers, extension agencies, libraries and arts councils. We searched our individual mailing lists for the names of rural teachers who might give information to farm women, some taking classes so they could get jobs as their families lost their land or homes. We limited our search to six Western states-- North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, Montana and Wyoming.


Defining Limits

We wanted writing that was clear, though we were more interested in truth than grammar and writing style. Each piece of writing must be authentic, the writer's personal experience. On the other hand, we wouldn't choose writing because its style, or its author's lifestyle, was politically correct. Content would be our only consideration.

After considerable friendly wrangling, we conceded we couldn't define authenticity, but we'd recognize it. An out-of-region editor might not understand authentic if she were standing in it.


The Stack of Manuscripts

We were astonished to receive written material from 550 women. The submissions varied wildly, even in form: thick photo albums, tattered notebooks recording eggs gathered and sold eighty years ago, bound books containing self-published histories, a life story told in hundreds of handwritten pages. A few women began to write letters to us daily, recalling more details of their lives.

Gathered for our first editorial meeting, we stacked the submissions on a handcart for a photograph: the two stacks reached nearly to our waists, say four feet of material. We made photo-copies of each manuscript and cover letter so we could each read at our own pace.

At first, we told ourselves we didn't have to read it all.

Eventually all three of us read everything submitted, typing the parts we liked best, sending copies to the others. Several times two of us heaved boxes of manuscripts into a car to visit the third, learning to trust each other's editorial judgments in the middle of the job. Reading, we copied good lines, including the phrase "leaning into the wind." We didn't immediately choose it as the title, but our goose bumps told us it was authentic.

We spent a couple of weekends in Gaydell's domain, the Crook County Library in Sundance, Wyoming. When the library was open, we sat at a table in a back room, looking editorial. After closing we scattered, sprawling in chairs or on the floor among the stacks. Reading. Sunrise to midnight. Sometimes we'd gather the others to read aloud, listening to the rhythm of words, strangling on tears as we deciphered arthritic handwriting.

We all know the Western code: Swallow complaints. Don't talk about private matters. We found women who subscribed to these ideas, but we were also startled in ways we hadn't expected. Women wrote movingly of their patience, anger, of hope and faith and pain that struck us dumb. Best of all, these women are not names from the past; they are alive.


Winnowing the Harvest

Gradually, we narrowed the submissions. From five enjoyable essays about watching over first-calf heifers, we had to choose one. Again and again, we copied good lines to use as section titles. These women showed us why they lived in the West, with details that defined authenticity for us. The familiar and the unusual began to blend into a portrait of the contemporary Western woman.

Sometimes a writer's viewpoints differed radically from ours, and sometimes we editors disagreed with one another. We were often intrigued by contrasting views on various subjects. Most of the women have found pride in themselves and their way of life, whatever it is. Their views into history and the future are as broad and varied as their horizons; one may hate the conditions of Western living that inspires another. More than one was frustrated by being called a housewife instead of a farmer, particularly intriguing since some authorities have said Western women are not believers in "liberation." While some own the land where they work, others work for landlords, defining themselves not by gender or ownership but by labor. Together, the women spoke with quiet force, as they always have-- even during the last couple of centuries when historians weren't listening.

Separated by fierce winters and steaming summers, we kept reading, considering, editing, retyping. The more we read, the more vehemently we believed in the women whose voices we heard even in our sleep. We never stopped working on the book, though one year passed, then two.

After five years of reading and a collective century and a half of thought, we possessed a manuscript of a thousand pages, and declared ourselves unable to delete any more material. We began writing to publishers, asking them to look at either a sample of the book, or the entire stack. Several were interested, though all declared the size of the book must be reduced for publishing practicality.

We hated sending rejections after such a long time, but had to do it. Many writers responded with thanks for the inspiration and said they had begun writing memoirs for their children or for themselves. Some women whose work was not used thanked us for considering it, for working to "make this volume representative of the courage, stamina, and idealism of Western women."


Looking Back

We chose material for its content, with little regard for the author's name or where she lived. Still, we worried about a lopsided book, afraid we would take work from too many women in the same region. When we'd finished editing, we had accepted a comparable number of contributions from each of our six states.


What Have We Learned?

For the first four years or so of this job, when one of us mentioned "our next anthology," the other two threw heavy objects at her. Gradually, we simmered down until we only snarled at the mention of another project, and began to think seriously about it. What methods would we keep or change while putting together a second collection?

Here's what we decided:

-- Solicit material as we did for the first book, from agencies, organizations and publications that serve working people on the land;
-- Define the topic very tightly; quickly and resolutely eliminate pieces which do not directly address it;
-- Use the network of women who wrote for this book, their friends and the organizations to which they belong to help spread information about the next project;
-- Broaden the physical range of the book by increasing the number of western states where we solicit material;
-- Keep a running total of the number of contributors from each state whose work is still being considered, so we don't accept an inequitable number from one state;
-- Trust each other to weed out obviously unsuitable manuscripts, reducing photo-copy costs and paper waste. When we were all together, shuffling multiple copies became confusing;
-- Try to find early support from a publisher, so we can schedule and complete the project in a shorter time, and don't have to absorb all the initial expense ourselves.


The Second Anthology
Woven on the Wind
Women Write About Friendship in the Sagebrush West

Notes made as we completed most of the work on the second anthology:

We sent the draft manuscript to our publisher, Houghton Mifflin, on March 1, 2000.

Each of us did some editing by copying manuscripts onto her computer. Then we sent the disk to one central point-- Nancy’s publishing business-- so that all the pieces could be consistent.

We’ve thought that if we were to do another anthology, and still want to accept hand-written manuscripts, we should also accept manuscripts on disk, to cut down on the amount of retyping.

It would also be helpful to number each line of each manuscript, so that in proofreading we could simply refer to “p. 1, line 43.”


The Third Anthology
Crazy Woman Creek
Women Rewrite the American West

Traveling together to promote the first two anthologies at bookstores and libraries, we editors admired miles of countryside, saw hundreds of Real Estate for Sale signs, and noticed malls and subdivisions attempting to encircle small towns. "Like the View?" says one sign; "Buy it!" We discussed the idea that anyone can own nature, and asked how this trend will affect the Western communities where we live and work. Moseying along in Gaydell's truck, Flora the Explorer, spitting dust, we pondered the future of Westerners and wannabes in city and country and began this third collaboration.

From the rainy mountains of Oregon to the corn fields of Iowa, from the wheat fields of Saskatchewan to the arid plains of Texas, we solicited women's writing. For the first time in this anthology series, we relied on technology, e-mailing our call for manuscripts to twenty-two states, Mexico, and Canada's Western provinces. We flung our electronic message out to thousands of individuals and organizations focused on writing, reading, storytelling, journalism, rural life, the West, women's studies, and other fields; to radio stations, newspapers, magazines, publishers, and bookstores; to state and regional arts councils, extension services, and on-line discussion groups.

Nearly four hundred women responded, sending us almost seven hundred answers in the form of essays and poems.

Though writers were not allowed to submit their contributions by e-mail, we did ask for and receive some submissions on computer disks; in certain cases, we were able to transfer documents directly to our own computers without having to retype them, one of the time-devouring chores of the earlier books. We also worked with some writers on their manuscripts by e-mail. We editors met to discuss the anthology only once and conducted the rest of our business electronically, despite computer gremlins and outages caused by floods, blizzards, Wyoming wind, and fire.

We cannot say that "we never left anyone out," but we are grateful also to the women who submitted pieces we are not able to publish. Their thoughts helped shape our perceptions of this book, and their writings inspired agonizing debates. Our most difficult task was deleting pieces we relished, in order to adhere to our contractual word limit.

The third Wind Anthology collects 158 selections in prose or poetry from 153 contributors, portraying diverse communities in twenty-one states and one Canadian province, all west of the Mississippi River.

We delight in the diversity of these texts. Women whose lives differ from ours demonstrate that the West is no fantasy paradise where everyone dresses, votes, and thinks alike. As editors, we must present the truth, because we answer to our contributors. Some of these women are downright cantankerous!

Like the two collections of writing that preceded it, Crazy Woman Creek: Women Rewrite the American West has been created by its contributors. We asked women to draw upon their experiences living west of the Mississippi River, to write a good and true story about contemporary women in any community, whether it's a place, an organization, or a spontaneous gathering. Although men were not excluded, we wanted stories focused on women, and on how their actions affect others. Our yardstick would be, as always, authenticity and quality of writing.

Evaluating manuscripts, we were alert for writing that grew out of strong convictions, whether we agreed with the conclusions or not. If a particular subject drew the attention of several writers, we worked to eliminate repetition and to select the most appropriate account. We loved brilliantly-written compositions, but we also appreciated the work of less experienced writers whose beliefs and emotions were an important component in the collective voice. We asked ourselves how to balance prose and poetry, how much attention to pay to geographical distribution. Eventually, we agreed, the true stories we chose had to possess a quality we call heart.

As in our two previous collections, in Crazy Woman Creek we allowed submissions to determine the content and organization. We might have created several other books from the available materials. As one contributor writes, "making community is like making rag rugs: it requires a lot of stitching-together, a decision not to regard any one scrap of fabric as essential to the design." Every one of us, and all the brilliant things we say and write, are merely scraps in a crazy quilt. Remove one of us, ten of us, thousands of us, and the design will change, but the creation will be braided anew, the gap filled by another rag or ribbon, so that the community remains strong and beautiful.

This book began with the real West and its women, and with writing collected in the two previous books, both published by Houghton Mifflin. Instead of erecting monuments, the writers in these pages demonstrate community connections in story form. We expect the books to provide inspiration for our descendants a lot longer than the average fad does, whether it's a trendy bestseller or even a marble obelisk.

# # #


back to top

---