Local author contributes to compilation of women writers' works

The Rio Grande Valley’s most prolific writer, Jan Seale, has her hand in yet another publication. Seale helped edit What Wildness Is This: Women Write about the Southwest (University of Texas Press, $19.95). The book is a collection of female writers writing from or to the Southwest. The contributions include poetry, prose, creative nonfiction and memoir. Seale worked with three other editors across Texas to complete the project.

“I was invited to co-edit this book as a result of belonging to the Story Circle Network, an organization that encourages women telling their stories,” Seale said.

“The other editors know me as a poet and they needed my skills in that.”

Separated by hundreds of miles, the four editors worked mostly by e-mail, which offered its own unique challenges.

“We got mountains of work done without distractions which often occur in face-to-face editing. The downside was that every time I opened my e-mail for several months, I had from two to eight e-mails on the subject to react to expeditiously,” she said.

Seale is proud of the work, an eclectic mix of writers from all different perspectives. “I enjoyed being part of a larger community, in dialogue with a great many women I may never meet in person, all of us echoing the vastness and consonance of personal experience on the land,” said Seale.

In the introduction, one of Seale’s co-editors Susan Wittig Albert explains the purpose was to “collect not just nature writing, but writing through which the writer revealed essential parts of herself, describing transformations brought about by her experience in the natural world.”

“So much of women’s experience and writing has been situated indoors, mainly because women’s roles have dictated they be inside, in the kitchen and the nursery,” added Seale. “For various reasons, women have been barred from say … the world of Hemingway’s hunters, fishers, and warriors. To experience what is going on in a woman’s heart and mind when she is fishing, or branding cattle, or mountain-climbing: this is exciting and new for many readers.”

Alongside such literary heavyweights like Barbara Kingsolver, Denise Chavez and Gloria Anzaldua, Seale contributes her own written memory entitled “Palapa” to the collection of stories.

“To be a ‘woman writing about the Southwest’ feels regional, in the best sense, as all writing is ‘regional,’ needing setting, background, roots. It also means joining in to celebrate a vast territory of the United States, with its unique cultures, topography, and history,” she said.

Seale’s son Ansen, a professional photographer based in San Antonio, contributed the cover photograph, a stunning shot of rock art framed by transformer towers in the background. “The Press chose it over some softer ones because, they said, they wanted something edgy. It has engendered a lot of comment,” said Seale.

Texas State University is sponsoring a conference, “A Land Full of Stories,” June

8-9 to celebrate the publication of the book. For more information, log on to www.storycirlce.org/WomenWrite/landstories.

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Martin Winchester is a book critic for The Monitor. He is an English teacher at the IDEA Academy in Donna. Send comments to mwinchester@ideapublicschools.org.