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Buy it now direct from Wildcat Press or from our Amazon.com store - My West: Personal Writings on the American West -- Past, Present and Future  

Patricia Nell Warren is known to most readers as the author of The Front Runner and Harlan’s Race books about gays in athletics. But to those of us privileged to have met her, she is almost instantly perceived and understood as a Westerner. I didn’t meet her until I’d moved to California, but I’ve conversed with her about purely Western concerns: places in Utah and Arizona to visit, how to raise a natural-dry versus a wet garden, and even how we each discovered our own particular “totem animals.” So I looked forward to reading My West and having done so I found myself at times surprised, edified, moved, and admiring. Like this now iconic woman herself, the book is complicated, at times unexpected, well written if usually plain-spoken, and surprisingly interesting.

I don’t mean the last to sound patronizing. But the truth is I’d never expected to read about hay-making techniques and machinery in Montana, or about small wildcats, or about the specifics of gate-making, or even about some of the details of rodeo life --and I’ll bet neither did you.

Because, as Warren makes clear early in her preface, this book is about her West, and not the West of movies and cliche best sellers. If she has any peers in what she knows and writes of, it would be Larry McMurtry, Annie Proulx and perhaps also Louise Erdich. Like them, in her novels, and now in this compendium, she extends our own knowledge deep into this least truly understood part of America.

Warren’s West begins with family, and in a way, this book is an extended love-letter to her ancestors and her precursors. These include Quarra Grant the First Nation woman who built and decorated the Montana ranch home Warren grew up in; Conrad Kohrs, one of the two European immigrant settler-partners who bought the extensive ranch land and became a cattle herder; his wife Augusta (Grandma or Oma), and Warren’s father and brother. These were all people who lived on the land, by the land, and taught young Patricia much of what she knew and much of what she values today and they come through as wise and strong.

Warren has divided her large book into sections—Agriculture, Animals,. Arts, Cities, Politics, Sexuality, Sprituality, Women and Zest. She has been writing these articles for many years, for many differing types of publications and on-line sites, and sometimes the topic is extremely specific (my favorites) such as wild grasses of the West; and as often the topics are more broadly observed and commented upon. There’s a lot of overlap, and some repetition here, but just enough to make you feel comfortable.

I’m guessing that my favorite pieces are studded throughout, but that the section “Women” was the most generally intriguing to me for facts and new information. Here, Warren writes of some of her heroines: Calamity Jane – “that awful girl”, whom she typifies as the anti-Victorian woman. Also Janet Thompson, the first woman thoroughbred horse trainer, and Alice Greenough, who returned women to rodeo via “barrell-racing.” Pat Quillen, who is trying to conserve and save endangered world species of smaller wildcats, is one of Warren’s heroines, as is Earth Thunder, a powerful Medicine Woman who sums up much of what has been lost to us.

Warren correctly sees that Native American Reservations were “prison camps” and that white misunderstanding, fear and prejudice held back First Nation peoples and all but destroyed them.  Her essay on Two-Spirit People (what we often think of as Berdache) should be required reading for any anthropologist, historian, sociologist or GLBT person.

            Warren could just as easily have titled this volume, “My Life,” or “My Essays,” or even “What I Know,”-- it’s that personal, and it’s that variegated, and it’s that diversely interesting. Like the woman herself.

Anyway, any book that gives me new words –“Metis” for mixed blood, as well as “passamanterie” – any book that recalls a fact I’d long forgotten –i.e. that early women’s jeans had zippers on the side, from the waist down! – and any book that gives me new factual information – just too much to point out -- is in Patricia Nell Warren’s own plain spoken writing, a worthwhile book. Warren’s My West is much more than worthwhile.

 ©2011, Felice Picano