Deciding to Remember the Many Strands of Home

 

I’m reading “Spokane Kitten” as we drive north toward Cody, into the Heat Dome. Hot, hot, hot. Excerpted from a memoir in progress, “Spokane Kitten” tells the tale of Linda’s Montana childhood spent working around a mother’s addictions.  José and I will be in Bozeman, then Helena, then Missoula.  It’s been smoky in the Colorado mountains but clearing up after last night’s rain. Wyoming seems all country, long stretches where no cell towers reach.  Lots of lone bicyclers, gear strapped to their bikes. All except one are young white guys with beards.

Watching all that road go by, I reflect on the visual Linda sends that says “feminist Wests” to her – a fountain pen, belonging to Berneta Ringer Doig, Western writer Ivan Doig’s mother. She was a woman who was never not poor, in Linda’s words, the pen a gift from husband-to-be, Charlie Doig. The pen speaks to women’s stories, Linda writes, and also their silencing. For more about Linda’s work and research, see here.

It’s a first for me to visit Bozeman.  I have been to three Western Literature Association (WLA) meetings in Montana: two in Big Sky, one in Missoula.  As WLA President in 2016, Linda hosted one of the Big Sky events.  Memorably the conference was entitled “The Profane West.”  More on that later . . .

Linda greets us with her potential therapy dog Larry – so named because it’s easy for hospital patients to remember.  He’s fun and frisky, an “exuberant little bastard” she says.  We plan to set up our camera in her backyard but take our time getting there because the house stops you with its ingenious renovations and José comments it has the feel of a feminist rest area.  The bottom floor is essentially an art gallery devoted to the work of Linda’s spouse, Kenda Minter. A lot of Kenda’s pieces are crafted from found items, one is a delicate window covering made of wire and embedded colored glass lenses. We seat ourselves outside eventually. Under the shade of a backyard tree, a bird feeder is affixed to an old upside-down fishing net, sans net.  On the side of the garage is a layered decorative wreath made from, when you look closely, very compressed aluminum cans. Linda recalls Kenda tucking cans under her car wheels and saying: hey, on your way out of the driveway, drive over these a few times, would you?

 

The Where of Here: Backyard in Bozeman

Krista Comer.  Here we are in your backyard, surrounded by all this art. All this found art and sculpture and compressed cans . . .

Linda Karell.  Yes, recycled this and that. It is an interesting yard.

Krista Comer.  The imaginative work of Kenda has made all of this to come to life.

Linda Karell.  Literally all of it. I’m the one who drinks wine and appreciates…

Krista Comer.  That is an important role!

Linda Karell.  I sometimes fund plant buying, and I do most of the watering, but I don’t do the hard gardening labor.  Kenda finds it meditative, it’s a version of church for people who aren’t church goers. I’m so lucky. I have a much better life because of that because I don’t think I could do this for myself. I don’t think I would do this for myself.

I’m much more of an indoor person. You were saying, Krista, that the place we do this interview depends on us. And I read these first blogs and people are taking you places and I’m like: Jesus Christ, I can’t take you anywhere!

Like I don’t go outside [chuckles].

Krista Comer.   Well, not everyone takes us places . . . . And what we are doing now is also a way to engage place. We’re talking already about the where of here, and the where of here is in the backyard. But for you it’s also indoors.

Linda Karell.  Yeah, and it’s Bozeman. I’m not someone who, who gets solace from wide open spaces.  [riffing on Gretyl Erlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces.]

It would never occur to me to go on a hike or go camping or something when I wanted to refresh myself . . .

No, I remember camping as a kid.  I lived in a three-generation household. My great grandmother owned the house, so she lived upstairs. My grandfather, my grandmother – and my grandmother had very severe rheumatoid arthritis – lived on the main floor. When my mother was divorced, eventually we moved in with them. And I had a room in the basement. I was tucked very far away from people in my own little room that was completely private. And my grandfather and my grandmother would go camping every summer, he worked for the railroad in Livingston. And they had this little camper. And to me, it just seemed like hauling all of your domestic work out into the woods where you didn’t have the luxury of getting away from it. And I watched my mom do most of that work because my grandmother couldn’t. So they would take us camping and for me as a kid, it was fine. You know, it was getting the watermelon from the creek and running around with my cousins and things like that. But so much of my impression of places links to my mother’s uncomfortable situation in place.  I don’t like to be cold, I don’t like to be bitten, I don’t like to be burned, I don’t like to be wind burned.

A backyard is all the outside I need or want. Unlike what Ed Abbey [in Desert Solitaire] actually did [live in a trailer in Arches National Park as a park ranger], his philosophy of let it be there, you don’t have to go see it, I’m all for that.  I wish there were more restrictions on national parks, I think there need to be more safeguards for those places so that ecosystems and the communities of animals and insects in those places can continue to exist.

But I don’t need to be in the middle of it.  It doesn’t call me or reassure me. I like to be cozied up under a blanket with a book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Krista Comer.  That’s a safe place, a good place?

Linda Karell.    Well, there is no safe place. But I think it’s a good place. Even things like open concept [architecture], I do not get that.  Give me a Victorian house with all sorts of little rooms so I can go be in these little rooms instead of a big space.  I’m not sure what all… maybe it’s my temperament. I’m not sure everything has to have an origin in childhood. But, I’m not a camper, I’m not a hiker. I’m not a skier.  I like to be indoors. And I like this backyard because it surrounds me.

Impressionistically, it’s one of the things I like about Bozeman.  We are cradled in a mountain valley.  In a geographic sense, there’s some deep unconscious soothing, even though the very presence of the mountains itself bespeaks geologic violence, eruption.

Krista Comer.  If I can pause you for a minute.  When you said there’s no safe space, there are a lot of ways to talk about that. . . ,

Linda Karell.  One piece of feminist scholarship that a big impact on me was Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s “What’s Home Got to Do With It?”

Krista Comer.  The conversation about “home.”

Linda Karell.  Yeah. Taking home as a concept, whether it’s identity, whether it’s feminism, whether it’s the West, whether it’s my backyard, whether it’s my living room.  “Home” maintains comfort for us, it’s welcoming, by excluding others . . . so oppressive histories, that’s always the work that is happening. [The Martin/Mohanty conversation] explained for me that the brilliance of feminism wasn’t that any particular strand was correct. Many of the strands gave me language for why my life worked the way it did, and why my mother’s life worked the way it did, language that filled in spaces that were terrified, or terrorizing. . . .

I’ve taught the essay at different times, it’s not conceptually hard to grasp. But I found students have a lot of trouble with it.  They can certainly think about the community, any particular community, and the way that it excludes and includes based on certain identity properties, or beliefs, or locations, or what have you. But they have a great deal of trouble then taking it and applying it to an idea of identity in which I’m not self-evident with myself, I’m not the same self that I was in the past.  I won’t be the same self that, even as I narrate to you a certain story, I’m leaving out things.

Krista Comer.  It’s kind of impossible.  Narrative gives you that expectation [of continuity] which it always frustrates.

Linda Karell.  Right. The momentous pleasure of that could be not that we have lost something – the Freudian trope that we’ve lost something that we’re never going to recover and so we’re endlessly searching for the lost object and substituting things for it. But that the loss itself is interesting. That the losses, the gaps are part of what constitutes us. And so it keeps me curious.

I think of Bozeman. Because I’m fortunate to be here. It’s exactly where I want to be.

I left home when I went to graduate school.  When I went there (University of Rochester), I was never coming back, that was as far east of West as I could possibly get.  And I was delighted to be there because I’m never coming home.

And when I grew up, this was where… this town, which is a completely different town now in many ways, was where we went for prom dresses.  If you couldn’t get to Billings which is really the big city, this is where we came. This is also where we came to see Christmas decorations.

Krista Comer.  So when you were in Rochester, you thought you wouldn’t come back?

Linda Karell.  Yeah. Because at that point in time, what was there to come back to? A very small railroad town in Livingston that the railroad had left, it wasn’t the artistic center that it has become. And small towns . . . I find them really frightening.  I survived growing up in one. And then I went as an undergraduate to MSU, where I teach now, but got out.  When the opportunity to come home happened, my mother and I had been estranged for a number of years because I was queer.

I felt if there was any hope for anything to happen with that estrangement, I had to come home.

Krista Comer.   Did you want something to happen? Because one of the things that you’ve written about is “deciding” to remember your mother. I’m so moved by calling it deciding. It suggests a willingness to go somewhere that one has decided to go, otherwise one isn’t going to do it.

Linda Karell.  Yeah, my mom had done things over the years that were indications of how much she loved me, even in the midst of her having a sort of gut repulsion.  For instance, I had a girlfriend in graduate school, and Mom sent us a double blanket. You wouldn’t think much of that. But it’s like she said . . .

Krista Comer.  I accept you, I’m going to help you be comfortable together.

Linda Karell.   Yeah.  It’s so tangled, because coming back to Bozeman. . . I had been a kid coming over to Bozeman for fun things like getting a prom dress.

Krista Comer.   Did you get a prom dress?

Linda Karell.   Oh, yeah. Store’s closed now. But I got a couple of dresses over here.

Krista Comer.   Did you go to prom with someone you liked?

 

Linda Karell.   I dated a gay guy the last two years of high school and that was wonderful. I have such a fondness for him. And a couple of proms I went to prom with a guy that I had a crush on. And those were not as much fun as going with my gay boyfriend who was my best boyfriend ever.

Krista Comer.   [Laughs.]. Tell me about the dress. Do we have any pictures of the dress?

Linda Karell.     I could get you pictures.  One was a Gunne Sax blue dress, and one was … lots of ruffles.  Yeah I went to four or six proms.

Krista Comer.  Four to six?

Linda Karell. Yes, I think I went to most of them.

Krista Comer.   How many proms are there a year?

Linda Karell.  Two a year. Yeah there was the Christmas Formal and the Spring Prom.

Krista Comer. Oh my god, I didn’t realize that I was cheated out of that many opportunities for a prom dress

Linda Karell.   No kidding. [both laugh]

I don’t even know how my mom came up with the money . . . at the time it was $50 for a prom dress.

Bozeman is also the place where I went to live because Mom kicked me out of the house. Bozeman is where I got my undergraduate degree and first encountered feminism. Bozeman is where I came back to as a professional. It’s been so many…I’ve been so many selves here and it’s been so many places to me and all of those places allow me to think about that…the disunity of identity, the lack of safety in having any particular identity or any particular place, if what you need it to be is to remain stable for you.  Because it’s going to be a different place and you’re going to be a different person in it.

So literally, I’m talking under the crabapple tree that my mother-in-law bought for me that my mother’s ashes are under.

Krista Comer.   Your mom’s ashes are right here.  [Pause.]

Can we talk a little bit about the American West and whatever ways you understood yourself to be a part of the American West?

Linda Karell.  I think that my relationship with the West is fairly antagonistic.

Deliberately so. Because it goes back to that idea of however you define it, it’s, it’s excluding. I mean, it seems for my queer identity… You know, when I moved here, there was “another lesbian” on the faculty, and she talked about “the lesbian community.” And I was like, what the fuck is that? Because my experience of the lesbian community or the gay community was always that I didn’t fit. I was too femme, I wore lipstick, I wore makeup, I liked high heeled shoes, I wasn’t butch enough, because those were the sort of operating identities when I was really coming out in the 1980s.

In any community I’ve ever been in, I feel this way about academia, about WLA, in any community I’ve ever been in, I’ve always felt like I don’t fit in somewhere.

And yet as you get older, what you come to like is the not-fittingness of it, is the way that it allows a certain wonderfully dark humor, and a certain vantage point of seeing-

Krista Comer. The Profane West — the title of the WLA Conference in which you were  president.

Linda Karell.  Yeah, and honestly, Katy Halverson came up with that name.

Krista Comer.  Oh, she did? I didn’t know that!

Linda Karell.   She did, she was like, “You should name it this,” because, Katy doesn’t swear. But she indulges me.

Krista Comer.  Well, I’m kind of disappointed in the amount of swearing that’s happening in this interview [Linda laughs]. Yeah, I was led to believe that there was gonna be…

Linda Karell.  You might want to keep your camera on later when we’re having dinner. Keep it recording.

Krista Comer.  You know, I think it should be for the record. But you know, it’s your interview . . .

Linda Karell.  We have a fucking moron as a governor, how’s that?

Krista Comer.  Ok, ok.  That seems like the minimum swearing required for that feeling.

Linda Karell.  Not fitting is a sort of Montana identity. It’s very rural [and there is a sense that] I don’t need to be in your business. And of course, you can’t come from a working class background and feel like you fit in academia, you just can’t. There’s something essential about how it works. It’s never disclosed to you, and you’re always-

Krista Comer.   Yes, it’s an owning-class institution. But it’s never called that or you don’t think it’s that because it seems so progressive.  So it’s confusing.

Linda Karell.   Right.  That’s one of the reasons I swear so much in class.  It’s a signifier of working class. And it also works extraordinarily well with students [laughs]. . . . So there’s a pleasure in that stance that comes from my very ambivalent position as working class, not desperate working class, but someone who never anticipated going to college.

Krista Comer. Really?

Linda Karell.   Oh, yeah. I got bored.  I was a legal secretary. My boss was a lovely man, who owned property that constituted his income and he did very little legal work . . . . I had nothing to do. He would say, here’s the information, hand it to me on a yellow pad. I would write the will, I’d get $2.75 an hour to do that, and he’d get $300.  But I was never going to be able to buy a car on that wage.  So I went to college. But college wasn’t on my radar.

I got to the point when I was living in Livingston, where I would make to-do lists and things on my to-do list would be like, read a magazine. I literally had nothing.

I’m constantly surprised by… I open my mouth, and I end up someplace else. And that feels to me very rooted in where I’ve grown up. And in the sort of inside talk of working class people that we try to . . . code switch.

I just love it when people underestimate me and think I swear because I’m crass or I’m not educated or something like that. It’s actually a strategy.

Krista Comer.   You submitted a visual [of Ivan Doig’s mother’s pen] and you read that visual as much about articulating a presence as about silence.

Linda Karell.   Any story we have is always going to be partial. A half story. That doesn’t mean it’s not the very story we need to survive at the time. But if we are fortunate, and if we’re curious, our stories will change. And we’ll look back at our earlier stories and say: Oh, that allowed me believe this or allowed me to do that.

I think writing about collaboration, authorship, which I’ve done across a lifetime, was part of this idea . . . . My first book, Writing Together/Writing Apart was all about the topic of the constructedness of “the author.”

I’m really interested in dismantling this idea that we are somehow unified and known to ourselves. Because if that were true, Holy Fuck, that would be boring. And more than anything else what feminism gave to me is the joy of being able to analyze something. I love to be able to think through, I find so much fun in a really deep satisfying way to be able to think.  Why is something like it is? Why am I feeling that thing? What sort of things go into the parts of my mother’s story that I can’t ever fully know, what difference does it make?

 

Friendship Gates, Dinner, “Spectacle”

Our interview finishes, Kenda arrives with dinner fixings, and we sit in the backyard around a table made artful with cut wildflowers from the garden.   The dog Larry comes out to join, and amidst the human hospitalities, and our good dinner, we learn of the neighborhood’s Friendship Gates, which open between yards so now the neighbor dogs too can visit with one another. Suddenly Larry has friends, running between yards, circling around our feet.

As a last gift, Linda asks Kenda to bring out a master work, “Spectacle.”   I have since been showing around a photo of this piece of feminist art, wondering how we can show it at a future Western Literature Association Meeting!