The one and only, Melody Graulich! We meet in Swan Valley, Idaho, set up at Camp Rendezvous, a small mom-and-pop shop with no tent campers but us. Melody herself had planned to throw her bag down under the stars, but late-day rain and her dog, who she thinks might bark tonight, change the plan. After several nights in smokey Missoula, then two smokier nights in Deer Lodge at a so-so motel, we are glad to have been on the road again, coming down Interstate 15 to Highway 26 where we turn east. José and I wonder if we’re headed in the right direction until the Snake River and change to greener land communicate that, yes, this is right. Rain on the horizon is ok if it helps clean smoke out of the air.
Swan Valley, Idaho. Rain Moving through the West Side of Tetons
Melody and I go back a long way, to my time as a graduate student at Brown University. I drove up to meet her for one long afternoon when she was a junior faculty at the University of New Hampshire. Was it 1993, 94? Immediately I knew I had a friend. I don’t remember the specifics of what we hashed through, maybe it was shock that my first paper at a WLA Conference (1993) had been slotted in a panel named “the Anti-West.”
Was I somehow anti-Western? The paper title: “Western Narrative: A Humanist Imperative? Joan Didion and the Category of `Western.'”
That visit in New Hampshire involved a lot of talking (me), a lot of listening (her), and a bond born out of understanding ourselves as feminists raised in California who wrote about women’s issues and the US West. Over almost thirty years of WLA conferences, literary readings, panels, late night drinks, Friday Awards banquets, Saturday field trips . . . Melody has been a fixture of my life at WLA. Many people’s lives. She served a long tenure as editor of Western American Literature (1997-2013), and continues to serve in new capacities on the WLA Executive Council. She has authored and co-authored numerous books and some thirty-five essays, and these days is writing literary fiction including short stories and a couple of novels in progress. For the story “Wishful Thinking,” published in Front Range Review in 2020, see here. Melody’s creative work shows the hallmarks of someone who knows literary and cultural history and has a hankering for extraordinary women artists who buck convention. She sends me a chapter from one novel, I want to read more! The source material is drawn from the historical life of the painter Abby Williams Hill. To read Melody’s full bio, see here.
The Where of Here: Swan Valley, Idaho
Krista Comer. Here we are! We’ve had a rain come through and gone into the van and listened to it patter. And we have Ziggy, Larkin’s dog, which became Melody’s dog. And we’ve been chatting about travel ventures and all this travelling you’ve done solo, and camping alone as a woman. This is fun! To see you here.
Melody Graulich. Yep. Thank you for inviting me.
Krista Comer. Thank you for coming! It’s three hours or so from home, Logan (Utah). And you drove up here even though your daughter, Larkin, is coming home day after tomorrow.
You haven’t seen here since before the pandemic. You’ve also just been to Croatia and Idaho, Boise. You get around! [both laugh]
Melody Graulich. I try.
Krista Comer. You’ve seen the interview questions and we begin with the where of the here. We are in Swan Valley, Idaho. Camp Rendezvous. But the “where of here” is whatever associations you bring too. Why is this place significant to you?
Looking at the Tetons from Camp Rendezvous, Swan Valley
Melody Graulich. We’re looking at the west side of the Tetons. And we’re here partly because the east side of the Tetons was already totally booked at the time we thought about going there.
One of my favorite places in the West is Jackson Hole. For a variety of reasons. I love the Tetons. My daughter was a figure skater. Every March, she had a figure skating competition in Jackson Hole from the time she was maybe seven or eight. We would come up. While she was figure skating, I went to her performances. But when she was practicing, we would go and ski in the park. And there’s a great, lovely cross country ski to Jenny Lake that we did for many years, every year. I came to really love Jackson. When you asked to meet someplace that was important to me in the West, I thought that would be a good place. We’re on the west side, instead of the east side.
Krista Comer. So the “where of here” is a place for you that’s beautiful, that calls to mind “the West” and also the memories of your daughter and raising your daughter and skiing.
Melody Graulich. And my son . . . who always longed for the skiing. And then, this will be of interest to you, the year that USU (Utah State University, Logan) defunded Western American Literature, I decided to do a trip to commemorate my work with Sabine Barcatta (15 plus years!). [Previously the managing editor of Western American Literature, Sabine is currently the Director of Operations for the Western Literature Association, and also runs The Purple Pencil, a business providing copyediting, proofing, translation and other services.] She and I went to a place called Jenny Lake Lodge, which is the most expensive place you can ever go in a national park because to get a cabin, you have to order three course, all-inclusive meals, from their gourmet menu. Sabine and I had a very good time together. We went hiking and we went swimming in Jenny Lake and…it was fun. A nice commemorative moment.
In my mostly positive TripAdvisor review of the Jenny Lake Lodge, the headline is “National Parks Should Not Be Only for the Wealthy.” [both laugh] It’s quite nice, but it’s just silly to have a five-star restaurant requirement to be able to go to a National Park.
Since then, I’ve gone to a couple of writing conferences in Jackson, which they have every summer. I have a lot of good associations with Jackson. I have a favorite place to stay, I have a favorite restaurant, the Blue Parrot.
Krista Comer. So you feel you belong there?
Melody Graulich. I belong there in a vacationing sense, not in the sense that I could ever live there. Partly because it’s so expensive and partly because it’s relatively remote. To get good health care you have to go to Salt Lake, to get specialized good health care. Of course, there’s a hospital there.
Let me say one more thing about Jackson Hole. My daughter originally played ice hockey. But the padding was so constrictive that she couldn’t skate well. We called her Skates Like the Wind. It was unfortunate that I let her get into figure skating, because it’s a very elitist, privileged kind of sport and most of her teammates were very wealthy. So it turned out not to have been the smartest thing to do. And one of my ironic memories about it is my now ex-husband made perhaps one of his most obnoxious comments ever, about the figure skating contest in Jackson Hole, which was that it was a fantasy for pedophiles.
Creepy, wasn’t it? But he wasn’t all wrong.
So, in terms of feminist associations to Jackson Hole, I regret that I let my daughter become a figure skater, though she was going to do what she was going to do. I wasn’t going to try to stop her, she really wanted to do it.
Krista Comer. It goes to the heart of what’s complicated about being in the West and being feminist. Embodying ways of being that we understand to be feminist can be at odds with being “Western.” One has to check one’s feminism at the door in some ways . . . .
Melody Graulich. Another paradox is that part of the reason I could go ski, seven miles into Jenny Lake, a long ski and a really wonderful ski where we saw moose and elk and we once saw an ermine, was that there were all these other mothers of her teammates. I would just assume that they would take care of my daughter, while I went off and did my feminist stuff. And they did. So I was pleasing myself on the backs of other women, who were in fact more privileged than I am, so it wasn’t like I was exploiting anybody, but in a way, the more traditional mothers were enabling my feminist activities.
Krista Comer. Let’s pursue this conversation about outdoor sport, and the feminist moment it was for you to engage in that kind of activity.
Melody Graulich. I never framed it that way at the time, but I associate feminism with liberation and cross-country skiing is one of the most liberating things I do.
Your heart rate gets up. You feel an incredible amount of energy and endorphin rush. It’s outdoors. Looking at the Tetons is really inspiring. It’s beautiful. You’re likely to see wildlife. It’s very free.
Krista Comer. So what makes that a feminist activity versus the activity of women who are athletic? There’s something about it that you’re identifying as feminist. Is it because you’re already a feminist, and see it through some kind of feminist lens?
Melody Graulich. I don’t think I would have put the term “feminist” on it, except in this conversation. When I talk about my daughter and figure skating, I should say she feels that figure skating is freeing, she feels that on ice. As I said, she skates like the wind. It was the construct around that [identity] that made it an anti-feminist activity. Also, the expectations put on her.
Like the first number she did was one of the songs from Pocahontas. There was even wind in the song, as I remember it. But my daughter is South Korean. Putting her hair in a braid and having her play a certain role that fit in with her physicality and what she looked like. That was inappropriate. She was not American Indian. But she could play American Indian, according to her coach.
Later, she skated to Mulan.
She felt empowered by the skating. One of the things I would associate with cross country skiing that’s liberating is speed. And Larkin is a really talented speedy skater. I think that she would probably associate a lot of the physicality and freedom that I associate with cross country skiing, with figure skating, although she is a good skier too, so she might associate with that, too.
Krista Comer. So continuing to pursue this, the idea of freedom here, implies a flip side, right? Maybe you could say what it… what it…what it pushed away. Just not… I’m not digging for personal details about difficulties for you personally, but I just mean, what, what’s on the other side of that?
Melody Graulich. Why do you associate freedom with pushing away?
Krista Comer. Well, so you don’t?
Melody Graulich. I don’t think so. Maybe I could go there by thinking about what is the opposite to freedom?
Krista Comer. That’s what I was meaning, the unfree.
Melody Graulich. Which would be restriction and constraint, enclosure, lack of movement, being on a leash, things like that.
Krista Comer. All of which, that kind of skiing, and the outdoors, was not about.
Melody Graulich. I’m trying to think about the title of my first book that I never finished. It had liberation in it. It wasn’t the liberated self but it was…. the West as a place of liberation. And I definitely associate that with feminism and with the West. Maybe I have a blinkered, pre-framed way of thinking about women moving west as a way of liberating themselves from social constrictions.
I’m not naive. I’ve read enough women’s history to know that it was not true for ordinary working class women that the west was a place of liberation. But the kind of women that I’ve tended to write about who were artists and writers, privileged women – like Mary Austin, or currently Abby Williams Hill, or even Mary Hallock Foote — to a large degree, I think, experienced the West as a place to trade a corset for pantaloons. A debutante ball for a Snake Dance, Katy Cory, is a woman who did that. I have tended to write about those women who came West as a place of opportunity for them to not have to lead traditional women’s lives. And again, I want to reiterate that I well know that that was not true for the women who were forced to follow their husband on a quest for gold in the Gold Rush or to get land and, there is Old Jules [chronicled by Mari Sandoz] who he abused all his wives. There was plenty of constriction and abuse, and lack of freedom, in women’s lives in the West.
I feel somewhat guilty about that I always chose to write about the ones who had the good life.
Krista Comer. What might a liberation program look like, for you, in your work on women artists, versus a project about women’s writers? There’s a distinction. Those are separate thinking projects, separate thinking-forward projects. Would you say more about this “liberation project” we are talking about, or your feminism as linked to liberation.
Melody Graulich. These largely successful women who liberated themselves in the West, whether they used the term feminist or not, though many of them did, had feminist ideas about how they were going to live their lives. I have been invested in telling that history. I wanted to challenge the idea that history goes like this – linear. Women who successfully broke away from conventional roles often encouraged other women to do so.
I’m thinking of an anecdote about the woman I’m writing about in my fictional work, Abby Williams Hill, who was the first woman who was hired by the Northern Pacific Railroad to paint promotional paintings of Yellowstone. When she first came West in the 1880s, with her husband, who was a doctor and was establishing a practice in Tacoma, she stopped wearing her corset. And her husband, who was quite liberated himself in many ways, came and said, “You know, Abby, people are talking about you. I’m trying to start a practice and, you know, can’t you sort of fit in a bit more?” And she said, “You wear a corset for a day.” And he did. And he came back and said, “I see what you mean.” So that was just one example of her rebelling against social conventions. Eventually, she adopted three daughters and encouraged them to make some of the same choices in their lives, join the Audubon Society, because women were encouraging people to kill birds for fancy feathers in their hats. There are lots of concrete details of women breaking the rules and getting away with it.
Krista Comer. I am struck by the corset example as another about embodiment and refusing certain kinds embodiments. Different embodiments as a possibility or foundation for a liberation project for women who come from east to west. And the alternative terms of maternity, and intergenerational passings-on of a different kind of womanhood, and livelihood (painting) as well as advocacy for creatures, i.e., birds to be more than feathers for somebody’s hat. These might be of a piece, suggestive of a feminist liberation project or feminist liberation vision.
When did you start to think about “the West?” You grew up in California, in Salinas.
Melody Graulich. One of the things that immediately comes to mind is when I applied for colleges. My parents did not go to college. The only colleges in the East I’d heard of were Columbia and Harvard. It became clear to me that I did not know enough about the East to think about going to college there. I’m glad I didn’t. It’s not a regret, but I certainly had an awareness by then of East and West and how ignorant I was. My parents also didn’t travel. At that point, when I was applying to college, I think the only place I had been out of state was Reno, because my parents liked to gamble.
I lived in the same community in Salinas until I was 18, and I was deeply attached to place. I lived out in the country, in the canyons local boy John Steinbeck called “The Pastures of Heaven.” I spent a lot of my time in nature. I’m an only child and I spent a lot of time alone in the natural landscape and I still have a deep attachment to the foothills of California where I grew up. I was aware of that as a Western space. I don’t think I thought of it as California, I thought of it as “the West.”
Melody with her father, Howard, in the San Benancio Canyon in the coastal foothills between Salinas and Monterey, 1952.
Melody with her grandfather, George, in the San Benancio Canyon, 1953. You can read Melody’s essay “Prepositional Spaces,” in which she discusses these photos, here.
I did a lot of hiking. I had a dog. And my grandfather did a lot of hiking with me while I was growing up. They lived next door. My grandparents were part of my childhood. I liked to be outside. One summer my parents moved my bed outside, and I slept outside all summer. You could do that in California, because it almost never rained in the summer.
The other thing I would say is that the only Western woman, historical woman, that I knew about was Dale Evans. Until the Big Valley came on, sometime late in my high school years. Then Barbara Stanwyck and her fictional daughter Audra, who was played by Linda Evans, became my embodiment of wonderful, heroic Western women. And I watched the series again a few years ago, parts of it, and I still think that they’re very satisfying portrayals of Western women historically.
Krista Comer. Place theory teaches us that early ontologies of place, basic orientations, are established so young. There’s a draw, a pull, a calling . . . of certain places to people. You have a combination of the outdoor world, then Big Valley, and the emergent, televisual world of “the West” and strong women in the West.
Melody Graulich. I’ve always thought, and have no idea if this is true, but that I was encouraged to do physical sports, and to be a physical being as a girl more than other women of my generation, because I grew up in California.
Krista Comer. One thing that I have been wondering is, since you’re now Emeritus, five years Emeritus, what do you think about your feminism now? I mean, I’m assuming there’s never a moment for “retirement” from feminist thought or feminist behavior.
Melody Graulich. A lot of my feminism today is associated with thinking about my daughter, who is 27. She declares herself a feminist and is very proud that I’m a feminist. So feminism enhances my relationship with my daughter.
Now that I’m not teaching, I don’t influence students. But I write lots of letters to the editor. The most recent one was about Critical Race Theory. The Utah legislature passed a law against Critical Race Theory while admitting that they didn’t know what it meant. And our State Board of Education supported them. I wrote a letter to every member of the State Board of Education saying that it didn’t represent my views. And I could be said to teach Critical Race Theory at some times in my life, and I certainly wouldn’t stop.
I also have a lot of friends from playing bridge who are older women, several in their 80s. I think of myself as sandwiched between them and Larkin. I think about how cool they are, how they are feminists, and how to be there for them in their lives, many of them are single, and I think about being there to help them.
Krista Comer. It’s about relationships and relationality, and reaching for a broader public.
Melody Graulich. For some years I have fretted about how academic writing is so ingrown, inward-directed to other academics. Historians manage to write books for both academic and general audiences, but literary critics, not really. I have written a number of essays I consider “narrative scholarship,” using personal stories, memoir, within them, but they still ended up in academic venues, read by small audiences. Now I am writing about place(s), often the West, in fiction with feminist slants, hoping to reach non-academic women readers, to let them know that women living 100, 150 years ago lived feminist lives, stubbornly stuck to their dreams. My current dream is to have my historical novel based on Abby Williams Hill’s life show up in national park bookstores with one of her paintings as the cover.