The Western Lit Blues

I don't like to gut fish. I grant you that a trout's fluorescent-colored guts are interesting to poke with a stick, but only for a short time, and only once in a great while. Mostly they are just slimy and smelly and get your hands all germy, which, if you are camping, say, in the Colorado mountains, is an annoying problem, because stomach ailments at 8,000 feet are never fun. There, I said it. I'll even repeat it: I do not like to gut fish. Usually I have better things to do. You may now dismiss me from the Cool Western Women's Club. I'm a writer who writes about the West and the people out here. You know, the tough outdoorsy folks who populate Western books. People who hunt, camp, ride horses, and love to gut fish. Men and women who live on ranches or fall in love with ranchers. Or the folks who have a kayak on their Subaru and suntan marks on their feet from Chaco sandals, and the people who fall in love with suntanned, Subaru-driving kayakers. I write about them because, in part, I'm that sort of person myself. I'm a ranch kid who now owns a Subaru and has crisscrossed suntan patterns on my feet all summer long. I write what I know and what I see. But I have to say: Even though I am similar to my fictional counterparts, I am also not them. There's more going on with life out here in the West than is often rendered in books. We Westerners are more complex and worldly and unique than what I sometimes find on the page, frankly. And as a writer, a reader, an observer, and a half-assed cultural critic, I'm starting to get a little worried...more