Desert Hawk Books

 

Writing for Her Life
The Novelist Mildred Walker

By Ripley Hugo

 

Cloth Cover

 

"Written with heart and intelligence, eschewing sentimentalism, Writing for Her Life will be an invaluable resource for all fans of Mildred Walker and for all who are interested in the complex nature of a writer's creative process." - Molly Gloss, author of Wild Life and The Jump-Off Creek.

"In this elegant memoir, Ripley Hugo explores both the work and the life of her baffling, accomplished mother. The result is a character study so provocative and mysterious that it feels like the core of a novel that Mildred Walker herself would have been proud to write." - Deirdre McNamer, author of My Russian.

"Lucent and densely satisfying, a gift equally for the casual reader, the writer, or the more serious scholar of Walker's texts." - Claire Davis, author of Winter Range.

"You are either a Mildred Walker enthusiast, as the Philadelphia Inquirer once declared, or you are missing one of the best writers on the American scene. " As Mildred Walker's daughter, Ripley Hugo was in the latter category. This biography of the author of thirteen celebrated novels is also Hugo's search for the writing life of a mother known to her children as a socially correct middle-class doctor's wife rather than as the ambitious, imaginative, often struggling novelist she was as well.

Drawing on family memories, letters, diaries, reviews, and, in particular, the notebooks that Mildred Walker (1905 -1998) kept for each novel, Hugo fashions an absorbing account of how her mother's characters emerged in the landscapes that she visited again and again: Vermont, the Midwest, and, most frequently, Montana, the setting for the classic Winter Wheat. Alongside this developing picture of a writer at work - shaping her contribution to western America's literary history over half a century - Hugo shows us the proper mother and social creature as carefully and consciously crafted; between the two lovingly detailed portrayals, we glimpse the depths of a life thus divided.

Ripley Hugo is a poet and a faculty affiliate in the English Department at the University of Montana. She is the coeditor of Richard Hugo's essays, The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet's Autobiography.