Next Month’s Reviews:  

Cranmer’s Church by the Reverend Chuck Collins, Rector of Christ Episcopal Church, San Antonio, Texas

Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven by Fannie Flagg,  author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café.

West’s reviews originally appeared in Book Shelf, her column for San Antonio Woman magazine written from May 2007 through February 2008. 

Nancy West Reviews…

RISK, COURAGE, AND WOMEN:
CONTEMPORARY VOICES IN PROSE AND POETRY
Edited by Karen A. Waldron, Janice H. Brazil, and Laura M. Labatt.
Trinity University Press, San Antonio. 2007.

We revere women like Mother Teresa, Madam Curie, and the female astronauts, but most of us view their courage as beyond our grasp. Fortunately, editors Waldron, Brazil, and Labatt joined forces to compile personal stories of ordinary contemporary women who found courage to overcome adversity and became, in the process, extraordinary. Karen Waldron writes in the introduction, “We decided to create a literary work where brave women would simply tell their stories. Our goal was to explore why these women took risks….”

The editors found that courageous women embody Sustenance for Living (the title of one section). Poet Naomi Shihab Nye relates how her grandmother, living on the West Bank at age 105, hasn’t eaten for twenty days and is about to die. When she hears that “someone who loves her” has flown miles to see her, she asks for soup. “By summer, she is climbing the steep stairs to her roof to look out over the fields once more. Her family’s love and “the simple love of her difficult place” sustain her.  

Janice Brazil writes of her grandmother who lost a beloved cadet to the war in France. Fifty years later, she has lost another loved one to war. Brazil asks her, “Would that seventeen-year old girl [her grandmother] have danced long into the night if she had known war would be so jealous as to strike out twice against her?”

Her grandmother answers: “It’s been downhill ever since I turned 90,” and laughs at her own joke…. “‘Life is good, Janice’, she says. For a moment, she loses herself to memories.’”

In “Walking Home,” Susan J. Tweit tells of being twenty-five years old and running away from her life. Two years before, she was diagnosed with Undifferentiated Connective Tissue Disease. “The immune systems turns on the sufferer’s own body, producing antibodies that destroy connective tissue” which cushions joints and links muscles, fiber, bones, even cells…elements that allow us “to feel, to think, to walk, to talk, to make love.” There was no cure. She might live two to five years; at the outside, ten. 

Susan decides to take her neighbor’s dog, Sadie, and hike 100 miles in an area she knows intimately from her years as a field ecologist “through some of the wildest country in the Lower 48….” Hiking for seven days, they “would climb two passes, cross the Continental Divide, wade numerous streams, and cross a major river.” Susan needs to “head for a place where she can be alone and hear herself think, hoping to find the wisdom she needs to deal with her illness.” Her marriage has disintegrated, she has left her career, and her best friend says her plan is “stupid and dangerous.”
      
“We both knew she was right.” Susan could face grizzly bears, drowning, lightning strikes, and a flare up of her disease from stress. “I could die out there.” Buoyed by the knowledge that immunologist Polly Matzinger, National Institutes of Health, has developed a hopeful new model of how the immune system works, Susan starts her trek. After several narrow escapes, she and Sadie make it to the last major creek crossing, but at the creek bank, the trail ends. The bluff has eroded and the “creek roars by, high and deep. We’d never make it across.” They hike up and downstream, looking for a crossing to no avail. The next morning, Susan starts back down the trail from which they’ve come, devastated, and runs into a backcountry ranger. She pours out her frustrations. He thinks a moment and says, “There’s a place down the creek that might be shallow enough for you to cross…. I’ve done it on horseback.” Clutching his glimmer of hope, she checks her map and heads for the spot. The creek is far wider than any they’ve crossed. They wade in. Swift water tugs at Susan’s thighs. Sadie is nearly swept away despite the nylon cord strapped to her dog pack and tied to Susan’s waist. Susan’s feet and legs are numb from the cold. They make it across.  

“I had gone to the wilderness,” she says, “in hopes I would hear a voice speaking…a revelation that would lift me out of my misery and banish my illness.” She has been at war with her own body, shutting down her emotions. “If I listened more carefully,” she says, “I might be able to learn what I needed to get a grasp on my illness.” At least she has “renewed her intimacy with the wild that lives deep inside of us.” Her pack lighter now, she and Sadie walk out of the wilderness.
     
Courageous women have Faith in the Unknown. Terri Jones writes, “It wasn’t enough for me to survive cancer. I wanted to triumph over it. In my mind, there was very little doubt that I could do it. You see, I have been blessed in my life and bad things do not happen to me.” She describes the valleys and blessings of her frightening journey. “Do I believe in angels?” she says. “You bet I do!” She offers five survival hints, one being to “Have faith.” She recalls Winston Churchill’s shortest commencement address during Word War II. He said, “Never, never, never give up.”

Terri and Dr. Kathy Safford co-founded WINGS (Women Involved in Nurturing, Giving, and Sharing), “to help women who, regrettably, will follow in our footsteps, but who don’t have health insurance or adequate income to pay for breast cancer treatment.” Net proceeds from this book go to WINGS.

In the section titled The Real Self, Nan Cuba confesses to being a compulsive overachiever. When her son, halfway through his fourth year in medical school, was diagnosed as manic depressive, Nan wanted to help him and his wife pay their expenses. She pulled together twelve creative writing classes, taught by her and a few friends. They met at her husband’s small law office until a nonprofit women’s resource center offered her the use of their space at nominal cost. Her teaching fees paid for her son’s therapy, and she had a home for her creation, which she named Gemini Ink. While her son and daughter-in-law fought his illness, Nan’s creation became her obsession, “a welcome distraction that kept me from panicking about my son.”

From a staff of ten volunteers including Nan and her daughter, Gemini Ink grew to be a major literary force in San Antonio, Texas,  with a paid staff of seven and a fifteen-member board that served over 3000 students and audience members and drew nationally known writers. By October 2000, Nan whizzed through her days, increasing the reach and status of Gemini Ink, for which she received many awards.
    
About every two weeks, she had a migraine and carried a bottle of Extra Strength Excedrin in her purse. On weekends, she went to bed with a wet washrag on her forehead. Her husband brought her meals on a tray. By 2002, she knew she had to get out of her job. She found funds to attract a new director and plunged through the important details that a national search, staff training, and an audit entailed. 
     
Six months after she left Gemini Ink, she finished the novel she had nurtured intermittently and started a second. She understands now that the source of her compulsive creation of a place devoted to writing corresponds with her own need for literary expression.

While the reasons for starting unpredictable journeys aren’t always clear, the initiator’s courage frequently leads to unexpected benefits.
 
Dr. Maya Angelou summed up the cost of courage in her interview shared as preface for this book: “Years ago, I deduced that it costs everything to win, and that it costs everything to lose. So, if I didn’t take a risk, if I didn’t take a dare, then I would lose everything…I wish women could see themselves free.”
     
Readers might expect that eighty-one pieces of prose and poetry written by thirty-six authors has to produce a sappy hodge-podge of personal angst. This is not true of Risk, Courage and Women. This book imparts courage to the least of us. Don’t miss it.       

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