Words on a Page

A Story of Bigamy in the Marriage-Mad Fifties When she is made executor to the estate of family friend Eva Eldridge, the author comes into possession of a large collection of letters which Eva has carefully bundled up and stored away.  Kept with such conscientious orderliness, the letters and check stubs and notes scribbled on the backs of envelopes form a personal archive, and one gets the feeling that Eva, who never spoke to Simmons about the deep mysteries of her life, had saved these letters, purposely, so that one day someone might make sense of her life.  Eva’s story begins in 1958, when she is working in a cigar stand in the swanky Hotel Boise.  She is slim and attractive, and glamorous in the way that women of that era seemed to be: her long hair is swept into a roll at the back of her head, her dress is nipped in at the waist to accentuate her figure, and ‘open-toe, open-back high heels’ add to her statuesque beauty.  She is also ‘deeply, deeply ...

The Shaping of a Western Identity photo by Karen Murray In June 2010, The Crab Creek Review sparked debate on a number of academic blogs about the validity of regional classifications of contemporary writers when it published an interview with the novelist David Guterson.  Responding to a question about ‘Northwest writers’, Guterson, who was born and has spent most of his life in Seattle, and whose novels are mostly set in the city and its Northwest environs, was vociferous in refuting regionalism as a valid contemporary concept: There might have been a time when geography and culture converged in such a way as to make the regional identification of artists a worthwhile practice…. Today, with the exception of the handful of essentially isolated cultures remaining on the planet, human beings have a limited relationship to place, and this is, of course, reflected in the arts.  To be a ‘Northwest writer’ in the 21 st century simply means that, like billions of peo...

During the past year, I have been attempting to gather all available information about William Clark’s supposed Nez Perce son, variously known as Tzi-Kal-Tza, Halahtookit, Al-pa-to-kate, Daytime Smoke(r), and Son of Daytime Smoker. The name I find the most poignant, however, the name that links into my research on personal identity, is the one he is said to have called himself – Clark (Moulton, vol 7, p 241). * The idea for my project started to emerge about ten years ago, when I visited the Nez Perce Historical Museum in my hometown of Lewiston, Idaho. Among the exhibits were collections of artifacts from early white settlers, the Nez Perce tribe, and the Lewis and Clark expedition which passed through the region twice: in September 1805, on their way to the west coast; and in May 1806, on their return journey to St. Louis. As I grew up in Lewiston, I thought I knew the history of the area fairly well, but tucked into a display of beaded gauntlets and stone tools was a piece of i...