Let's Hear It: Stories by Texas Women Writers

Front Cover
Sylvia Ann Grider, Lou Halsell Rodenberger
Texas A&M University Press, 2003 - Fiction - 422 pages
"Fig newtons" of the imagination and of memory abound in this marvelous collection of twenty-two stories by Texas women. "Fig newtons" such as the magical moment when a dying grandmother teaches Sue Ellen to dance, the red shoes Tammy the Tupperware Princess dons in New Orleans, the yellow thread needed to put Sue Tidwell's quilt together, or weekends of escape and sisterhood spent in El Paso's McCoy Hotel.

The stories chosen here--and introduced and placed in their historical and literary context by editors Sylvia Ann Grider and Lou Halsell Rodenberger--together weave a story of their own: the story of women's writing in the Lone Star State. From 1865, when a prescient science fiction work was serialized in the Galveston newspaper, until the present, women have written of a different Texas than the stereotypical Wild West of men's writing. Beverly Lowry, Carolyn Osborn, Annette Sanford, Denise Chavez, Katherine Anne Porter, Judy Alter, Joyce Gibson Roach, and others have told a range of stories that capture the range of circumstances, feelings, and experiences Texas women have known and lived.

As Susan Wiltshire Ford writes in "The Quilt," "any grief was bearable if you could tell a story about it or make a story out of it." Texas women have borne grief and laughter, hope and memory by telling a story. Let's hear it.

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Contents

Aurelia Hadley Mohl
49
Belle Hunt Shortridge
73
Mollie E Moore Davis
83
Olive Huck
98
Dorothy Scarborough
115
Winifred Balch Mahon Sanford
135
Katherine Anne Porter
154
Margaret Cousins
165
Annette Sanford
275
Joyce Gibson Roach
293
Sunny Nash
311
Denise Chavez
323
Susan Ford Wiltshire
341
Betty Holland Wiesepape
349
Judith MacBain Alter
361
Jan Epton Seale
374

Loula Grace Erdman
183
Jane Gilmore Rushing
197
Beverly Lowry
214
Carolyn Osborn
231
Laverne Harrell Clark
248
Leslie Jill Patterson
388
Short Story Collections by Texas Women Writers
403
Major Collections of Texas Short storm Containing Stories by Texas Women
407
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Page 164 - She screamed in her sleep and sat up crying for deliverance from her torments. Dicey came, her cross, sleepy eyes half-closed, her big dark mouth pouted, thumping the floor with her thick bare feet. "I swear," she said, in a violent hoarse whisper. "What the matter with you? You need a good spankin, I swear! Wakin everybody up like this ..." Miranda was completely subjugated by her fears. She had a way of answering Dicey back. She would say, "Oh, hush up, Dicey." Or she would say, "I don't have to...
Page 162 - Miranda almost touched him before she saw him, her distorted face with its open mouth and glistening tears almost level with his. He leaned forward and peered at her with kind, not-human golden eyes, like a near-sighted dog: then made a horrid grimace at her, imitating her own face. Miranda struck at him in sheer ill temper, screaming. Dicey drew her away quickly, but not before Miranda had seen in his face, suddenly, a look of haughty, remote displeasure, a true grown-up look. She knew it well....
Page 43 - David F. Burg, Chicago's White City of 1893 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976); R. Reid Badger, The Great American Fair: The World's Columbian Exposition and American Culture (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1979); and Robert W.
Page 87 - ThA., 1952, x, 49-60. 7164 a. WILKINSON, CLYDE WINFIELD. The Broadening Stream: The Life and Literary Career of Mollie E. Moore Davis. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois, 1951. Abstract of Thesis, pp. 17. 7165. WILLEY, BASIL. Nineteenth Century Studies. (Bibl. 1949, 3038.) Rev. by Carlos Baker in NYTB., Jan. 8, 1950, p. 7; by William D. Templeman in Pers., xxxm, 76-7; in Sat.
Page 163 - the fruits of their present are in a future so far off, neither of us may live to know whether harm has been done or not.
Page 52 - My father's columns and papers are now held at the Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin. In the present volume, his articles appear as originally published, with no substantive changes. Since his editors sometimes were inconsistent in spelling a word such as "programming," I have reconciled these discrepancies.
Page 161 - An enormous brass band seemed to explode right at Miranda's ear. She jumped, quivered, thrilled blindly and almost forgot to breathe as sound and color and smell rushed together and poured through her skin and hair and beat in her head and hands and feet and pit of her stomach. "Oh," she called out in her panic, closing her eyes and seizing Dicey's hand hard. The flaring lights burned through her lids, a roar of laughter like rage drowned out the steady raging of the drums and horns. She opened her...
Page 303 - We praise Thee, O God, For the Son of Thy love, For Jesus who died And is now gone above. Hallelujah, Thine the glory! Hallelujah, amen! Hallelujah, Thine the glory! Revive us again.
Page 156 - This constant exercise of memory seems to be the chief occupation of my mind, and all my experience seems to be simply memory, with continuity, marginal notes, constant revision and comparison of one thing with another. Now and again thousands of memories converge, harmonize, arrange themselves around a central idea in a coherent form, and I write a story.