THE WOMAN WHO LIVES IN THE EARTH, TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
A FABLE FOR YOUNG & OLD
The Woman Who
Lives in the Earth ~ Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition
The Woman Who Lives in the Earth is a fable about a young girl who prevails over fear and hate. A long and deadly drought turns a peaceful people into desperate, craven souls. Their wrath pursues the girl whose insight into the veiled wonders of the natural world mark her as an evil and powerful demon that must be killed.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
When I was six, I dreamed an angry mob chased me through the woods. They carried pitchforks, clubs, and sharp blades. Their dogs were gaining, closer and closer. I came out of the woods into a large, yellow field. In the middle of the field was a dark tower. As I ran toward the tower, my legs grew heavy and slow. I just made it inside, slammed the door, and bolted it as the dogs lunged against the door. The mob was close behind.
It was dark inside. I waited, listening to the howling dogs. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, a single, thin shaft of light from a small hole in the roof gradually revealed a shadowy, spiral pattern on the wall. The pattern became stairs that spiraled up clear to the top. I started climbing. Outside, the mob chanted, and raged. They rammed the door with poles. At the top of the stairs was a small door. I looked out and saw icicles hanging from the edge of the roof, melting in the sun’s heat. Drops from the icicles fell and broke into smaller drops, and these broke into even smaller drops and smaller and smaller until they became mist and drifted away.
I thought, if I could become ice, the sun would melt me, and I would turn to mist and escape. So, in some thoughtless, magical way, I became ice, the sun melted me, I tumbled and tumbled and tumbled, and became mist. But I was a heavy mist. I did not drift away, I sank into the mob. By their angry shouts and chants the mob inhaled me deep into their lungs, deep into their minds. They could feel me inside them, and I could feel myself inside them, inside their minds. We were changed by this. We were amazed by this.
This childhood dream inspired The Woman Who Lives in the Earth.
REVIEWS
“Wolfe's disarmingly simple novel, part Aesopian fable, part environmentalist parable, clearly aspires to the timeless, ageless stature of The Little Prince.” —Publishers Weekly
“Enchantingly told and beautifully realized . . . His prose resonates with a deft and heartfelt honesty that owes as much to poetry as to the straightforward storytelling style of say a Hemingway. I take the risk of putting you off with what might seem like excessive praise for this book, but I do so in the hope that my enthusiasm will have you trying it for yourself. And once you've read it, I don't doubt you'll be pressing it into the hands of your favorite people as well.” —Charles De Lint, Fantasy & Science Fiction
“Beautiful and profound, both fantastical and utterly real. Swain Wolfe has given us a truly useful story, a moral fable for these and all times.” —William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky, The Nature of Generosity, editor of The Last Best Place
“A remarkable book, a fable of enchantment, written with grace and elegance, a memorable story of land and love . . . Prose like night air.” —Kirkus Reviews
More Books
The Lake Dreams the Sky
This is a story within a story of lovers whose passion literally sets a lake on fire. An artist who travels from mill to mill sharpening saws for his livelihood, meets a waitress in a local café that is perched above the shore of a Montana lake. It’s the postwar ’40s, so the restaurant faces the highway, not the lake.
The lovers’ defiance of society’s unwritten rules makes them outlaws in an unforgiving time. The Lake Dreams the Sky conjures a landscape of passion, shifting perception, and the visceral longing that shapes our lives.
Reviews
“An irresistible novel . . . The pleasures of falling in love, the tensile bond between women of kin, and the pains of discovering just what it means to be an outlaw, just how dangerous it is to break the rules.” —Sandra Scofield, recipient of the American Book Award, author of A Chance to See Egypt and Plain Seeing
“Muscle-to-bone storytelling . . . Soars off into an astonishing climax, nicely mingling the mundane and marvelous and once again demonstrating Wolfe’s stirring original power as a storyteller!” —starred Kirkus Reviews
“The beauty of Swain Wolfe’s prose illuminates both the Montana lake that provides his novel’s setting and the shifting interior landscapes that arouse his characters’ passion.” —The New York Times
“In The Woman Who Lives in the Earth, Swain Wolfe introduced himself as a writer of great imagination and sensitivity. Now, in The Lake Dreams the Sky, he proves himself to be a storyteller of awesome proportions. This is truly one of those books you can’t put down.” —James Welch, the author of Fools Crow; The Death of Jim Loney, The Heartsong of Charging Elk
“An elegantly written, heartfelt novel.” —Oscar Hijuelos, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
“The Lake Dreams the Sky is about the clash between a remnant tribal culture and the nonculture of the Western town. But greater than its clash is its sentence-by-sentence music. Swain Wolfe’s voice—with its quiet slippings into myth, eroticism, vision, dream—bends the mind the way a prism bends light or a bluesman his guitar strings.” —David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K, River Teeth, and My Story as Told by Water“
Here is a beautiful story, beautifully told. Swain Wolfe is a magician—his hypnotic prose makes the familiar strange, the strange familiar. The Lake Dreams the Sky won’t be an easy novel to put down.” —Rick DeMarinis, author of Sky Full of Sand, The Mortician’s Apprentice, and A Clod of Wayward Marl
Reviews
“A darkly funny send-up, in which cultures and characters that should not even be in the same country with one another are forced to interact. The result is thoughtful, hilarious, frightening, and at times, philosophical.” —The Arizona Republic
“Set in the outsider fringe culture of the Southwest, Swain Wolfe’s engaging novel The Parrot Trainer transforms accurate archaeology into a wry fantasy interweaving the present and the ancient past.” —Steven LeBlanc, Archaeologist, Harvard University, and author of The Mimbres People and Constant Battles
“With repartee worthy of Oscar Wilde, and magical invention reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Swain Wolfe’s The Parrot Trainer is a delightful, insightful comedy of archaeological manners. Wolfe’s luminous intelligence will make the reader believe that living spirits inhabit clay and that jocular ghosts can sometimes pull our strings.” —Rick DeMarinis, author of A Clod of Wayward Marl and The Year of the Zink Penney
“Swain Wolfe has created nothing less than a new genre . . . and a rousing read.” —Alex Shoumatoff, author of Legends of the American Desert, Russian Blood, and The Wasting of Borneo
“The Parrot Trainer is a fascinating, splendid novel. Wolfe really has a deep feeling for the Southwest and its people, and he knows how to tell an engrossing tale.” —Douglas Preston, author or Cities of Gold and The Lost City of the Monkey God
The Parrot Trainer
A man steals a painted bowl from a Mimbres Indian grave. Inside this exquisite, ancient bowl is the image of a woman holding a hoop with a parrot preached inside. A scorpion stings the thief, and the woman enters his mind. He cannot tell if she is a figment of his poisoned mind or an external disturbance operating on her own volition. She teases, torments, and pleads with him to break the bowl, thereby breaking a curse and releasing her soul into the clouds.
This is a comedy of cultural clash. How do cultures appropriate other cultures—curate them, absorb them, or misconstrue their ways of knowing the world? The Parrot Trainer pits professional, academic appropriators against the amateurs known as pot hunters or worse, grave robbers. The primary difference between these two is that one of them keeps records—an important difference.
Four sisters serve as a chorus. They befriend the thief who shows them how to make mud-men on the bank of the Joaquín Jimenez River. The mud-men are constructed with willow stays designed to slip and spring free in the summer rains—deconstructing into a fury of flying clots.
The Boy Who Invented Skiing
Swain Wolfe’s memoir takes him from his early childhood in the early 1940s living in a large stone house in a tuberculosis sanitarium until a sudden series of events found him living in a large tent with his mother, sister, and seven horses, packing dudes and hunters in Colorado’s high country, then a winter with his violent, morphine-addicted father in the New Allen Hotel in Gunnison, Colorado. After his parents divorced, his mother remarried and Swain found himself living an idle—“land poor” in a tiny cabin on his stepfather’s huge ranch and farming with draft horses until a violent disruption sent him to Montana as a teenager where he fell in with an unusual gang of boys who built and raced hot rods. In high school, he worked night shifts in the local lumber mills. He spent surprisingly exhilarating winters gleaning the fours in Delaney’s Mill and later, working the log pond at Hamilton Lumber. After he dropped out of high school he spent a winter gypo logging in the Lolo Forest until the trees talked, and crew chiefed on the Jocko Canyon fire on the Salish Indian Reservation. The memoir closes with him working 3,200 feet underground in the Butte copper mines and his discovery of a way of seeing and thinking that changed his life. This is a story of growing up in hardscrabble times when the West felt real.
Reviews
“For those who have wondered about the stuff of fantastical tales and where it is found, Wolfe’s charming memoir offers a view of the world through a storyteller’s goggles. Wolfe, author of the acclaimed fable, The Woman Who Lives in the Earth, grew up in the early 1940s wandering through the tunnels under his father’s Colorado tuberculosis sanitarium and across the mesas above it, where he traded with the pack rats that looted small, shiny treasures from houses and hid them in the cracks in the rocks. He spent the latter half of his childhood on his stepfather’s ranch, running free with his imagination and “inventing skiing,” until family violence forced him to Missoula, Mont., and he discovered a trapping of city life that haunts him throughout the book: “Instead of nature, other people became my mirror.” The book ends while Wolfe is in his 20s, working in a copper mine, which is forever changing the depth of his perception: ‘The latticework of the underground found a conscious expression, extending itself up to the surface as a way of thinking.’ Thirteen hundred feet below ground, Wolfe decides he will tell stories. His memoir contains no mirrors—just magic.” —Publisher’s Weekly
“The Boy Who Invented Skiing is more than a compelling tale; it’s a primer in how the imagination finds its shape and strength in the forge of raw experience. This is one of those rare books that make you want to call up your friends and read passages to them.” —Rick DeMarinis, author of The Burning Women of Far Cry, Under the Wheat, and Borrowed Hearts.
“Those who like memoirs by really talented writers, who have lived very lively lives are going to enjoy Swain Wolfe’s recollections of how the West used to be. —Tony Hillerman, author of The Tale Teller: A Leaphorn, Chee & Novel and Skeleton Man.