How
to Be a Man
by Tamara
Linse
Genre: Literary Short Story
Collection
Publisher: Willow Words
Print
ISBN: 0991386701
ISBN-13: 978-0-9913867-0-3
Epub
ISBN: 099138671X
ISBN-13: 978-0-9913867-1-0
ASIN: B00HKSLFSQ
Number of pages: 238
Word Count: 59,650
Book
Description:
“Never acknowledge the fact that
you’re a girl, and take pride when your guy friends say, ‘You’re one of the
guys.’ Tell yourself, ‘I am one of the guys,’ even though, in the back of your
mind, a little voice says, ‘But you’ve got girl parts.’” – Birdie, in “How to
Be a Man”
A girl whose self-worth revolves
around masculinity, a bartender who loses her sense of safety, a woman who
compares men to plants, and a boy who shoots his cranked-out father.
These are a few of the
hard-scrabble characters in Tamara Linse’s debut short story collection, How to
Be a Man. Set in contemporary Wyoming—the myth of the West taking its
toll—these stories reveal the lives of tough-minded girls and boys, self-reliant
women and men, struggling to break out of their lonely lives and the emotional
havoc of their families to make a connection, to build a life despite the odds.
How to Be a Man falls within the tradition of Maile Meloy, Tom McGuane, and
Annie Proulx.
The author Tamara Linse—writer,
cogitator, recovering ranch girl—broke her collarbone when she was three, her
leg when she was four, a horse when she was twelve, and her heart ever since.
Raised on a ranch in northern Wyoming, she earned her master’s in English from
the University of Wyoming, where she taught writing. Her work appears in the
Georgetown Review, South Dakota Review, and Talking River, among others, and
she was a finalist for an Arts & Letters and Glimmer Train contests, as
well as the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Prize for a book of short stories. She
works as an editor for a foundation and a freelancer. Find her online at
tamaralinse.com and tamara-linse.blogspot.com
Excerpt:
from
short story “How to Be a Man”
Never
acknowledge the fact that you’re a girl, and take pride when your guy friends
say, “You’re one of the guys.” Tell yourself, “I am one of the guys,” even
though, in the back of your mind, a little voice says, “But you’ve got girl
parts.”
You are born on
a ranch in central Colorado or southern Wyoming or northern Montana and grow up
surrounded by cowboys. Or maybe not a ranch, maybe a farm, and you have five
older brothers. Your first memory is of sitting on the back of Big Cheese, an
old sorrel gelding with a sway back and—you find out later when you regularly
ride bareback—a backbone like a ridge line. Later, you won’t know if this first
memory is real or comes from one of the only photos of you as a baby. You study
that photo a lot. It must be spring or late fall because you’re wearing a
quilted yellow jacket with a blue-lined hood and your brother’s hands reach
from the side of the frame and support you in the saddle. You look half asleep
with your head tilted to the side against your shoulder, a little sack of
potatoes.
Your dad is a
kind man, a hard worker, who gives you respect when no one else will. When
you’re four, if he asks, “Birdie, do you think the price of hogs is going up?”
ponder this a while. Take into account how Rosie has just farrowed seven
piglets and how you’re bottle-raising the runt and how you’ve heard your
brothers complaining about pig shit on the boots they wear to town. Think about
how much Jewel—that’s what you’ve decided to name the pig—means to you and say,
“Yes, Daddy, pigs are worth a lot.” He’ll nod his head, but he won’t smile like
other people when they think what you say was cute or precocious.
Your mother is a
mouse of a woman who takes long walks in the gray sagebrushed hills beyond the
fields or lays in the cool back bedroom reading the Bible. When your brothers
ask “Where’s Mom?” you won’t know. You don’t think it odd when at five you
learn how to boil water in the big speckled enamelware pot and to shake in
three boxes of macaroni, to watch as it turn from off-yellow plasticity to soft
white noodles, to hold both handles with a towel and carefully pour it into the
colander in the sink while avoiding the steam, to measure the butter and the
milk—one of your brothers shows you how much—and then to mix in the powdered
cheese. You learn to dig a dollop of bacon grease from the Kerr jar in the
fridge into the hot cast iron skillet, wait for it to melt, and then lay in
half-frozen steaks, the wonderful smell of the fat and the popping of ice
crystals filling the kitchen. When your brothers come in from doing their
chores, they talk and laugh instead of opening the cupboards and slamming them
shut. And your dad doesn’t clench his jaw while washing his hands with Dawn
dishwashing liquid at the kitchen sink and then toss big hunks of Wonder Bread
into bowls filled with milk.
When you wear
hand-me-downs from your brothers, be proud. Covet the red plaid shirt of your
next older brother, and when you get it—a hot late summer afternoon when he
tosses three shirts on your bed—wear it until the holes in the elbows
decapitated the cuffs. If you go to town with your dad for parts, be proud of
your shitty boots and muddy jeans and torn-up shirts. It shows that you know an
honest day’s work. Work is more important than fancy things, and you are not
one of those ninnies who wear girlie dresses and couldn’t change a tire if
their lives depended on it.
Be prepared:
when you go to school, you won’t know quite where you fit. All the other kids
will seem to know something that you don’t, something they whisper to each
other behind their hands. They won’t ever whisper it to you. But they won’t
make fun of you either because—you’ll get this right away and take pride in
it—you are tough and also you have five older brothers and the Gunderson family
sticks together. Be proud of the fact that, in seventh grade social studies,
you sit elbows-on-the-table next to a boy about your size, and he says with a
note of admiration, “Look at them guns. You got arms bigger than me.” It’s
winter, and you’ve been throwing hay bales every morning to feed the livestock.
Your friends
will be boys. You understand boys. When you say something, they take it at face
value. If they don’t understand, hit them, and they’ll understand that. For a
couple of months—until your dad finds out about it—your second oldest brother
will give you a dime every time you get into a fist fight. The look on your
brother’s face as he hands you those dimes will make your insides puff to
bursting. Use the dimes to buy lemons at the corner grocery during lunch time.
Slice them up with your buck knife and hand them out to see which of the boys
can bite into it without making a face.
About
the Author:
Tamara Linse grew up on a ranch
in northern Wyoming with her farmer/rancher rock-hound ex-GI father, her
artistic musician mother from small-town middle America, and her four sisters
and two brothers. She jokes that she was raised in the 1880s because they did
things old-style—she learned how to bake bread, break horses, irrigate, change
tires, and be alone, skills she’s been thankful for ever since. The ranch was a
partnership between her father and her uncle, and in the 80s and 90s the two
families had a Hatfields and McCoys-style feud.
She worked her way through the
University of Wyoming as a bartender, waitress, and editor. At UW, she was
officially in almost every college on campus until she settled on English and
after 15 years earned her bachelor’s and master’s in English. While there, she
taught writing, including a course called Literature and the Land, where students
read Wordsworth and Donner Party diaries during the week and hiked in the
mountains on weekends. She also worked as a technical editor for an
environmental consulting firm.
She still lives in Laramie,
Wyoming, with her husband Steve and their twin son and daughter. She writes
fiction around her job as an editor for a foundation. She is also a
photographer, and when she can she posts a photo a day for a Project 365.
Please stop by Tamara’s website, www.tamaralinse.com, and her blog, Writer,
Cogitator, Recovering Ranch Girl, at tamara-linse.blogspot.com. You can find an
extended bio there with lots of juicy details. Also friend her on Facebook and
follow her on Twitter, and if you see her in person, please say hi.
Tour wide giveaway
$100 Amazon of BN Gift Card
Dear Sue, Thank you so much for hosting me! I so much appreciate it! Sincerely, Tamara :-)
ReplyDelete