From the Bookshelf: UM Author Mary Clearman Blew

Mary Clearman Blew
Mary Clearman Blew.

By: Susan Cuff

From rustic beginnings on a small cattle ranch in central Montana to an esteemed western writer and professor emerita, Mary Clearman Blew personifies what a reviewer once said about the protagonist in her novel:

“ … exemplifying the maxim that 'If you don't like who you are … you can always be somebody else.’ ” 

Blew wasn’t dissatisfied with “who” she was on the ranch. She just knew she wanted more in life than to be a country school teacher – her parents’ dream for her.

Blew was born on that cattle ranch near Lewistown in 1939, the great-granddaughter of homesteaders. Her rich family legacy figures prominently in her robust body of work. From “All But the Waltz” to the recent “Think of Horses,” ranch life looms large in her writing. You can take the girl off the ranch, but…you know the rest.

Blew was a voracious young reader, but not many books could be found on the ranch. She tried creating her own stories and her novice writing career began to bud. Her first published work was some years off, however, as an education needed to come first.   

Blew and a friend planned to apply for college in Massachusetts. When her parents and guidance counselor discovered the plan, however, the counselor instead set up a teaching degree program for her at then-Rocky Mountain College in Billings. Through admissions testing, Blew instead secured a scholarship to the University of Montana. Regardless, she was moving away from the ranch and was glad of it, knowing there was so much more out in the world that she wanted to learn.

At UM, she found teachers she greatly admired, such as English professors Leslie Fiedler, Walter King, John Moore and Henry Larom and Latin professor Marguerite Ephron.  

Her professors, she says, “gave me an image of someone I wanted to be on equal terms with, a role model.”

Living in Corbin Hall, she took freshman composition as a required class. The instructor recognized her talent and recommended her for an advanced composition class. She married right after her first year of college and the couple settled in the Xs married student housing (now called University Villages).

When she was working on her master’s degree at UM, she took creative writing courses, but the only MFA in creative writing at the time was in Iowa. 

She earned a bachelor’s degree in Latin and English and a master’s degree in English literature at UM. 

She applied for the doctorate program at the University of Missouri and secured a teaching post there. She earned a Ph.D. in English literature and her dissertation on Renaissance satire was her first published work.

While writing her dissertation, Blew found herself in need of an electric typewriter. She entered a short-story writing contest that paid $100 for first place. She won the contest, purchased an electric typewriter and finished her dissertation. The contest winner, the short story “Lambing Out,” eventually found its way into her first published work, a volume of short stories that originally came out in 1977.

After graduation, she hoped to land a college-level teaching position, but jobs in the humanities and arts had “dried up” in the late 1960s. 

She took what she calls “the last job on earth” at then-Northern Montana College in Havre. The library there was small and she struggled to do her research in Renaissance literature, so she turned more to writing – more essays, more fiction, more memoirs.

She spent nearly two decades at Northern, as chair of the English department and then dean of the School of Arts and Sciences. She next went to Lewis Clark State College, after which the University of Idaho in Moscow recruited her to help start a graduate creative writing program. 

She retired from U of I in 2015. After teaching her last class in the spring of 2016 – as a favor for another instructor on leave – a graduate course in the history of the personal essay, Blew turned in her grades, went home and wrote the first draft of the novel “Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin” in 30 days. It was published in 2018. In the intervening years, she finished two additional novels.

Her impressive catalog also includes “All But the Waltz: A Memoir of Five Generations in the Life of a Montana Family” (1992), “Balsamroot” (2001), “This is not the Ivy League” (2011), “Sweep Out the Ashes” (2019), “Waltzing Montana” (2021), “Think of Horses” (2022) as well as short story collections “Runaway” (1990), “Sister Coyote: Montana Stories” (2000) and “Lambing Out and Other Stories” (2001). Her prolific collection earned her a lifetime Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western Literature Association in 2004.  

While she is no longer teaching, she isn’t any less busy. A new novel is in the works and she belongs to the “world’s best writing group” in Moscow where she says she benefits from peer critiques and deadlines. She never outlines a new novel. To do so would “close out the possibility” of the evolving story.

Although Blew was just the second woman to teach English at Northern in Havre, she now belongs to a legion of talented female writers in the west, including Louise Erdrich, Mildred Walker, Debra Magpie Earling, Deidre McNamer and Judy Blunt. Blew eschews the description of “regional writer,” and instead calls herself a “woman writer,” “serious novelist” and “revisionist historian.”

Her latest book, “Think of Horses,” was published in September of 2022. It calls on Blew’s personal experience with raising and training horses, hearkening back to the first education she ever received, on the ranch.    


Book description

Think of Horses by Mary Clearman Blew ’62, ‘63

Moscow, Idaho

Published by University of Nebraska Press

ISBN-13 9781496229656

At 50, Tam Bowen is estranged from her out-of-wedlock son whom she has supported as a writer of soft-porn novels. She has returned to the Montana cabin of her childhood to ponder her life's choices. At first dismayed by the many changes she finds in the mountain community, she makes a few friends and becomes involved in the lives of two troubled teenagers, who draw her back into the horsemanship she turned from so many years ago. Horses provide Tam with a sense of stability in her new-old life.