Delicate: Stories [Paperback]

The lives of middle-aged women struggling with jobs and family, friendship and romance, are captured to perfection in this collection of humorous and touching stories set in the contemporary Southwest.
Mary Sojourner writes about hardworking, hard-living, blue-collar women who fight quietly and fiercely to make their way in the world, find love and beauty, and hold on to their hopes. The heroines, most of them over forty, include single moms, aging hippies, women newly awakening to the possibility of love, and women confronting their own mortality.Mary Sojourner,now sixty-four, started writing at age forty-five. She is also the author ofSolace: Rituals of Loss and Desireand is a contributor to NPR's Morning Edition. She teaches writing in Flagstaff, Arizona.CONTENTS

Bear House

Absolute Proof of the Cosmos in Life

Binky

The Most Amazing Thing

Luzianne

Monsters

Armageddon Coffee

What They Write in Other Countries

Riv

Estrellas Ranchos: Where the Real West Begins

Squirrel

My Tree

Officer Magdalena, White Shell Woman, and Me

Hag

Huevos

Messin' with the Kid

Betabank

DelicateJohn Nichols author ofThe Milagro Beanfield WarandThe Voice of the ButterflyMary Sojourner is tough, she's funny, she's full of wisdom, a fine outrage, and lots of hope. She sees the world as it is, heartbreaking and alive.Delicateis an inspiration.Terry Tempest Williams author ofRefuge: An Unnatural History of Family and PlaceThe subjects of these stories are anything but delicate. Not the women, big and fierce and truly blonde, not the HIV, the cancer, the tattoos, or the estrogen, not the roadkill or the nine-thousand-year-old man in beads, not the politics that have oozed into these stories under pressure in a place where fighting is like the weather. What is delicate is the way Sojourner has connected her subjel£&