Read Valerie Miner’s latest novel, After Eden, published by University of Oklahoma Press, Spring, 2007.
From Booklist
Miner skillfully presents Chicago urban planner Emily, whose annual return to a Northern California women's land collective for rest and relaxation in her cabin turns to tragedy when her life partner's flight goes down in flames. So, too, do her hopes for happiness here despite the kind support of her neighbors and the land's breathtaking beauty. Michael, her attorney brother, arrives to assist his sister on her slow journey through grief and healing and becomes increasingly attracted to the landscape and one of the women. He finances Emily's extended leave from work when a neighbor's accident motivates his sister to stay and help out, but she soon begins to see trouble in paradise. A rash of fires is thought to be arson. Is it the work of migrant farm workers, or maybe environmentalists? The logging interests who find it cheaper to sell the land to vintners than reforest? Miner weaves a gripping tapestry of conflicting interests in a novel in which nature is a major character.—Whitney Scott
Women of Mendocino Bay View
Fall, 2004
By Sharon Gilligan
“There’s a passage in The Diaries of Adam and Eve” as “translated” by Mark Twain, at Eve’s grave, where Adam says, “Wherever she was there was Eden.”
I don’t know if Valerie Miner had it in mind when she titled After Eden, but it fits. After Eden explores the painful path many of us will one day trod—the journey back to the living after losing a long-time lover.
We meet Emily Adams in mid-June as she drives from Chicago where she works as a city planner to the MacKenzie Valley in Northern California. There she will wait for Salerno, a jazz musician who is meeting her at their cabin after a gig in Tucson. At Beulah Ranch, a land collective the couple started with three other women, they will unwind from their mutual careers and re-connect with the land, each other, and the women with whom they share the land.
But at a Birthday BBQ for Marianne, the new partner of one of the shareholders, one of the late arrivals reports a plane crash she heard on the radio. Emily knows it can’t be Salerno’s flight. But it is, and her world implodes.
In this episodic novel, we next see Emily in Early August seven weeks into a ten week compassionate leave. She longs to join Salerno’s ashes buried under the Douglas fir next to their cabin. The only other thing she can get her mind around is an implement or fetish she found buried at the base of the tree. The decorated sticks are clearly remnants from the native peoples who had lived on the land long ago. Her curiosity about the object tells her she’s still alive.
Otherwise, she feels dead inside though she tries to be kind to their dog, Phoenix, who is grieving as much as Emily herself. She allows the other women to approach her gingerly after dusk, but she worries about telling them she intends to sell her land. She cannot bear the thought of being in this place without the woman who lured her here, drew up the house plans in her head, and taught her to love every board and nail, every tree and jay. Emily believes she must recover in three weeks when her leave ends, but circumstances conspire to delay her return to Chicago.
In addition to losing Salerno and probably Emily, the ranch women are facing other challenges: an influx of upscale newcomers seeking to change the landscape, a partner with a drug problem she won’t admit, and an arsonist threatening the forests and the community.
Miner’s elegant prose pulls us from present-day Mendocino County (there are several fictitious locales along with real towns like Ukiah and Mendocino sprinkled in the story.) to Berkeley in the late 80s and early 90s where Emily and Salerno met and started their life together. The story unfolds slowly—like putting one foot in front of the other, like taking one breath in and then letting it out. And repeat. It feels like how one might get through enormous loss. Valerie Miner is a writer’s writer, and with After Eden she proves to be a Mendonesian woman’s Mendonesian. I recommend this book to anyone who loves good women or good writing or this blessed place we call home.
After Eden is published by the University of Oklahoma Press and is volume 17 in their series Literature of the American West. It is, in the end, a love story. It’s not just about Emily and Salerno’s love, but about the love of a place in the West, it’s history and native people, and it’s about the healing love of community.—Volume 17, Number 3, Women of Mendocino Bay, Mendocino, CA 95460
Books to Watch Out For, Spring, 2007
I just loved Valerie Miner's After Eden, her latest work following 2005's Lammy nominated collection of short stories Abundant Light (reviewed in TLE #12). Emily Adams is a city planner from Chicago who has traveled to Northern California (think closer to Mendocino than San Francisco) for a vacation at the cabin she shares with her partner, Salerno. But when Salerno dies unexpectedly, Emily's life changes completely. The cabin was first Salerno's, part of a lesbian land trust with women who were more Salerno's friends than Emily's. But all rally around her as Emily decides what to do with the cabin, her life and job back in Chicago, and with Salerno's legacy as a musician. It's a sometimes heartbreaking, but ultimately rejuvenative story of a woman's journey through grief and rebirth, populated with an eclectic family of choice and a supportive brother who goes through his own changes, too. I highly recommend After Eden.—Suzanne Corson
“Densely layered yet transparent, tragic yet shimmering with hope, After Eden is the story of a very special community of women in Northern California, as well as the account of one woman's grief over the unexpected loss of her beloved. Ultimately, it is an affirmation of community values and their triumph over adversity. After Eden offers a compelling narrative enriched by lyrical passages of stunning beauty. I found myself marvelling at Miner's writerly gifts and the spiritual strength that underlies the novel. I have no doubt about it: After Eden is a necessary novel for the 21st Century.”—Pablo Medina
“Valerie Miner’s fiction is like an arrow shot dead into the
essence of the lives of working-class women. Her well-crafted prose is clean,
direct, and honest. She tells the truth.”
Jana Harris, poet and novelist
“Seldom has a contemporary writer portrayed commitment in such an
absorbing voice.
Miner has written a novel of such substance that it makes most of the fiction
on the bestseller list melt into banality.”
Pacific Sun
“This fundamentally – though not exclusively – serious
examination of the spectrum of radical politics as experienced by two generations
of women at once personalizes and intensifies the conflict between ideals
and reality. Recommended.”
Library Journal
“Blood Sisters is political fiction at its best…”
The New Women’s Feminist Review
“The novel is tightly written, filled with complicated emotional demands
that draw out the characters, adding realism and rendering the tragedies they
fall into all the more gripping.”
Booklist
“Unself-conscious dialogue is one of the greatest strengths of this
novel…The author has kept a fine ear cocked for the real, off-camera
language of politics.”
The Los Angeles Times
“[Miner] bravely handles a complex web of allegiances and loyalty systems
– ties of blood, feminism, and patriotism. Indeed, as the book scrutinizes
the cousins’ relationships with each other, with women, with mothers,
lovers, and the countries to which they are emotionally bound, all the questions
seem to connect and all conflict…Blood Sisters is highly intelligent
and honest.”
The Guardian (London, England)
Praise for the 2003 edition:
“The intensity is overwhelming. Unreserved commitment demands payment.
In Blood Sisters, the payment is as disastrous as the conflict over Northern
Ireland. “Blood Sisters is political fiction at its best.”
The Feminist Press
“Miner shows the real consequences of terrorist theories – loss
of limbs and lives – but also shows why terrorist groups are attractive
to young activists. The novel is unique because it discusses these concerns
in the context of women’s lives.”
Radical Teacher
“I liked the form of Movement very much – it is indeed a novel
of movement, political, personal movement from country to country and subculture
to subculture…vignettes and stories out of Susan’s life, but never
episodic, always carrying her development as a person and as a political personage
a step farther.”
Marge Piercy
“This is a compelling book, invigorated by Susan’s idealism and
enthused with her deep passion for life.”
Publishers Weekly
“Miner doesn’t show Susan’s eventual transformation into
a highly successful radical feminist journalist in a linear way, but instead
describes isolated wedges of Susan’s experience, not always in sexist
or feminist contexts. In scenes that do directly explore feminist themes,
Miner never loses control, never allows rhetoric to overtake English, hysteria
to overtake gentle irony. Such control makes Susan’s final commitment
to radical feminism and lesbianism the natural product of her experience,
not a moral contrivance of the author’s.”
The Los Angeles Times
“Each chapter can be read on its own as a short story, making it valuable
on its own terms. In so structuring her narrative Miner succeeds wonderfully
at making the novel a chronicle of movement and growth; character development
comes more from experience and interior monologue.”
The San Francisco Review of Books
MURDER IN THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
“Valerie Miner’s characterization of professors is a merciless
delight.”
Rita Mae Brown, author of Rubyfruit Jungle
“…a totally compelling and utterly modern mystery, the ‘mystery’
of how women go about fighting back against sexual abuse and division. A sparkling,
hope-giving book.”
Judy Grahn, author of The Work of a Common Woman
Miner’s characters are sharply clear; the dialogue is completely credible.
The plot is dynamite and hurls you from page to page….Valerie Miner
is a fascinating writer whose intellectualism infuses her story with validity.
I found myself immersed and entertained in Murder in the English Department.”
The Pacific Sun
“In Murder in the English Department, Miner shapes a new breed of mystery
that combines elements of family conflict evocative of Joyce Carol Oates and
women strong enough for Gail Godwin or May Sarton with a sense of creative
humor uniquely her own.”
Washington Book Review
“With laudable perceptiveness, Miner probes issues that are as relevant
today as they were forty years ago: the rampant bigotry that deprives Wanda
of her father and her liberty; Moira’s uncertain sexual orientation;
Ann’s wariness of commitment; and Teddy’s adjustment to her own
homosexuality. The novel’s rewarding conclusion also has contemporary
overtones, for the women’s hard-won ‘shared sense of potential’
finally guides them safely beyond ‘anguish and loss’ to equanimity.”
The Los Angeles Times
“An extraordinary tale of women in wartime. Most novels set in the
‘40s are about men fighting World War II. This one is unique in that
the protagonists are four young women.”
San Jose Mercury News
“On the huge canvas of World War II we follow the lives and friendships
of four women. We follow with passionate interest these interrelated but widely
different stories, and as the four women grow, we grow with them. A complex,
nourishing work of art.”
May Sarton
“An exceptionally good novel that realistically depicts the personal
trauma faced by four young, working-class women at the outbreak of World War
II…Miner writes with perception and sensitivity about the changes wrought
by the war in each woman’s life and the strong bond of friendship that
sustains them throughout years of upheaval. Rich in atmosphere, strong on
plot, and featuring a down-to-earth portrayal of ordinary individuals in extraordinary
circumstances, this engrossing novel far outshines most similar works of historical
fiction.”
Booklist
“Finally, a World War II novel written from the perspective of women’s
lives – and not Hollywood starlets waiting for Johnny to come marching
home. All Good Women gives us a broader understanding of an era as well as
a deeper awareness of the significance of social forces in our own lives.”
Seattle Times
“A strong, authentic novel, All Good Women is a celebration of female
friendships. It maps the moving boundaries of disclosure, generosity and affection
that survive war and unshared life experiences. Here’s a book that’s
an unspoiled pleasure to read, with a little value-added learning acquired
along the way.”
Company Magazine
“Fast-moving and ever faithful to the atmosphere of the period, All
Good Women creates a vivid and vital portrayal of life in war-torn Europe
– and beyond – which will gladden the heart even in moments of
pathos and poignancy.”
The Jewish Chronicle
“Miner’s novel takes place, in her own words, ‘in an imaginary
café and an imaginary news shop on an imaginary corner of San Francisco.’
Those are the workplaces of Chrissie MacInnes, an outspoken, Scottish-born
waitress, and her friend Margaret Sawyer, a clerk inclined toward introversion.
These two longtime pals, both of whom are in their seventies, find their relationship
tested by a fierce community conflict involving gentrification and electioneering.
When the fight for the neighborhood turns violent, the two team up to battle
an arsonist bent on destroying property. Chrissie and Margaret’s collaboration
leads them examine their pasts and their fears for the future while affirming
the importance of friendship and community. In her afterword, critic Donna
Perry writes, ‘By showing us two very different heroines, in a totally
believable setting of violence and political corruption, Winter’s Edge
reminds us that love takes many forms and heroism isn’t reserved for
the young.”
The Washington Post
“Chrissie and Margaret
are beautifully drawn characters, full of prickly yearnings and well-practiced
defenses against the stacked deck of life…Miner’s tough, spare
prose turns wonderfully eloquent…with an integrity that celebrates a
special kind of affection.”
Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Valerie Miner is an author of reach, audacity, range, uniquely important
to understanding our time. In Winter’s Edge she again enlarges the scope
of contemporary fiction. A poet of the city, the everyday urban life, she
gives us its beat, its struggling human beings, its worklife, its politics,
its interrelationships; best of all, its old women on the edge of survival.
A U.S.A. seldom portrayed.”
Tillie Olsen
“In Winter’s Edge, Valerie Miner brings us two wonderful old
women whose relationship is feisty, tender and deep. No fluff about senior
citizens here! In the whole novel we live close to the marrow of humanity
itself, its sordid side never evaded, its rich amalgam celebrated with fervor.
What a splendid novel this is!”
May Sarton
“Valerie Miner is a brilliantly gifted storyteller and Winter’s
Edge is one of her best novels to date.”
The Midwest Book Review
COMPETITION: A FEMINIST TABOO?
“Everyone wins because this book is here. Original, intelligent, sensitive,
it probes old, hard realities and imagines new and better ones.”
Catharine R. Stimpson, Professor of English and Dean of the Graduate
School, Rutgers University
“This is a remarkable collection of insights in a field where humane,
useful, non-male perspectives have been scarce. Competition is a paradigmatic
and indispensable book. Its reading changes a man…dramatically. Similarly
it surely empowers women in today’s intricately competitive areas.”
Houston Baker, Albert M. Greenfield Professor of Human Relations,
University of Pennsylvania
“This book is a pleasure to read: intelligent, thoughtful,
and altogether touching in its collective honesty.”
Vivian Gornick, author of Fierce Attachments
“I have come to depend on Valerie Miner as an uncommonly honest novelist:
humorous, acute, and kind. In Trespassing her writing attains a new beauty
and intensity.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
“Polished, sincere, thought provoking, and compelling. These stories
may change the way some readers look at the world and their own relationships.
The short story can do no more.”
Scotland on Sunday
“Valerie Miner’s provocative new novel explores the territory
of betrayal: of country, family, and self…With a satisfying deftness,
Ms. Miner moves the story back and forth from the present to Cora’s
painful childhood and her radical college years….Ms. Miner powerfully
portrays Cora’s struggle to lead an independent life.”
The New York Times
“A Walking Fire is very likely Valerie Miner’s best novel thus
far. It is thoroughly believable, densely layered, and expertly told…Suspense
builds as we yearn to find Cora’s missing links. And Miner knows how
much to reveal and at what point. It’s an interesting and exhaustive
trip. If peace is not made between Cora and all of her family, at least Cora
is able to make some peace with herself, which is maybe what this journey
is all about.”
Sojourner
“Here’s a good big story of Cora’s journey home across
a continent and twenty years. Valerie Miner’s gift is to make us see
again that the issues we too often see as political are really deeply personal.
This is the mission of our best fiction. A Walking Fire is a worthy pilgrimage
and a welcome book.”
Ron Carlson, author of Plan B for the Middle Class
“This powerful and poignant novel is about the cauterizing of wounds:
personal, familial, and political. It explores the lingering damage of Vietnam,
both for those who fought in, and those who fought against that war. Valerie
Miner’s analysis is lucid and unsentimental. When profound political
divisions run through the center of a family, there are no easy answers, only
temporary truces, and sometimes, here and there, if we’re lucky, transcendent
moments of hope. For any reader who was politically involved in those turbulent
times, there will be a strong inner assent to Miner’s work: yes, this
was the way it was. A wise, compassionate, unforgettable novel.”
Janette Turner Hospital, author of The Last Magician
“A Walking Fire tallies up the costs of many kinds of exile –
from family, from country, from every kind of mainstream comfort we build
our lives on. Then, through honest and painful detail, daily and undramatic,
Valerie Miner shows the kind of strength it takes to pay the bill. This moving
novel brings politics back to where it begins and ends – in the life
of the family, its secrets, its compromises, and the affection that sometimes
eludes acknowledgement – without ever giving up its radical commitment.”
Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After
“A Walking Fire is as much a monument to the [Vietnam] war as the Vietnam
Memorial the middle-aged Cora visits with her daughter in Washington, D.C.
As Cora’s political beliefs pit her violently against the men in her
family, Miner’s novel documents the political turmoil and the heartbreak
that war brought to many other U.S. families. The results of the Casey family’s
political conflicts serve as a metaphor for the U.S. role in the Vietnam war.”
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Shaped by the rhythms of a walk through nature, this gentle, thoughtful
novel explores what’s too often ignored: the life-long bonds of women’s
friendship.”
Andrea Barrett
“Range of Light is Valerie Miner’s most skillful novel yet. Her
exploration of the dynamics between two friends is subtle, profoundly moving,
and true. Miner’s stunning descriptions of these mountains map a mysterious
upland world. It made me want to buy some hiking boots and get going!”
Lisa Alther
“Miner has a keen eye for detail. Her perceptive descriptions make
the high country a significant character in the women’s quest for renewed
understanding: ‘A sliver of moon was rising over Kuna Crest, whispering
into the shoulder of the mountain as it ascended.’..With skill and assurance,
Miner portrays the range of small but significant moments that tenderly renew
the friendship….Miner has done a commendable job of exploring what holds
people together. She understands complication well and can live with the contradiction
that secrecy, grievances and slights are as important a fabric as empathy
and concern in sustaining a friendship. How Adele and Kath understand themselves
and their choices makes for a satisfying journey. The reader is privileged
to accompany these resilient women during their week of losing and rediscovering
each other in the High Sierra.”
Chicago Tribune
“There is a stirring gentleness is Miner’s work, which brings
to life the emotional inarticulateness of these two women and captures their
uneasy journey towards renewal of love and friendship…There is a lyrical
subtlety to Miner’s work.”
Lambda Book Report
“With a novelist’s consummate skill, Valerie Miner weaves together
the lives of her grandparents, her mother, and herself to create a passionate
and engrossing memoir.”
Margot Livesey, author of Eva Moves the Furniture and Criminals
“This is a richly imagined family history: beautifully written, deeply
felt.”
Vivian Gornick, author of The End of the Novel
of Love: Critical Essays and Fierce Attachments: A Memoir
“Miner…uses her investigative skills, her novelist’s imagination,
and her proven ability as an engaging storyteller to create the best kind
of memoir – the kind that places a personal history intelligently into
its political and historical context.”
Judith Barrington, author of Writing the Memoir: From Truth to
Art and Lifesaving: A Memoir
“I was thoroughly captivated by The Low Road, which does for Valerie
Miner’s family what all of us would love to do for our own: it gathers
the broken shards of ‘documentable’ history and fills the seams
with history to make a plausible and moving whole.”
Rosellen Brown, author of Half a Heart and Tender Mercies
“…imaginative and durable…”
Chicago Tribune
“Miner brings a researcher’s eye together with a novelist’s
search for truth in a story that reads as unflinchingly honest.”
Minnesota Literature
“Fascinating and creative…emotionally thought-provoking.”
The Lansing State Journal
“The Low Road is as entertaining as it is insightful. Valerie
Miner is an obviously brilliant author writing about the story she has carried
with her for a lifetime. And it’s a good story.”
The Bloomsbury Review
“Truly, the story belongs to Miner’s mother, Mary, the repressed
link between the lost homeland and the new world. Miner fills in this history
with aching detail. Mary changed her name to Pat, married and had children.
She worked in a coffee shop. At 50, her husband left her. At 77, she retired,
eventually succumbing to Alzheimer’. Standing in her mother’s
empty home, Miner remembers her last days, divorced, alone and living in a
studio apartment. ‘All this after eighty years? It could have been worse,
is my mother’s reply.’ Coming at the end of the book, it’s
a lovingly rendered chapter, typical of the rich family portrait Miner has
created.”
Washington Post
“Though her story is deeply emotional, filled with sad losses, including
the loss of her mother, Miner’s reticence and lack of self-indulgence
have helped her to dignify the narrative with humor, to focus on the larger
questions, to work past blame and to treat her Scottish family – especially
her mother’s ‘extraordinary, ordinary life’ – with
compassion and respect.”
Women’s Review of Books
“It is a brilliant volume, one that challenges the notion that ‘trendy’
equals ‘excellent,’ that affirms there is a connection between
lesbianism and feminism, but that the connection is by no means simple and
identical. Above all, she shows a mind that is subtle and far reaching.”
Lambda Book Report
[Miner] coveys a more active and hopeful understanding, and practice, of
‘collectivity’ in the women’s movement than anyone I know
today…The strengths of Rumors from the Cauldron lie in its contributions
to the conversations we have informally and in print about feminism –
where we have come from, who we have been, where we are going, and who’s
the we?”
Women’s Review of Books
“Readers who run to the bookstore for each new work of fiction by Valerie
Miner will be thrilled by the insights and revelations that Miner shares in
Rumors about her development as a writer and the construction of her books.
Those who aren’t yet Miner connoisseurs will surely become so after
enjoying the essays and reviews in this surprisingly eclectic collection.
Its themes range from working class and lesbian identity to Chinese literature,
but Miner’s staunch advocacy of an international feminist movement is
the thread that holds the pieces together. The reader can’t help being
charmed by Miner’s warmth and intelligence.”
Sojourner
© 2006 Valerie Miner. Created by SmartAuthorSites.com
Read Valerie Miner’s latest novel, After Eden, published by University of Oklahoma Press, Spring, 2007.
