November 2019
Celebrity Photo Of The Month

Debra Gwartney with Kim McKimmie

Debra Gwartney has two honorable occupations — an Author and a Teacher.

She is the author of Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love and the coeditor of Home Ground: A Guide to the American Landscape.

Born in Salmon, Idaho, a fifth generation Idahoan, Debra Gwartney is the winner of the 2018 RiverTeeth Nonfiction Prize. She teaches Pacific University's MFA in Writing program and lives in Western Oregon.

Miss Kim went to a reading by Debra Gwartney of her latest book. Her synopsis reads: Part history, part memoir, I Am a Stranger Here Myself taps dimensions of human yearning: the need to belong, the snarl of family history, and embracing womanhood in the patriarchal American West. Gwartney becomes fascinated with the missionary Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, the first Caucasian woman to cross the Rocky Mountains and one of fourteen people killed at the Whitman Mission in 1847 by Cayuse Indians. Whitman's role as a white woman drawn to "settle" the West reflects the tough-as-nails women in Gwartney's own family. Arranged in four sections as a series of interlocking explorations and ruminations, Gwartney uses Whitman as a touchstone to spin a tightly woven narrative about identity, the power of womanhood, and coming to peace with one's most cherished place.

We give a huge round of applause to Debra Gwartney for a most interesting and innovative way to tell a story and write a memoir.