'Breaking Clean' by becoming a writer

MISSOULA, Mont. -- Judy Blunt needed to find meaning in her life as a prairie ranch wife. So she took money she had saved for three years and bought a Sears Roebuck typewriter.

Each night, she would spool strips of freezer paper into the machine and write, "emptying myself onto the paper until I could lie down." Later, she began writing during the day, while the menfolk worked in the fields.

Then her father-in-law, "furious because lunch for the hay crew was late, took my warm, green typewriter to the shop and killed it with a sledgehammer."

But the destruction of her writing equipment did not stop Blunt, whose story unfolds in "Breaking Clean," a memoir about a woman who escaped from her life as a ranch wife.

The book, released in February by Alfred A. Knopf, began years ago in a writing class at the University of Montana, where Blunt enrolled soon after she left Phillips County in 1986 with "a new divorce and an old car, with three scared kids and some clothes piled in back."

"Breaking Clean" won Blunt a $35,000 Whiting Writer's Award in October, and, in 1997, a PEN/Jerard Fund Award for a work in progress.

"Ranch wife had always been my default career," says the 47-year-old Blunt. "I knew I could do it. I didn't have a lot of guidance about finding my way in the outside world."

The granddaughter of homesteaders, Blunt grew up on a remote eastern Montana ranch, between the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation and the Missouri River Breaks. At 18, she wed a Vietnam veteran 12 years her senior and moved to his family's cattle ranch 15 miles away.

As the daughter-in-law in a family ranch corporation, Blunt said, "my job basically was to take care of men and, when they came along, babies." She is quick to add her story is not the story of every ranch wife.

Her former father-in-law, Frank, figures into Blunt's book again and again.

One day as she wiped counters in the kitchen "he began telling stories ... how his mother and father walked from Lewistown to the banks of the Missouri River with everything they owned in a wheelbarrow."

"Young people these days seemed to expect everything at once -- big house, nice things, everything new. Didn't want to wait for a thing," she said he told her. "He let this soak in for a moment, then rose to leave, his smile like bared teeth. If I was going to get along here, he added, I'd better figure out we were raising calves, not minting money."

"Breaking Clean" was written over the course of a decade, mostly student years for Blunt as she pursued a bachelor's degree and then a master of fine arts at Montana. The book began as an essay submitted to William Bevis, the professor who taught the creative writing class Blunt was taking.

"I read it out loud and the class was just stunned, silent," said Bevis, who describes Blunt's writing as "unpretentious, certain and exact."

Blunt felt torn about leaving the ranch and it took her a while "to resolve that stuff for herself," said author William Kittredge, who taught Blunt about a dozen years ago.

As a student she paid the bills with college financial aid, child-support checks and money from a job that had her sanding and varnishing wood floors for customers who included actress Andie MacDowell, part of Montana's emerging celebrity population at the time.

"Judy survived on three and four hours of sleep a night, sometimes less, and about three pots of coffee," said Clifford Cain, who owned Custom Wood Floors. "I don't know how she did what she did." He remembers watching her children join her on the stage at her graduation ceremony.

Her two sons and daughter spent summers at the ranch after their parents separated. Blunt said her children have become productive adults, but she wrote of some of the difficulties they faced. "The move was hardest on the boys, for here (in Missoula) they were only boys," she writes. "At the ranch they were men-in-training, and they mourned this loss of prestige."

The elder son seemed destined to return to the ranch and eventually did, but he was an outsider and did not stay, she wrote.

All three children have read the book.

"The hard part for them is that there are some things you don't want to know about your mother," Blunt said.

Kittredge, who has written several books and co-edited the 1988 anthology "The Last Best Place," said it is hard to predict how a national audience will receive "Breaking Clean."

"Western books tend not be big successes nationally," Kittredge said. "But once in a while, one is."

Blunt's book has all the Western elements: hard winters, a one-room school, isolation, a desperately feverish child and more.

"I think this is a book that will last, and last and last," Kittredge said. "Decades from now, it will still be in print."

Blunt is cautious about forecasting what might lie ahead.

"I don't know how far this book will fly me," she said.

She has looked at opportunities in places like Miami and Pittsburgh, but is mindful that her writing is grounded in the West. She knows there are good things about "staying where your stories are heard."

"I can't manufacture excitement about learning to live in a large city," she said.

And there are times when she wonders if moving to Missoula was her "last brave thing."

------

On the Net:

Alfred A. Knopf: http://www.aaknopf.com

UM Creative Writing Program: http:www.cas.umt.edu/eng--dev/