Blog 3 Freestyle: Pamela Steele Greasewood Creek

I know Pamela Steele as a writer from Eastern Oregon who has read her work in La Grande, so I was excited to pick up her novel Greasewood Creek at a reading earlier this year. The novel is a series of scenes in the life of protagonist Avery from different moments in time. In childhood, Avery's sister drowned when she was supposed to be watching her. In adulthood, Avery's child is stillborn, a loss that her relationship with Davis cannot overcome, giving her perspective on her parents' difficulties as parents, partners, and people after the death of Avery's sister. Ultimately, Avery finds purpose in delivering babies.

Two aspects of this book were particularly powerful: the language is very spare. Steele provides language like line-drawn images, giving the reader just enough to live with and feel for the characters and nothing more. This gives the reader energy to focus on the details of the story and plenty of room to imagine the rest of the characters' lives.

The other aspect I appreciated was the use of the Eastern Oregon landscape as a character. Here is an example: "A south wind sizzles through the dry grass, brushes Avery's bare legs, rises into the limbs of the cottonwoods. It surges through a swath of apple trees to the east, whispers the names of her sister, grandmother, father before it rushes north across the pasture toward the only other house she's lived in" (1). A living thing, almost sentient, that landscape keeps Avery company throughout her life, and as a transplant to Eastern Oregon, I love getting the feel of Steele reveling in all of its details. 


The only part of the book that didn't sit well with me was the sexual abuse Avery experienced as a child. Given Avery's losses of sister and baby, the abuse almost seemed like too much--and doesn't every female character in literature get abused as a child? Of course, intellectually I know the abuse demonstrates the devastation Avery's mother experienced in losing her child--so devastated was she that she could not look out for the safety of her other daughter. I also know that at least 25% of women will be sexually abused at some point in their lives, so there actually aren't enough stories that realistically include that experience. All the same, I think the story could have operated fine without that additional pain. 


Works Cited
Steele, Pamela. Greasewood Creek. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2011. Print. 


Image Source
Greasewood Creek Cover Image. amazon.com. 1996-2012. Web. 1 July 2012. <http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Greasewood+Creek>.