“Lula wondered if the Halloween alps boys had been a mirage, a fig 
newton of her imagination, as she and her brothers had called it in 
their youth.”—Jan Epton Seale

    “Fig newtons” of the imagination and memory abound in this 
collection of twenty-two stories by Texas women: the magical 
moment when a dying grandmother teaches Sue Ellen to dance; 
the red shoes Tammy the Tupperware Princess dons in New 
Orleans; weekends of escape and sisterhood spent in El Paso’s 
McCoy Hotel.

    The stories chosen here—and introduced and placed in historical 
and literary context by Sylvia Ann Grider and Lou Halsell 
Rodenberger—weave a story of their own: the story of women’s 
writing in the Lone Star State, from 1865 to the present.

    Authors include Beverly Lowry, Carolyn Osborn, Annette 
Sanford, Denise Chavez, Katherine Anne Porter, Judy Alter, Joyce 
Gibson Roach, and fifteen others.

    As Susan Ford Wiltshire writes in “The Quilt,” “any grief was 
bearable if you could tell a story about it or make a story out of it.” 
Texas women have borne grief and laughter, hope and memory by 
telling a story. 

_________________________________________________________

Folklorist SYLVIA ANN GRIDER, an associate professor of 
anthropology at Texas A&M University in College Station, and LOU 
HALSELL RODENBERGER, professor emeritus of English at 
McMurry University in Abilene, Texas, earlier co-edited Texas 
Women Writers: A Tradition of Their Own, also published by Texas 
A&M University Press.


Number Sixteen: Tarleton State University Southwestern Studies in 
the Humanities


What people are saying about this book

"The Texas women whose stories make up this anthology and the 
editors who put the collection together have done the Lone Star State, 
and American Literature, proud."—Pembroke, June 2005