{"id":23913,"date":"2013-11-03T13:08:25","date_gmt":"2013-11-03T19:08:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=23913"},"modified":"2013-11-06T10:34:41","modified_gmt":"2013-11-06T16:34:41","slug":"barbara-k-richardsons-tributary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/barbara-k-richardsons-tributary\/","title":{"rendered":"Barbara K. Richardson’s Tributary"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are pleased to announce that Barbara K. Richardson’s novel Tributary has been awarded the 2013 15 Bytes Book Award for Fiction. The author will receive a small cash award to recognize her achievement.<\/em>
\nOur congratulations also go out to our other two finalists for the award, Miah Arnold for her novel Sweet Land of Bigamy (see a review here), and Matthew Kirkpatrick for his story collection Light Without Heat. (look for a review here later this month).<\/em><\/p>\n

\"5280-TRIB-cover-shot\"<\/a>Remarkable as Barbara K. Richardson\u2019s novel Tributary<\/em> is, it is most remarkable, perhaps, because it seems to be one of the first literary works in memory that positions the history of the Great Basin in the broader context of its time. Set in the years following the arrival of the Mormons to Utah, this sprawling tale told in the first person dignifies the region, if rarely the \u201csaints\u201d who people it, with the weight of its narrative. Here the territory is not just a placeholder in the story of the west\u2014or in modern parlance, a \u201cflyover state.\u201d Its heroine, plucky Clair Martin\u2014the woman with the red stain of a birthmark on her left check\u2014is its product, and its curse, its orphan and its lay prophetess. Clair is a proto-feminist\u2014not entirely likable\u2014and, lucky for the reader, stained with much more than just the splotch on her face.<\/p>\n

Of the many questions this Western epic raises in the course of its scene-shifting from Brigham City to the Mississippi Delta and back to the Utah\/Idaho border is, what happened to those 19th Century Mormons who left their tribe?<\/p>\n

Not since Frank C. Robertson\u2019s gritty biography of a homesteading family titled A Ram in the Thicket<\/em> has the story of this lost generation of the American West been visited so grippingly. Clair is fiercely independent, not willing to marry, though willing to love, not only her beloved Tierre\u2014 the nine-year-old black orphan from Louisiana who ends up returning to the high mountain desert with Clair\u2014but a scheming sheepherder whom she beds. Clair is the first to say that she holds a grudge against the Mormons who raised her, trammeled her spirit, attempted to marry her off as a plural wife, and, finally,\u00a0 looked the other way when one of them tried to rape her. And yet still she resonates, as humans tend to do, with the civilizing force of her youth even as she relentlessly critiques it, resists it and stubbornly makes it somehow her own.<\/p>\n

Only \u201cthe continuous body of earth,\u201d the landscape seems to give Clair sustained solace from psychic injuries that alternately torture and beguile her, that and the authenticity and spirituality of the Bannock and Shoshone, equally \u201cmarked\u201d in her view as is Tierre (who eventually marries a Shoshone)\u2014equally set apart with the \u201cmark of Cain,\u201d as is she.<\/p>\n

The \u201cwhite and delightsome\u201d race of the righteous, a Book of Mormon phrase that has only recently been excised from scripture by apologists, sticks in her craw throughout this lyrical outing. And yet as with those who will follow her\u2014outsiders of every stripe from what can seem like a hermetically-sealed and ideologically-driven community\u2014Clair forms her family from those who, like her, have been \u201cmarked.\u201d And the character of that nascent family, first in New Orleans but especially later near the River Raft Mountains in what is now Box Elder County, is a character yet to be fully formed and fully validated. (Might there be a sequel?)<\/p>\n

Still, as with another Western spiritualist and mystic lover of the land\u2014Terry Tempest Williams\u2014Clair is too smart and too resilient to dismiss out-of-hand the clay from which she has been formed. Despite this novel\u2019s ending with Clair\u2019s initiation into Native ritual, I don\u2019t believe Clair (or Richardson) is capitulating to the self-righteous rose water wash some insist\u2014mostly Anglos\u2014on splashing Native American culture. Nor is there a capitulation to bald pantheism. These don\u2019t seem to be the answers to Clair\u2019s dilemma based in longing for both<\/em> independence and community. The beauty and rigor of Tributary<\/em> stem from a tension, what author Levi Peterson referred to as \u201ca fierce, grieving thing,\u201d that rises uniquely in the people Clair can\u2019t quite claim as her own any longer (if she ever could), but to whom she can never look away.<\/p>\n

One of several books published by the new Torrey House Press, Tributary<\/em> seems to have been largely overlooked by critics and the public since its publication last year. (The exception being, of course, that it was a finalist for the Willa Literary Award, named in honor of Willa Cather.) Is there a market for this stunning novel with the admittedly antique\u2014sometimes arch–diction, 20-plus years in the making?<\/p>\n

Perhaps not. Why?<\/p>\n

For the devout the book isn\u2019t certain enough in its moral (read: Mormon) purpose.<\/p>\n

For the modern-day LDS apostate, it doesn\u2019t burn the beast far enough to the ground.<\/p>\n

For the \u201cLatter-day Sometimes Saint\u201d (to quote a poem by Carolyn Campbell), it\u2019s offensive because it\u2019s not a critique borne out of his or her own idiosyncratic complaints.<\/p>\n

And for the outside observer living here in the gumbo of this self-described \u201cpeculiar people\u201d with their lively but checkered history\u2026will they also ignore Tributary<\/em> under the old pretense that it is artistically inferior or worse, provincial? Bigotry not only knows no skin color; it knows no religion. And that, dear reader, is the cultural conundrum quite specific to where we live.<\/p>\n

Perhaps only Clair Martin, the magisterial outsider\/insider with the stained left cheek, could narrate a penetrating expose of just that. She\u2019s already done a pretty brilliant job of getting the lay of this enigmatic land that is as much about an idea and its proliferating but largely reactionary counter-ideas as it is about rock and juniper, alkaline flats and big sky.<\/p>\n

————————-<\/p>\n

Tributary by Barbara K. Richardson<\/strong>
\nTorrey House Press <\/a>(September 2012)
\n352 pages
\n$15.95<\/p>\n

About the Author
\nBarbara Richardson\u2019s debut novel, Guest House<\/em>, launched the first literary Truck Stop Tour in the nation and was a fiction finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award in 2010. In Tributary<\/em>, she claims the land of her Mormon ancestors who settled the northern Salt Lake Valley. Richardson earned an MFA in poetry from Eastern Washington University. Barbara is also an avid environmentalist. She now writes and designs landscapes in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. Visit the author\u2019s website: www.barbarakrichardson.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We are pleased to announce that Barbara K. Richardson’s novel Tributary has been awarded the 2013 15 Bytes Book Award for Fiction. The author will receive a small cash award to recognize her achievement. Our congratulations also go out to our other two finalists for the award, Miah […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":834,"featured_media":23917,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,30,35],"tags":[1749,1750,1423,1061],"class_list":["post-23913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-15-bytes","category-book-reviews","category-literary-arts","tag-15-bytes-book-award","tag-barbara-k-richardson","tag-by-david-g-pace","tag-torrey-house-press"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/11\/5280-TRIB-cover-shot.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-29 22:52:40","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/834"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23913"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23913\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23916,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23913\/revisions\/23916"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}