Having Everything Right

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Kim Stafford. Having Everything Right

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“In an age in which we often find ourselves at odds with nature, Stafford serves as a guide and interpreter listening for the way stories name a region, a country, and with familiarity and affection, explicating the terrain for those of us who have forgotten or never learned how.”

—FROM THE 1986 CITATION OF EXCELLENCE AWARDED BY THE WESTERN STATES BOOK AWARDS

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“I can’t help thinking,” she said, “how we look upon the Roanoke River every day, and savor our three-hundred-year history. It must be strange to live out West, where history is only a hundred years old, and stories only a hundred years deep.” I was chilled by a westerner’s homesick knowing: a century is a veil almost thin enough to brush aside.

This book travels for place, custom, and story. As water is pilgrim, I know the urge: to visit all the places I was healed. Water travels as local inhabitant, as essence of tree, of capillary stone, of sunlight pillar in a meadow ablaze with grasshoppers. By that pilgrim’s urge, I listen to my family stories, one long generation from the primitive. By that urge, I seek out the speaking places of my own country: Montana battlefield, Oregon fallen barn, North California coastal midden, Idaho eccentric’s hut. I listen for the way stories would name our country. This book is the listening. The task of naming I would share with you, for the naming is the active part. I want to learn place, custom, and story for my home. I want to name it in my own tongue, “Having Everything Right.”

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