Idaho Commission for Libraries

After a youth spent in the East in quiet discontent, Susan Swetnam writes about the middle-age surprise of finding herself at home in southeastern Idaho.  The book’s autobiographical essays chronicle her attempts to come to terms with various “homes”–with the beautiful expanses and sometimes quirky occupants of the Intermountain West, but also with life choices, with family, with love, with responsibility, and with the need to keep adapting to life’s ongoing changes.  Essay topics range from the surprise of winning a blue ribbon at the Eastern Idaho State Fair, to mountain rambling, to fighting fires, to accepting the blessings of a love which can only be temporary.  Youth is hardly the apex of life, Swetnam concludes; middle age, too, can be a time of deep satisfaction, a time of dawning self-realization.  Home Mountains was honored by the Idaho Library Association in 2000.

*Cover reprinted with permission from Washington State University Press

Author Information

Susan Swetnam was born in Philadelphia in 1950 and educated at the University of Delaware and the University of Michigan.  She came to Idaho in 1979 to teach at Idaho State University.  A professor of English and a writer, she has published essays and articles in a wide variety of national, regional, and literary magazines, including Gourmet, Mademoiselle, and Black Canyon Quarterly.  She won a writer’s residency from Washington State’s Espy Foundation in 2004.  In addition to Home Mountains, she has published book-length studies of Mormon pioneer life story writing and of Idaho writer Grace Jordan, as well as a collection of personal essays about teaching (My Best Teachers Were Saints, 2006).  She has been active in public humanities programming in Idaho, including Let’s Talk About It programs for more than twenty years, as was her late husband, poet Ford Swetnam.

*Photo reprinted with permission of Washington State University Press

Discussion Questions

1. What does Swetnam see in the landscape of southeast Idaho that helps her define herself?
 
2. Some of this book’s essays are retrospective, looking back at periods when the writer had not yet discovered Idaho.  How do they fit into the book’s overall themes?�

3.  The book’s first essay, “On Entering the Eastern Idaho State Fair,” concludes “and I am home.”  And yet that essay has shown that the writer still recognizes herself as an outsider in the human landscape of the Fair.  In what sense, then, is she “home?”

4. Though a few of the essays in this book are about family, this book suggests that Swetnam is more disengaged from birth family than many writers in this series.  What constitutes “family” for her?  How can a person be “home” in a place if no blood relations live there?

5. Which of these essays round and complicate conventional pictures of the West and Westerners?  Which would confirm such pictures?

6. How does the perspective that an immigrant like Swetnam brings to a place differ from the perspective of a native?  Does one necessarily see a place differently, or better, than another?

7.  In the introduction, Swetnam writes that “middle age . . . is about finding the sort of grounding that makes living possible.”  What sorts of “grounding” does the book suggest that she’s found?  Do you agree that middle age is an especially fruitful time for self-definition?