Idaho Commission for Libraries

Much of the literature of Idaho and the Intermountain West lies in narratives of landscape and personal experience.

By Ron McFarland

Of the twenty-eight books listed in the program for Tough Paradise: The Literature of Idaho and the Intermountain West, six are anthologies of some kind and of the remaining twenty two titles, twelve are narrated in the first person; that is, with the writer himself or herself speaking from personal experience. What are we to make of this apparent infatuation with the self? What happens in a text when the distinctions between subject and object are blurred? How does the first person, I, as speaker affect the reader?