Tamara Linse - "a writer, cogitator, recovering cowgirl" - grew up on a Wyoming ranch where adult women told dumb blonde jokes. Linse's book of short stories is called How To Be A Man. "They thought of themselves," she writes of the ranch women, "as profoundly set apart, a sort of third gender - not quite a man but definitely not a woman. I know this because I was one of these women, and it took years of writing and university classes to recognize this as a particularly virulent form of self-hatred." The young girl in Judy Blunt's poem, "Lessons in Physics," waits out a thunderstorm, wondering if doing so will violate her rancher father's unwritten rules.
(Broadcast: "Reflections West," 10/28/14 & 10/29/14. Listen Tuesdays, 8:30 p.m. or Wednesdays, 3:54 p.m.)