“Through fiction, I have something to say about the ways living on a border, a place where you can have a foot in two different countries, influences inhabitants’ inner lives,” said Rachelle Scott, a UT Dallas School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology (AHT) doctoral candidate. “I do a lot of reading of others who write about this particular area of the world, and I appreciate the chance for my voice to be included in the conversation.”
“Sometimes They Sound Like Women,” a fiction short story that is part of Scott’s larger novel First Names, earned a spot in the upcoming edition of Southwestern American Literature (SAL).
Scott specializes in the Texas/Mexico border literature and is writing the novel, which takes place in the Chihuahuan Desert, as her dissertation. She spoke with AHT Communications about her story.
I spent part of my life in the desert where my story takes place, and that had a big influence on me as I was growing up. It stuck with me long after I left it, along with some of the ways of thinking that can evolve from spending time there—like a tendency to look inward for a sense of identity, rather than relying heavily on national narratives, or gender narratives, or even on a sense of belonging in a particular community.
Being forced to live more closely with the natural world than people who live in more heavily populated and settled places leaves a mark, and I found myself gravitating toward writing about that experience. Eventually the interest led to one of my specializations and my dissertation. I’m interested in the history and pre-history of the place, including the ongoing dramas spinning out from the competing claims of different groups and nations who have struggled for control there. All these things are reflected in the novel.
The “they” in the title refers to mountain lions, which are common in that area. When you hear a mountain lion vocalizing at night, depending on which kind of vocalization it is, you might think you’re hearing a woman screaming.
The title has some nuances of meaning because the central character is a woman, but she doesn’t fit some of the expectations of womanhood. For example, she doesn’t want children, and that helped tank her marriages. At the beginning of the story, she’s living in Dallas going through her second divorce, and part of that reason for it is that she’s not the kind of woman her husband expects her to be. He assumes that if you’re a woman you want children but that’s not necessarily true.
She has roots in the Big Bend and inherited some land there when her mother died, so she leaves Dallas and goes back to where she grew up to learn how to be, as she says in the story, “no-one’s daughter, no-one’s mother, no-one’s wife.”
That’s a central issue for all of us, really. We all have to figure out who we are at different stages of our lives.
I hope to communicate that since there are different ways to be a woman, we should be wary of expecting all women to have the same values, to want the same things. On the positive side, and I have to be careful to phrase this in a way that’s not a cliché, being alone in a wild place puts your humanity into relief, but also divorces your humanity to some extent from other people’s judgments and from categories that you may or may not fit into. For some people that can be liberating. And for this character, it is.
She begins to have a sense that there’s something worthwhile in her that resists categorization, like there is in everybody. There’s no great thunderclap of insight at the end of the story, but what she experiences while living alone in the desert leaves her with a feeling she’ll eventually be able to put her finger on what that worthwhile something is.
Scott’s story is scheduled for the Spring 2023 volume of Southwestern American Literature, a biannual scholarly journal that includes literary criticism, fiction, poetry, and book reviews concerning the Greater Southwest published by Texas State University.