Melanie Rae Thon

Melanie Rae Thon (born 1957, last name pronounced tone) is an American Writer. She is a recipient of a Fellowship in Creative Arts from The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, a Whiting Writer's Award, the Hopwood Award, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Reading the West Book Award, the Gina Berriault Award, and a Writer's Residency from the Lannan Foundation. In 2009, she was Virgil C. Aldrich Fellow at the Tanner Humanities Center.

Thon's most recent books and chapbooks are Silence & Song (2015); The 7th Man (2015); The Bodies of Birds (2019); Lover (2019); and The Good Samaritan Speaks (2015). She is also the author of the novels The Voice of the River (2011); Sweet Hearts (2001); Meteors in August (1990); and Iona Moon (1993); and the story collections In This Light (2011); Girls in the Grass (1991); and First, Body (1997). Her work has been included in Best American Short Stories (1995, 1996); three Pushcart Prize Anthologies (2003, 2006, 2008); and O. Henry Prize Stories (2006). In 1996, Granta included Thon on its list of the Twenty Best Young American Novelists.

She has taught at Emerson College; the University of Massachusetts (Boston Campus); Syracuse University; and The Ohio State University. Originally from Montana, Melanie Rae Thon now lives in Salt Lake City, where she teaches at the University of Utah.

She earned a B.A. with Highest Honors in English from the University of Michigan in 1980 and an M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University in 1982.

As a teacher, explorer, and writer, she is devoted to the celebration of diversity from a multitude of human and nonhuman perspectives, shattering traditional limits of narrative consciousness as she interrogates the repercussions of exile, slavery, habitat loss, genocide, and extirpation in the context of mystery and miracle, ecstasis, and the infinite wonder of cosmic abundance. Her work moves beyond and between genres, and might be considered poetry, prose, fiction, nonfiction—love songs and prayers, laments and confessions.

Works

BLESSÉD BEARS

The black bear rises out of a dream—fat moths, ripe berries—but does not open her eyes or turn, only surfaces far enough to pull the two squalling cubs deep into her dark fur, back to her warm nipples. The female cub weighs seven ounces, her brother nine. They fit in the cups of their mother’s paws, feel light as birds on the mass of her body.

Last fall she spent five days digging this cave, excavating the earth beneath a fallen cedar. Now the sweet smell of decay fills her. She lined the hole with twigs and grass, leaves and needles, but the floor is cold, the cubs blind and naked.

She gave birth in the bliss of sleep six days ago. She does not count, does not remember, but the shudder of high voices reminds her she’s not alone, pierces through dream to warn: Don’t roll, don’t crush us.

The den is small, its opening barely wide enough for her to squeeze through when she was fat and full last October. She hasn’t eaten since then, hasn’t voided in the den, or pushed her nose outside it. Now she eats what the cubs leave, keeping the cave clean, licking their bare bodies. By early spring, more than a third of her weight will be gone, fat transformed to heat, fuel for bone and milk and muscle.

The cubs cannot hear their own cries or soft trembling murmurs. Deaf now they are, toothless—but they feel their small frames quiver with sound and know how their mother’s rough tongue and deep fur and sweet milk soothe them.

They will never understand how miraculous their lives are. For five months they floated free in their mother’s womb, clusters of cells, embryos fertilized but not implanted. They didn’t attach themselves to the wall of the uterus until their mother was safe and warm in the den, asleep at last, fat enough to survive winter.

They cannot conceive the dangers outside. Cannot imagine cold or snow, thin ice, fast water. A starved grizzly could find them even now, tear through earth, take them from her.

In lush, wet, flowering spring, they’ll meet wolves and mountain lions. Skunks, raccoons, moose, martens. Swarms of ticks! Bees, snakes, birds, mosquitoes. They’ll smell rabid dogs and terrified humans. Bobcats, voles, porcupines, weasels. They’ll eat lilies dug from dark earth and trout pulled from the green river. Climb the straight trunks of ponderosa pine and sway in high branches. They’ll bite rocks and chew grass and scavenge the carcass of an elk killed by wolves and left for coyotes and crows, magpies, eagles. One perfect day in late summer, the forty-two-pound cubs will wrestle and roll and tumble together down a slope of fiery shooting stars and deep blue forget-me-nots.

But now the dark den is home, their mother’s mysterious body their whole world.

Bibliography

Silence & Song, lyric fictions, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press / FC2, 2015
In This Light: New and Selected Stories, Saint Paul: Graywolf, 2011
The Voice of the River, a novel, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press / FC2, 2011
Sweet Hearts, a novel, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001
First, Body, stories, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997
Iona Moon, a novel, New York: Poseidon/Simon & Schuster, 1993
Girls in the Grass, stories, New York: Random House, 1991

Additional Info

Region: Wasatch Front
Genre: Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction
Tags: Environmental, Devotional, Women