Pressured by her husband and parents to be the conventional wife of the 1950s, Mary Clearman Blew persisted in her quest to earn M.A. and Ph.D degrees. Her new memoir, This Is Not The Ivy League, is Blew's behind-the-scenes account of pursuing a career at a time when a woman's place in the world was supposed to have limits. It is a story of both the narrowing perspective of the social norm and the ever-expanding possibilities of a woman who refuses to be told what she can and cannot be.

The Write Question: a program that explores the world of writing and publishing in the Western United States.

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Mary Clearman Blew is the author of the acclaimed essay collection All but the Waltz and the memoir Balsamroot. She is the editor of When Montana and I Were Young: A Memoir of a Frontier Childhood, available in a Bison Books edition. Her most recent novel, Jackalope Dreams, is also available in a Bison Books edition.

Blew is a professor of English at the University of Idaho and has twice won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, once in fiction and once in nonfiction. She is also the winner of a Western Heritage Award and the Western Literature Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award.

Read what Kirkus Reviews has to say about This Is Not The Ivy League.

You'll find This Is Not The Ivy League and other books by Mary Clearman Blew at Fact and Fiction in Missoula, or at your local independent bookseller.

The Write Question is produced by Chérie Newman.

Read an interview with TWQ producer Chérie Newman on the Humanities Montana Web site.

Executive producer, Michael Marsolek.

Special thanks to Lisa Simon, David Moore, Barbara Theroux, and Kim Anderson.

This program is supported in part by Humanities Montana, enriching intellectual, cultural, and civic life for all Montanans. And by the Montana Cultural Trust.

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Guests on the The Write Question are writers, publishers, and illustrators living, or working for an extended period of time, in the western United States. The Write Question is a production of Montana Public Radio.