Winter's Edge

by Valerie Miner

I first read--and admired--Valerie Miner's work when I reviewed A Walking Fire two years ago. The award-winning author of six novels and many short stories and essays, Miner reveals in this work the world and worries of older working-class urban women, a world that seldom receives recognition. In the San Francisco of the 1970s, two women--a feminist Scottish waitress and a ladylike ex-New York shop clerk--find themselves drawn into a violent chain of events that binds their friendship closer. Miner also portrays the issue of sex and the older woman, who enjoys her pleasures but doesn't want that old ball and chain again. Winter's Edge is a wonderful book of loves and tears, without being the least bit sappy.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Valerie Miner is the award-winning author of fifteen books. Her new story collection, Bread and Salt, will be published in September, 2020. Her latest novel, Traveling with Spirits, will be published in September, 2013. Other novels include After Eden, Range of Light, A Walking Fire, Winter's Edge, Blood Sisters, All Good Women, Movement: A Novel in Stories, and Murder in the English Department. Her short fiction books include Abundant Light, The Night Singers and Trespassing. Her collection of essays is Rumors from the Cauldron: Selected Essays, Reviews and Reportage. In 2002, The Low Road: A Scottish Family Memoir was a Finalist for the PEN USA Creative Non-Fiction Award. Abundant Light was a 2005 Fiction Finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards.
Valerie Miner’s work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Triquarterly, Salmagundi, New Letters, Ploughshares, The Village Voice, Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, The T.L.S., The Women’s Review of Books, The Nation and other journals. Her stories and essays are published in more than sixty anthologies. A number of her pieces have been dramatized on BBC Radio 4. Her work has been translated into German, Turkish, Danish, Italian, Spanish, French, Swedish and Dutch. In addition to single-authored projects, she has collaborated on books, museum exhibits as well as theatre.
She has won fellowships and awards from The Rockefeller Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, The NEA, The Jerome Foundation, The Heinz Foundation, The Australia Council Literary Arts Board and numerous other sources. She has received Fulbright Fellowships to Tunisia, India and Indonesia.
Winner of a Distinguished Teaching Award, she has taught for over twenty-five years and is now a professor and artist in residence at Stanford University. She travels internationally giving readings, lectures, and workshops. She and her partner live in San Francisco and Mendocino County, California. Her website is www.valerieminer.com

Reviews

[KV LeSuer · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was on a shelf then in a box for more than 20 years. I recently had 40 boxes of my books returned after being separated from me for over 9 years. As I am reading through ones I don’t know about keeping I came upon this one.
All I can say is the idea was probably good. However the plot was messy and the writing confused. The author would be writing about a characters thought and suddenly remembered she should give environment or other embellishment and did right then and there. Character development was pinched despite their development could have changed the success of this becoming literature.
Even odder she added a sex scene with 2 characters that may have had more development and clarity in 3 paragraph than the entire book.
I hope this was practice and the authors went on to do something better. Curious but could have been so much better.
I am always told I am intense in my opinion. I see it comes out in a negative fashion here. If you seek a woman to woman friendship with lesbian questions of what makes friendships and what makes romance (or/and both) see the book Sarah and Patience written back in the day by Isabel Miller.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book had been lurking on my bookshelf unread for nearly 30 years but finally I picked it up, and I must say I did enjoy it. The two central characters Chrissie and Margaret are well developed and quite complex. The friendship between these two very different personalities is believable. the book is set in the resident community of the Tenderloin district of San Francisco in the early 1980's against the backdrop of a looming local election in which a pro-development candidate is playing dirty, threatening the community in which these women have lived for so many years.
Thsi would be the time of Harvey Milk, and two of the minor characters are gay, but it's not a gay novel as such.
I would like to read some more books by Valerie Miner now.