Mt. Mary Austin Black Mountain Sat, Jun 12, 2004 With: Matthew Holliman		Etymology Mt. Mary Austin Black Mountain	Story	Photos / Slideshow	Maps: 1 2	Profile

"Mary Austin: The Creator of Land of Little Rain
The story of Land of Little Rain really begins with the four-year-old Mary Austin's mystical experience at the walnut tree, during which she recognized her ability to communicate with the spiritual world. 'To this day I can recall the swift inclusive awareness of each for the whole--I in them [plants and animals] and they in me and all of us enclosed in a warm, lucent bubble of livingness' (Pearce 21). Since Austin's account of the experience cannot be corroborated, what actually happened at the walnut tree remains in doubt. Nevertheless, her claims that the experience shaped her later work, including Land of Little Rain, cannot be discounted in light of her future relationship with the natural world and the mysticism suffusing her writing.

Her intimacy with the natural world, so vividly represented in Land of Little Rain, has also been linked with her reading of a book by Scottish geologist Hugh Miller. In The Old Red Sandstone, Miller writes: 'The commonest things are worth looking at--even stones and weeds and familiar animals' (Church 116). Austin obviously took that advice to heart in Land of Little Rain, in which she writes with great care and detail about 'the commonest things': the flora, fauna, and 'lost rivers' of the desert.

Her published insights about the creation of the book are scant, perhaps because she felt her work spoke for itself. However, the work was clearly significant in her mind; she decided to leave southern California because she considered her experiences there 'stored' in Land of Little Rain. Remembering the creative process that led to the book, she writes that she 'had been trying to hit upon the key for it for a year or more, and found it at last in the rhythm of the twenty-mule teams that creaked in and out of the borax works, the rhythm of the lonely lives blown across the trails' (Austin 296). Although Land of Little Rain sold well, she was not happy with the work she had so assiduously labored over. She hid the volume among the other books in her house and cringed when her husband showed it to visitors (Fink 119). She wrote to a friend '. . . I have not spoken out my message to my satisfaction and cannot therefore call my work successful no matter what the booksellers say' (119). A perfectionist, she had set standards she felt unable to meet. As she worked over a new edition of Land of Little Rain twenty years and several publications later, however, Austin seemed more content with the original piece. 'Reading it after all these years . . . I see now where I came wholly into the presence of the Land, there was a third thing came into being, the sum of what passed between me and the Land which has not, perhaps never could, come into being with anybody else' (Fink 195)."
- University of Delaware