The ten stories in The Day of the Dance by Norma Crawford Tomlinson are about women at various stages of life, from childhood to midlife maturity. They explore the crises that make people change: the first awareness of death in the family, awakening sexuality in the context of family history, a college romance during wartime, encountering the world views of different (and sometimes dangerous) cultures, troublesome travels abroad, concern for a friend in trouble, the difficult work of marriage and motherhood, and prayers for a prodigal child.
The earliest stories are about girlhood, particularly the time spent with the narrator’s grandfather in a small town in Michigan. These early stories celebrate the strong ties of extended family, and they owe a great deal to the presence of a patriarchal grandfather, the doctor who saved the narrator’s life by diagnosing her rheumatic fever. This grandfather also serves as a link to the ancestral past, introduces the narrator to a sense of place and history going back to the Ojibwas, and is the first to instill in her a love for literature, especially the romantic poets.
Some of the stories are about the narrator’s time spent as a young teacher of Indians in New Mexico, where she learns as much as she is taught, and that there’s still much to learn about herself. Other stories take us from college years to young marriage to motherhood and world travel.
The landscapes of Tomlinson’s prose are vivid, whether the stories are set in a small town in the American heartland, a crowded street in India, the French countryside, a Southwestern Indian reservation, or the art world of San Francisco. They are woven with artful complexity, so that a story about a battered woman is also about a troubled teenage daughter. Sophisticated without being overwritten, complex without being puzzles, Tomlinson’s stories are full of compassion for the human condition.
Norma Crawford Tomlinson studied with Wallace Stegner in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. She has taught creative and expository writing at the Tokyo University of the Sacred Heart and at the University of San Francisco. Her stories have been published in literary journals, such as The Pacific Spectator, and the Carolina Quarterly. She also received a special mention for “Snowbound” in the Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses (1983-1984).
