Skin Deep: An Inspirational Ode Sung In The Vast Grandeur On The Western American Plains
woman writer of exceptional talent in any genre."(1) Not only was she able to take her craft of tatoo art and turn her creative needlepoint into a form of literary aestheticism in the written and spoken word.
On memories concerning her youth, Griffen remembers,
"Maybe I grew up western without really notocing, Calamity Jane without a horse, or maybe that's just something else I've said so often enough that it sounds like the truth. When I was very young, I believed that the West was special, that Wyoming was the Indian word for a land where courageous men and strong women struggled our a peculiarly western code of ethics and morality along the way."(2)
"But this was accompanied by the unspoken belief that the West was the kind of special place in which someone like me didn't belong."(3)
She continues at other points in the novel to remember her youth and inability to come to terms with the idea of becoming. At first, she despised the harshness of the West, but as "Skin Deep" portrays later, Griffin soon came to miss the rough solid edges of the West of her childhood. In the segment, she describes the harshness of the landscape.
"I hated the West when I was younger, loathed Laramie with the intensity of an animal that would have chewed off one leg or another to free itself from a steel- jawed trap. I hated the cloaxing smallness of town and I feared the gaping expanse of prarie as well as the mountain ranges that loomed like molars above the sage brush. And then there was the wind, the Wyoming wind that showed more than a few homesteaders over the brink of insanity. The wind hurls icy taunts in February, breaks and enters into March, spits a phlegm of sleet in April. The rest of the year, it just blows.(4)
As the book moves from chapter to chapter, the pages disclose a young woman in the midst of a slow gradual process of becoming an adult on the Western plains. With her emergence as a literal and visual artist, a rare glimpse into the changing fortunes of the American West begins to unfold. A slow transformation from the old world of a romantic pioneer spirit into the modern world of a new century dominated by the cold economics of globilization run through her narrative. While the pages of her book turn, Griffen gives her reading public a glimpse into the lives of the last
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