Caroline Patterson, best known as the editor of the Willa Award–winning anthology, Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart, is also the author of powerful short fiction. Her new collection, Ballet at the Moose Lodge, showcases sixteen of her extraordinary stories. In these stories, Patterson explores what it is to grow up female in the American West. As her narratives reveal the lives of travelers, homemakers, radio show announcers, mothers, teachers, dancers, shop clerks, and the subterranean world of girls, they take the reader from a ferry dock in Resurrection Bay, Alaska, to a two-room school in the Bitterroot Valley, from brash, backpacking college students to young new mothers on the edge, from the 1920s to the 1990s. In Ballet at the Moose Lodge, Patterson explores in delicate and searing prose the visible and invisible negotiations women make to navigate lives bound by the rugged western landscape.