Like the versatile denizen of Hummingbird Mountain in her story "Venison Pie," Tess Gallagher is a contemporary hybrid. Deeply rooted in her native Washington State, Gallagher draws on the literature and culture of places as distant as Ireland, Eastern Europe, and Japan. Though instinctively self-reliant, she has joined in collaborative projects with moviemakers and visual artists as well as other writers. Early recognized for her poetry, she has won acclaim for work in several genres: the essay, the screenplay, and the short story. Invoking the title of Gallagher's poetry collection Amplitude (1987), Emily Leider of The San Francisco Chronicle Review (10 January 1988) observed that her "inclusiveness allows qualities usually seen as antithetical to meet in reconciliation, or at least peaceful coexistence." In the fluid landscape of Gallagher's poems and stories, horses transform houses, saloons become salons, and "nettles could be feathers."

As these ambiguities suggest, the unifying pattern of Gallagher's...