When We Were Hardcore

Linda Michel-Cassidy's stories are born of the mountain areas in the American Southwest, and they depict the lesser-known lives of characters who discover, reckon with, and often seek to escape the mostly rural landscapes that made them.

In As Happy as I Ever Was, the narrator is dropped into the rural Southwest, on a road trip engineered by her cousin. When they become separated, the narrator eventually tumbles into a sort of eco-mini-cult. One of the folks with whom she ends up living th...