THE WESTERN LITERATURE ASSOCIATION’S
OFFICIAL HOME PAGE
Western Literature Association
41st Annual Conference
PROGRAM
Feeling Western
25-28 October 2006
The Grove Hotel, Boise, Idaho
Hosted by Tara Penry and Boise State University
NOTE: The schedule is subject to change and will be updated regularly as changes occur. The latest update was made on 9-7-06. If there are any scheduling conflicts for your session or questions of any kind, please contact Tara Penry.
WEDNESDAY, 25 October
1–4 Executive Council Meeting River Fork
4–7 Registration 2nd Floor Landing
5–6:30 Executive Council Dinner Cottonwood Grille
7:15-10 Welcome Evergreen
Tara Penry, WLA President
Silent Film: Back to God’s Country, starring Nell Shipman
Introduction byTom Trusky, Idaho Film Collection
Original Score Performed by Bijou Orchestrette
Reception
THURSDAY, 26 October
8–3 Registration 2nd Floor Landing8–5 Book Exhibit Aspen
Thursday 8–9:15 Session One
1A (Evergreen) Mary Clearman Blew and Western Feminism
Chair: O. Alan Weltzien, University of Montana, Western
Sarah Hulme, Utah State University: “Mending Geographies: Mary Clearman Blew’s Balsamroot”
Susan Rowe, Boise State University: “Isolation and Identity in All But the Waltz”
Cassie Hemstrom, Boise State University: “The Rebirth of the Sow in the River: Creating a Narrative of Choice in Mary Clearman Blew’s Writing Her Own Life”
Evelyn I. Funda, Utah State University: “The ‘Threat to the Common Herd’: Monsters in Mary Clearman Blew’s Writing”
1B (Cedar) Foreign Places in the Heart
Chair: Nancy Owen Nelson, Yavapai College
Susan Lang, Yavapai College: From Juniper Blue
Nancy Owen Nelson, Yavapai College: From Don’t Stay Too Long: Memoir of an Army Brat
Penelope Reedy, Idaho State University: From Coffee Royal, Pocatello Blend/Rare Beans
Charlotte M. Wright, University of Iowa Press: “Henry’s Story”
1C (Rapids) Understanding Animals in the Western Frontier
Chair: Sarah E. McFarland, Northwestern State University
Jennifer J. Clark, University of Southern California: “As Honest as the Horse Between My Knees: Slavery, Horsemanship, and Stewardship in the Western Novel”
Tamas Dobozy, Wilfrid Laurier University: “ ‘Between You, the Coyotes and the Crickets a Thought Don't Have Much of a Chance': The Artificial Frontiers of Sam Shepard's True West”
Lauri Chose, Indiana University of Pennsylvania: “Writing Arctic Animals: Forging the Connection”
Andrew Wingfield, George Mason University: “Stalking the Mountain Lion”
Chair: Susan Kollin, Montana State University
Elizabeth Lester Barnes, Boise State University: “Transcending Boundaries: The Un-Housing of Bachelard in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping”
Catherine Holmes, College of Charleston: “‘The Remystification of Nearly Everything’: Another Look at Myth, Metaphor, and Mobility in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping”
Sayzie Koldys, Boise State University: “Reimagining the Emptiest State: Magical Realism in Annie Proulx’s Wyoming Stories”
Stacy Coyle, University of Denver: “Open Places vs. Charged Spaces in Annie Proulx”
1E (River Fork) Forces of Nature and Community in Cather’s Fiction
Chair: Anne Kaufman, Milton, Massachusetts
Angela Glover, University of Kansas: “Jim Burden, Lost in Space: How Liminality and Temperament Theory Work to Produce a Tragic Ending in Willa Cather’s My Antonia”
Margaret Doane, California State University, San Bernardino: “‘Bridled by Caution’: Community-Enforced Conformity in Willa Cather’s Nebraska Novels”
Mark Hartvigsen, Boise State University: “‘Geography is a terribly fatal thing sometimes’: Determinism in O Pioneers!”
1F (Clearwater) The Trouble with “Black” and “White”
Chair: Michael K. Johnson, University of Maine, Farmington
Brian Flota, George Washington University: “Whose Country Is It? Ishmael Reed and Percival Everett’s African American West”
Katie Rawson, University of Mississippi:
“Roping Uncle Sam’s Canon: Narrative Voice and the American Myth of the West in The Life and Adventures of Nat Love”
Amber Leonard, Leeward Community College: “A Place in Paradise: Perceiving (In)authenticity in Tara Bray Smith’s West of Then”
John Escobedo, Rice University: “The Racial Logic of White U.S. Mestizaje in Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? and The Squatter and the Don”
1G (Ivy) Reading Western Fiction by Genre
Chair: Jill Heney, Boise State University
John Donahue, Concordia University: “Zane Grey’s Idaho, The Border Legion, and Deadwood”
Paul Varner, Oklahoma Christian University: “Twenty-first Century Paperback Westerns”
William Katerberg, Calvin College: “At Home in Utopia: Time and Place in Utopian Science Fiction set in the American West”
John C. Davies, Bishop Grosseteste College & Portland State University: “Western Feeling, Feeling Western: The Novels of Molly Gloss”
1H (Suite 214) Making Home In A Restless World: Perception, Representation, Preservation
Chair: Liz Stephens, Utah State University
Brandon R. Schrand, University of Idaho: “Curating Memory: Seeing Home as a Tourist”
Rob Kunz, Utah State University: “Growing Pains: The Battle over Land and Family in the Shadow of the Tetons”
Liz Stephens, Utah State University: “American West Heritage Center: The Selling of a Lifestyle, The Commodification of a Dream”
Denice Turner, University of Nevada, Reno: “Flying Home: Finding a Place in the Space of the West”
Thursday 9–10 Coffee Break (Aspen)
Thursday 9:30–10:45 Session Two
2A (Evergreen) Emotion in the Western Classroom: Workshop and Conversation
Co-chairs: Tara Penry, Boise State University, and Michelle Payne, Boise State University
2B (Rapids) Idaho Poetry: Charles Potts
Introduction by John Crawford, West End Press
2C (White Water) Fiction Reading: Daniel Orozco and Joy Passanante
Introduction by Mary Clearman Blew, University of Idaho
2D (River Fork) Sacajawea’s Story: A Lemhi Shoshone Perspective
Rozina George (Lemhi Shoshone), Great-grandniece of Sacajawea
2E (Clearwater) Willa Cather and War
Chair: Mary R. Ryder, South Dakota State University
Steven Trout, Fort Hays State University: “Willa Cather and War: An Overview”
Ann Romines, George Washington University: “Willa Cather’s Civil War: A Long Engagement”
Michael Gorman, Independent Scholar: “Jim Burden and the White Man’s Burden: My Antonia and the Plains Indian Wars”
Richard Harris, The Webb Institute: “One Little Feller’s Quest for ‘Something Splendid’: Another Look at Cather’s Claude Wheeler”
2F (Suite 214) Encountering Western Landscapes: Writing, Living, and Feeling One’s Way
Chair: Alex Hunt, West Texas A&M University
SueEllen Campbell, Colorado State University: “Things That Happen in Deserts”
Alex Hunt, West Texas A&M University: “Annie Proulx’s Exploration Narrative: That Old Ace in the Hole and James William Abert’s Expedition to the Southwest”
Barbara J. Cook, Mount Aloysius College: “Life Changes in an Instant: Changing Relationships with Western Landscapes”
Nina Björnsson, Eastern New Mexico University: “Gender/Migration/The West: Going TransAmerica”
Thursday 11–12:15 Session Three
3A (Rapids) Embodying Social and Environmental Justice
Chair: Steve Tatum, University of Utah
John Streamas, Washington State University: “The Diminishing Significance of Genre in the Literature of Wartime Japanese America”
Kyoko Matsunaga, Hiroshima University: “Meats, the Female Body, and Toxicity: Environmental Justice in Ruth L. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats”
Hilary Hawley, Washington State University: “Cultural Activism as Environmental Justice in Castillo’s So Far From God”
Dora Ramirez-Dhoore, Boise State University: “Third World Women and Ecological Matters in Tomás Rivera’s …y no se lo trago la tierra and Helena Maria Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus”
3B (White Water) Domestic Violence in the West
Chair: Lillian Schlissel, Brooklyn College
Lillian Schlissel, Brooklyn College: “The Literary History of Secrets”
Barbara Richard, Independent Scholar, Washington: “Walking Wounded”
Mary Clearman Blew, University of Idaho
Judy Blunt, University of Montana
Jeanette Weaskus, Northwest Indian College
3C (River Fork) Sex, Gender, and Social Critique in Plains Literature
Chair: Doug Werden, West Texas A&M University
Amy T. Hamilton, University of Arizona: “ ‘A Constant Move’: Adventure and Social Critique in Sarah Wakefield’s Captivity Narrative”
Peter L. Bayers, Fairfield University: “Charles Alexander Eastman’s From the Deep Woods to Civilization and the Shaping of Native Manhood”
Matt Evertson, Chadron State College: “Feeling Western Bodies: Sex and Settlement in the Narratives of Mari Sandoz”
Kim Palmore, University of California at Riverside: “My ‘Queer’ Àntonia”
3D (Clearwater) Knowing Western Rivers
Chair: T. S. McMillin, Oberlin College
Laurie McMillin, Oberlin College: “‘Ragged, Rugged, Dark-Complected’: Race, Reflection, and Twain’s Mississippi”
Mary Keller, University of Wyoming: “Native Ways of Knowing Rivers in the Rocky Mountain Region: From Creek Mary’s Blood to the Native Waters Curriculum”
T. S. McMillin, Oberlin College: “Into the Great Unknown: Powell’s Colorado River”
Nick Petzak, Case Western Reserve University: “Selling the Middle Fork”
3E (Ivy) Cashing In? Money & Politics in the Production of West Coast Music
Chair: Brock Dethier, Utah State University
David Fenimore, University of Nevada, Reno: “Songs for Sale: Woody Guthrie’s Columbia River Compromise”
Karl Germeck, Utah State University: “The White Guy from Santa Monica: Ry Cooder and Chavez Ravine”
Brock Dethier, Utah State University: “The Cost of Artistic Independence”
3F (Suite 214) Tales of Disaster: A Gathering of Creative Readings
Chair: Ann Putnam, University of Puget Sound
Beverly Conner, University of Puget Sound: “Hearing Voices”
Ann Putnam, University of Puget Sound: “Lights Go Out”
Sarah Jane Sloane, Colorado State University: “The Lifeguard,” from The Antler Diaries
Beth Kalikoff, University of Washington, Tacoma: “Café du Monde”
3G (Suite 320) Judge Holden: The Mythic Trickster Rides the West in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian
Chair: Jerry D. Mathes II, University of Idaho
Jerry D. Mathes II, University of Idaho: “Classical Tricksters and Judge Holden’s Malevolent Power”
Steven Coughlin, University of Idaho: “Landscape of the Tricksters”
Joshua Cilley, University of Idaho: “Trickster Fools in Blood Meridian”
Sean Prentiss, University of Idaho: “Convergence and Divergence of Tricksters in Blood Meridian and Winter in the Blood”
3H (Cedar) The Academic Library of the Future: What’s In It for the Literary Scholar?
Chair: Thomas Peele, Boise State University
Donald Barclay, University of California, Merced
Alan Virta, Boise State University
Denise Shorey, Northwestern University
Larry Kincaid, Boise State University
3I (Grove Lobby) Basque Block Tour
Preregistration required. Cost: $5. Also offered Wed 10/25—1:30 pm.
Meet at Grove Hotel lobby and walk across Capitol Blvd to Basque Block. This tour will only appear in the final program if a sufficient number of members have preregistered for it. Space limited.
Thursday 12:15–2 Past President’s Address & Luncheon (Evergreen)
12:15 Luncheon
1–1:45 Address: William Handley, University of Southern California
Open seating will be available at 1 pm for those who wish to hear the address only. All WLA registrants are welcome to attend at this time.
4A (Rapids) Feeling Western on/under the Skin
Chair: Krista Comer, Rice University
Elizabeth J. Wright, Pennsylvania State University, Hazelton: “An ‘Unexpected Visitor’: Disability and Family Politics in the Fiction of Laura Ingalls Wilder”
Linda Lizut Helstern, North Dakota State University: “Written on the Skin: Ableism and the Native Subject”
Krista Comer, Rice University: “Feeling Western/Feeling White”
Bruce Ballenger, Boise State University: Title pending
4B (White Water) Stock-Taking in the Literary Northwest
Chair: Peter Donahue, Birmingham Southern College
John Trombold, Independent Scholar, Oregon: “Reading Portland: Toward a Place-Based Pedagogy of Politics”
Peter Donahue, Birmingham-Southern College: “Taking Stock of the Stock-Takers: Regional Identity and the 1946 Writers’ Conference on the Northwest”
Michael Strelow, Willamette University: “Lost and Found: Authors, Editors, and Publishers in the Northwest”
Philip Heldrich, University of Washington, Tacoma: “The Absence and Presence of Mount Rainier: Ansel Adams, Martha Hardy, and the Mountain”
4C (River Fork) Women’s Collaborations and Relationships in Willa Cather’s Fiction and Career
Chair: Ann Romines, George Washington University
Michael Schueth, Creighton University: “‘Her Masterful Will’: Mary Baker G. Eddy, Celebrity Biography, and Cather’s Canon”
Pat Brennan, Clarkson College: “The Sister Narratives of Willa Cather”
Mary R. Ryder, South Dakota State University: “That D---d Mob of Women Performers: Women Artists as Rivals in Cather’s Fiction”
Janis P. Stout, Texas A & M University: “Curious Connections: Cather, Silko, and Randall in the Southwest”
4D (Clearwater) Wild Encounters
Chair: Charles Crow, Bowling Green State University
Michael L. Johnson, University of Kansas: “Wildfire: A Taste of Authenticity”
Bob Lyon, Bellevue, Washington: “Blowups: Fact and Fiction in Firefighting”
Christopher McGill, Boise State University: “Wildness Wherever: Social Subversion and the Wilderness Experience of Charles Bowden’s Blood Orchid”
Susan J. Tyburski, Colorado School of Mines: “Seduced by the Wild: Audrey Schulman’s Journey into the Arctic Heart of Wilderness”
4E (Ivy ) Proto-Westerns and Early Westerns
Chair: Lawrence I. Berkove, University of Michigan, Dearborn
Nicolas Witschi, University of Western Michigan: “‘I do not like newspaper notoriety’: Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, The James Gang, and the Op-Ed Autobiography”
Jefferson D. Slagle, St. Bonaventure University: “The Heirs of Buffalo Bill: Performing Authenticity in the Dime Western”
Seth Bovey, Louisiana State University, Alexandria: “Pulp Fiction, Gangster Films, and the Beginnings of the Noir Western”
4F (Suite 214) Reading and Teaching Intermountain Western Women
Chair: Pamela Steinle, California State University, Fullerton
Ron McFarland, University of Idaho: Title pending
Christine Shearer-Cremean, Black Hills State University: “No Place to Raise a Girl: The Destructive Secular Wilderness of Kim Barnes’s In the Wilderness”
Susan Swetnam, Idaho State University: “Western Family Romance as Western Political Manifesto: Grace Jordan’s Home Below Hell’s Canyon”
Yvonne Rutford, University of Wisconsin, Superior: “Anger Issues: A Reflection on Teaching Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge”
4G (Suite 320) Insiders, Outsiders, and Their Stories of Place
Chair: Karen Uehling, Boise State University
Jamin Casey, Montana State University: “Living in the Landscape: The Relationship between a Sense of Being Local and the Attitude toward the Landscape It Generates”
Hal Crimmel, Weber State University: “A Place in the Sun: A Northerner Meets the Desert West”
David Mogen, Colorado State University: “Boom and Bust”
Jacoba Mendelkow, Utah State University: “Tractor”
Poetry Reading: Human Rights and the American West/Featuring Lawson Fusao Inada
Thursday 7:30-9 Distinguished Achievement Award Lecture (Egyptian Theatre): Featuring Terry Tempest Williams
Friday, 27 October
7–8 Past Presidents’ Breakfast (Cedar)
8–5 Registration (2nd Floor Landing)
8–5 Book Exhibit (Aspen)
5A (Evergreen) Predators in the West: Narratives and Counter-Narratives
Chair: Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Eric Heyne, University of Alaska, Fairbanks: “Moose Ranching and Lupine Narration: Alaska’s Love/Hate Affair with Wolves”
Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska, Lincoln: “El Lobo’s Return: A Bioregional Narrative of Re-wilding”
Sherry Booth, Santa Clara University: “Thinking about Canis lupus: The Literary Wolf and Ecofeminism”
Capper Nichols, University of Minnesota: “Grizzly Men: Treadwell, Peacock, Herzog”
5B (Rapids) Feminized Spaces of Western Literature
Chair: Audrey Goodman, Georgia State University
Melissa Bowles, Utah State University: “‘If I Had Children’: May Swenson’s Poetic/Motherly Work”
Amy Baird, Utah State University: “In the Shelter of the Tortilla: The Role of the Kitchen in the Art of Carman Lomas Garza and in Elva Trevino Hart’s memoir, Barefoot Heart: Stories of a Migrant Child”
Dan Holtz, Peru State College: “Marion Marsh Brown Country: A Worthwhile Stop in Nebraska’s Literary Geography”
5C (White Water)es Western Women’s Voices
Chair: Jennifer Dawes Adkison, Idaho State University
Jennifer Dawes Adkison, Idaho State University: “Appropriating Voice: Textual Editing and Western Women’s Narratives”
Carmen Pearson, Mount Royal College: “‘Unpublished Emotion’: Interpreting the Private Diaries of Carmen Barragán Messinger, Mexican American”
Laura Woodworth-Ney, Idaho State University: “‘The Best-trained Ditch Can Never Be a River, Nor the Gentlest Wife a Girl Again’: History and the Female Literary Critique of Irrigated Settlement”
Nancy Rushforth, Utah Valley State College: “The Teller Tells the Tale”
5D (River Fork) Violence, Catharsis, and Western Embodiment
Chair: David Mogen, Colorado State University
Marc Dziak, Boise State University: “Fingers Ripping Out Teeth, Teeth Biting Off Fingers: Naturalism and Inherent Brutality in Frank Norris’s McTeague”
Wendy Witherspoon, University of Southern California: “Deadwood: Lawlessness, Violence, and the Postmodern Gothic Frontier”
Tim Steckline, Black Hills State University: “Kidneystones, Pigpens, and Bodily Catharsis in Deadwood”
Doug Werden, West Texas A&M University: “Poetry as Mulch: Linda Hasselstrom as a Prairie Poet”
5E (Clearwater) Storying Western Science and History
Chair: Karen Ramirez, University of Colorado, Boulder
Dorys C. Grover, Texas A&M University, Commerce: “Vardis Fisher and the Death of Meriwether Lewis”
Megan Jensen, California State University, Fullerton: “Embedded in the Soil: The Treelessness of the Tallgrass Prairies Through 1862”
Ann Lundberg, Northwestern College: “The Origin of the Black Hills: Native Stories and Geological Narratives”
Lee Schweninger, University of North Carolina, Wilmington: “‘Something to Wail About’: A Literature of the Whale and the Makah Hunt”
5F (Ivy) Interpreting Texas and the Literary Plains
Chair: Diane Quantic, Wichita State University
Susanne George Bloomfield, University of Nebraska, Kearney: “First Inhabitants”
Daryl W. Palmer, Regis University: “Plains Emotion: What Willa Cather Made of Kansas”
Chen Xu, Hangzhou Dianzi University, People’s Republic of China: “An Interpretation of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove”
Kyhl Lyndgaard, University of Nevada, Reno: “Collaboration, Competition, and Relocation in the Life and Works of Edwin James”
5G (Suite 214) Narratives of Mormon Gender and Resistance
Chair: Christine Edwards Allred, Eagle, Idaho
Kacy Lundstrom, Utah State University: “The Seductress and the Seduced: Notions of Gender in Samson and Delilah”
Russ Beck, “The Missionary Position”
Heather Robison, University of Washington: “Interstices of Religion, Politics, and Land Management in Rural Nevada; or, A Mormon Girl Gone Left”
Friday 9–10 Coffee Break (Aspen)
6A (Evergreen) Periodicals, Politics, and Western Feeling
Chair: Chadwick Allen, Ohio State University
Marcia Hensley, Western Wyoming Community College: “‘Hats Off to the Girl Who Has Staked Out a Claim:’ Journalists Promote Single Women Homesteaders”
Nicole Tonkovich, University of California, San Diego: “Public Letters and the Allotment of Indian Lands”
Chadwick Allen, Ohio State University: “Tonto on Vacation; or, How to be an Indian Lawyer”
6B (Cedar) Feeling on Film
Chair: Len Engel, Quinnipiac University
Jette Morache, College of Southern Idaho: “Short Story to Screenplay: The Significance of Salmon and Community in Smoke Signals”
Len Engel, Quinnipiac University: “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia: Sam Peckinpah’s Macabre, Over-the-Top, Morality Tale”
John M. Gourlie, Quinnipiac University: “Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby: The Deep Heart’s Core”
Jennilyn Merten, University of Utah: “Don’t Cry For Me South Dakota: Deadwood, Brokeback Mountain, and the 21st-Century Western”
6C (Rapids) Under European Eyes: Real and Imagined Wests in European Texts
Chair: Neil Campbell, University of Derby
Neil Campbell, University of Derby: “The Delirious Outside: Rem Koolhaas and the Architecture of Western Studies”6D (White) Women and the Popular Western
Chair: Victoria Lamont, University of Waterloo
John Clayton, Independent Scholar: “The Lady Writer and the Lady Doc”
Victoria Lamont, University of Waterloo: “The Doctor Was No Lady: The Woman Professional in Caroline Lockhart’s The Lady Doc”
Christine Bold, University of Guelph: “Women in the Frontier Club”
6E (River Fork) Myths, Truths, and Translations from California and the Southwest
Chair: William Handley, University of Southern California
José Aranda, Rice University: “Feeling Mexican in the West Before 1960: The Hollywood Western vs. Real Californios”
Steve Davis, Texas State University: “Eros in Dobie Country”
Michael C. Ryan, Ohio University: “Translations of Anzaldua’s Spanish Poems: A Reading”
6F (Clearwater) Homing: Creative Testimonies of Family, Migration, Place
Chair: Ron McFarland, University of Idaho
Amy Garrett-Brown, Boise State University: “Syncope”
Mary Webb, University of Nevada, Reno: “Absent Places: A Military Family’s (Dis)Location”
Sherman Sutherland, Ohio University: “Thirty-Two Hours from Home: A Familiar Essay”
John T. Price, University of Nebraska, Omaha: “Love Mountain”
6G (Ivy) Writing Borders and Communities
Chair: TBA
Linda Palen Ruzich, University of Nevada, Reno: “Low-Riders, Grafitismos, and Border-Crossers: Identity, Resistance, and An-Other Space in Ballejos’ and Witt’s El Indio Jesus”
Mikage Kuroki, University of California, Riverside: “The Landscape of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange: Re-Peopling L.A.’s Layers of Space and Time”
Daniel Gustav Anderson, University of Idaho: “Loka: A Record of Space-Based Pedagogy, Impersonal Writing, and Becoming-Other at Naropa Institute, 1974”
Jennifer K. Ladino, Creighton University: “Toward a Culture of Life: The Politics of Nostalgia in Ruth Ozeki’s All Over Creation”
6H (Suite 214) Sadness, Emptiness, Irony, Fear: Modern and Existential Western Writers
Chair: Edgar H. Thompson, Emory & Henry College
Stephen Cook, California State University, Sacramento: “Sadness for No Reason: Tom McGuane’s Existential Struggle”
Robert Murray Davis, University of Oklahoma: “Dream Dump and Artist’s Burden: Sex, Death, and Art in the Hollywood of The Day of the Locust and The Loved One”
Kerry Ahearn, Oregon State University: “Elliot Paul's Modernist West”
Edgar H. Thompson, Emory & Henry College: “Battles in the Kingdom of Fear: Hunter S. Thompson at Home in the West”
7A (Evergreen) Literary Sins Revisited
Chair: James H. Maguire, Boise State UniversityChristine Hill Smith, Longmont, Colorado: “Mary Hallock Foote, Pioneer Illustrator, Writer, and ... Snob!”
Diane Quantic, Wichita State University: “Women Reading Margaret Hill McCarter: Culture and Club Women in Kansas, 1900–1940”
James C. Work, Colorado State University (Original recipient of Willa Pilla award, in Boise, 1981): “Cather’s Confounded Conundrums”
7B (Cedar) Nevada Dramas: Comstock to CSI
Chair: Bonney MacDonald, Union CollegeLawrence I. Berkove, University of Michigan, Dearborn: “Theatrical Riches from Nevada’s Silver Land”
Steve Tatum, University of Utah, & Nathaniel Lewis, St. Michael’s College: “Morte Las Vegas”
7C (Rapids) Ecotraumas and Literary Paradigms for Healing
Chair: Barbara J. Cook, Mount Aloysius College
James Barilla, Lake Forest College: “After the Deluge: Disaster and Renewal in T.C. Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth”
J. Gerard Dollar, Siena College: “Feeling Clearcuts: Ravaged Woods, Lost Magic in Louise Erdrich & Rick Bass”
Astrid Melchart, Utah State University: “Healing Narratives - An Exclusive Cure For A Specific People?”
7D (White Water) The Territory of Aesthetics: Toward a New American Sublime
Chair: Colin M. Robertson, Nevada Museum of Art
Colin M. Robertson, Nevada Museum of Art: “Inventing the Sublime: Contemporary Artists’ Responses to the History of an Idea”
Phillip David Johnson II, University of Nevada, Reno: “Looking for Hope:Assessing the Sublime and the Picturesque in Postindustrial Places”
Anne M. Wolfe, Nevada Museum of Art: “Engineering the Sublime: Visual Representations of Water in the American West”
Terre Ryan, University of Navada, Reno: “‘Plantations of God’: Sentiment, the Sublime, and the Aesthetics of Clearcuts”
Chair: José Aranda, Rice University
Susan Kollin, Montana State University: “Before the Western was a Noun”
Lourdes Alberto, Rice University: Title pending
Elixabete Ansa-Goicoechea, University of Indiana: “The Deep Blue Memory: A Reformulation of Basque National Identity in the Western United States”
Elaine E. Limbaugh, Portland State University: “The Australian/American Connection”
7F (Clearwater) Unconventional Western Women Writers
Chair: Judy Nolte Temple, University of Arizona
Judy Nolte Temple, University of Arizona: “‘Fixing’ Baby Doe: The Writer Behind the Legend”
Alison Reuschlein, University of Arizona: “Mary MacLane as Revolutionary/Reinscriptionist”
Lauryn Bianco, …: “The Queer Body as Interruption in The Bean Trees”
Taylor Mariah Johnson, University of Arizona: “Legacy of Action: Julia Butterfly Hill’s New Western Narrative”
7G (Ivy) Western Poetry, Poetics, and Politics
Chair: Jennifer Ladino, Creighton University
Bill D. Toth, Western New Mexico University: “No Fission in Peggy’s Pond: The Poetry of Peggy Pond Church and Niels Bohr’s Principle of Complementarity”
Sarah Stoeckl, Utah State University: “The Poetical is Political: Community and Political Activism in the Poetry of Anne Waldman”
Maure L. Smith, Utah State University: “Place-based Poetry: May Swenson’s Westernness”
Michael Gorman, Lincoln, Nebraska: “The Poet Laureate and American Pastoral Ideology”
7H (Suite 214) Tricksters, Dreamers, Survivors
Chair: Linda Lizut Helstern, North Dakota State University
Michael Terry, Utah State University: “Coyote Conundrum: Trickster Twists in Vine Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins”
Henry Stewart, Centenary College: “Of Dreams and Disillusionment: Dreams as Reality and Reality as Dreams in Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues”
Angela Elliott, Centenary College: “Sorrow and Survival: The Storyteller's Journey in Sherman Alexie's Reservation Blues”
Richard Hutson, University of California, Berkeley: “Survivance or the Non-Vanishing American: Charles Eastman”
8A (Evergreen) Teaching Life: The Pedagogical Challenges of Memoir and Autobiography
Chair: Susan Maher, University of Nebraska, Omaha
Kathleen Boardman, University of Nevada, Reno: “Whose Story? Talking about Ethics in the Autobiography Class”
Drucilla M. Wall, University of Missouri, St. Louis: “The Voice in Four Directions: American Indian Memoir in the Writing Classroom”
John T. Price, University of Nebraska, Omaha: “Anyway, Back to Me: Addressing the Myth of Solipsism in the ‘Placed’ Memoir”
8B (Cedar) Deadwood and Emotion
Chair: Michael K. Johnson, University of Maine, Farmington
John Smith, Clemson University: “Reading Lessons: Steering the Narrative in Deadwood’s ‘Suffer the Little Children’”
Chad Hammett, Texas State University: “Milch and Me”
John Dudley, University of South Dakota: “‘Land of Oblivion’: Abjection, the Body, and the Western Narrative in HBO's Deadwood”
Michael K. Johnson, University of Maine, Farmington: “Queer Spaces and Emotional Couplings in Deadwood”
8C (Rapids) John Steinbeck and His Contemporaries
Chair: Stephen Olsen-Smith, Boise State University
Stephen Cooper, Troy University: “The Dust Bowl Revisited: William Humphrey’s A Time and a Place”
Jessica Bremmer, University of Southern California: “Refiguring Steinbeck’s California: What if Sanora Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown Had Come First?”
Susan Shillinglaw, San Jose State University: “Steinbeck, Ricketts and the Ecology of Place”
Chair: Sarah E. McFarland, Northwestern State University
Diane Guichon, University of Calgary: “Life Savers, Steak, and Mirrors: Animal Representations in Fred Stenson’s Lightning”
Merit Kaschig, College of William and Mary: “‘Dumb Dogs and Dick(ie)s’: Inter-specific Intimacy vs. Procreative Agency in the Western Literary Imagination”
Rebecca Onion, University of Texas at Austin: “Lead Dogs and Heroic Masculinity in the New Age of Celebrity”
Sarah E. McFarland, Northwestern State University: “Performing Timothy Treadwell: How the Bears Made the Man”
8E (River Fork) Telling the Stories
Chair: P. Jane Hafen (Taos Pueblo), University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Gwen W. Griffin, Minnesota State University, Mankato: “Tohan Dakota unkokiyakapi sni: When we don't tell our own stories”
Patrice Hollrah, University of Nevada, Las Vegas: “‘Nobody Wants to Hear These Things’: Why Sherman Alexie's ‘Can I Get a Witness?’ Needs to Be Told”
P. Jane Hafen (Taos Pueblo), University of Nevada, Las Vegas: “‘I Deplore Propaganda’: Response to Zitkala-Sa and ‘Oklahoma's Poor Rich Indians’”
John Purdy, Western Washington University: “The Pains of ‘Progress’ in the West”
8F (Clearwater) New Mexico and the Southwest: Magic, History, Authenticity
Chair: TBAAudrey Goodman, Georgia State University: “Open Graves and Magical Borderlands in the Fiction of Arturo Islas and Luis Alberto Urrea”
Don Scheese, Gustavus Adolphus College: “The Presence of the Prehistoric in Literature and Art about Bandelier”
Eric Chilton, University of Arizona: “‘An Exact Reproduction’: Narratives of Authenticity in Mary Colter’s Grand Canyon Architecture”
Robert W. King, Utah State University: “Modernity’s Pilgrims: The Search for Authenticity in The Professor’s House and Heritage of the Desert”
8G (Ivy) Western Aesthetics in Art and Literature
Chair: Jan Widmayer, Boise State University
Michael A. Brown, Creighton University: “Galaxy (1949): Jackson Pollock’s Other Wyoming Landscape”
Mary K. Stillwell, University of Nebraska, Lincoln: “Chiaroscuro: Light and Shadow: The Aesthetics of Place and Time in the Work of Ted Kooser”
Allan Juhl Kristensen, University of Newcastle: “PrairyErth: The Aesthetics of the Deep Map”
Jenny Emery Davidson, College of Southern Idaho, Blaine County: “Looking in the Corners for a Regional Aesthetics: Contemporary Western Literature and the Drawings of James Castle”
8H (Suite 214) Anticipating and Revisiting Brokeback Mountain
Chair: Sara Spurgeon, Texas Tech University
O. Alan Weltzien, University of Montana, Western: “Standing before Brokeback Mountain: Queering the Northern Rockies”
Sara Spurgeon, Texas Tech University: Title pending
David Peterson, University of Nebraska, Omaha: “‘Everything built on that’: Landscape and Homophobia in the Brokeback Mountain Corpus”
A (Evergreen) Name Change: The Western Culture Association
Chair: Ann Ronald, University of Nevada, Reno
Ann Ronald, University of Nevada, Reno
Melody Graulich, Utah State University
Susan Bernardin, SUNY, Oneonta
Alicia Garza, Boise State University
Laurie Ricou, University of British Columbia
Charles Crow, Bowling Green State University
B (White) Teaching in Place
Chair: Jacky O’Connor, Boise State University
Karen Ramirez, University of Colorado, Boulder: “Place Matters: Simon Ortiz’s From Sand Creek and the Development of a Place-Based Pedagogy”
Janis Johnson, University of Idaho, & Georgia Grady Johnson, University of Idaho: “Pedagogy of Place: Learning on Tribal Land”
Lisa Slappey, Rice University: “Teaching on Buffalo Bayou: An Urban Pedagogy of Community and Environment”
C (River Fork) Fiction Reading: Mitch Wieland and Anthony Doerr
Introduction by Devan Cook, Boise State University
D (Ivy) Readers’ Theater
The Psychoscope (1871), by Rollin Daggett and Joe Goodman
A (Evergreen) Fiction Reading: Kim Barnes and Claire Davis
Introduction by Mary Clearman Blew, University of Idaho
B (Clearwater) Native Legends: Wilson Wewa (Northern Paiute, Nez Perce, Palouse)
Introduction by Gail Shuck, Boise State University
C (Ivy) Poetry Reading: Janet Holmes and Alvin Greenberg
Introduction by Amy Garrett-Brown, Boise State University
8–noon (Aspen) Book Exhibit
Saturday 8–9:15 Session Nine
9A (Evergreen) Reading Desert Women: Williams, Austin, Meloy
Chair: Susanne Bloomfield, University of Nebraska, Kearney
Alf Seegert, University of Utah: “Loving the Land Without Becoming the Land: The Intimate Distance of Place-Connectedness in Mary Austin and Terry Tempest Williams”
Nicole Sheets, University of Utah: “Redirecting Appetites in The Anthropology of Turquoise”
Paul Wilson, University of Utah: “Biological Essentialism and Ellen Meloy’s The Anthropology of Turquoise”
Sharon A. Reynolds, Palomar College: “Downhome Eloquence in the Southwest: Ellen Meloy’s Prose of Place”
9B (Cedar) History, Memory, and Cather’s Fiction
Chair: Evelyn Funda, Utah State University
Timothy Bintrim, Saint Vincent College: “Sublime Blizzards in the Fiction of Willa Cather and Annie Prey”
Amanda Kuhnel, University of Nebraska, Lincoln: “O Pioneers! and Compassionate Agriculture”
Chris Kemp, Wichita State University: “Children of the Moon: The Search for Kinship and the Power of Memory in the Novels of Willa Cather”
Matthew Lavin, Utah State University: “Competing Characterizations Coalesce; or, Collier's Restores Tom Outland's Out West Self Esteem”
9C (Rapids) Stegner, Abbey, Lopez
Chair: Matt Burkhart, University of Arizona
Dynette Reynolds, University of Utah: “Moon-Eyed Professors: The Different Wildernesses of Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner”
Matthew Heimburger, University of Utah: “The Gospel of St. Edward Abbey: Desert Solitaire as Holy and Unholy Writ”
Matt Burkhart, University of Arizona: “Writing Magic Carpets into Navajo Country? Reckoning with Flights of Fancy in Barry Lopez’s Early Fiction”
9D (White Water) Locational Identities: Narratives of Western Migration and Diaspora
Chair: Jan Keessen
Linda H. Ross, University of Wyoming: “‘Are We There Yet?’: Immigration in the Western States”
Sarah Wald, Brown University: “Environment, Identity and Mobility in Steinbeck’s TheGrapes of Wrath and Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus”
Stephen Macauley, Utah State University: “Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as a Model for Understanding Diaspora and Movement in the 21st Century”
Susan Naramore Maher, University of Nebraska, Omaha: “Far and Near: Setting the Coordinates of Space, Memory, and Identity in Linda Hasselstrom’s Feels Like Far”
9E (River Fork) Short Fiction
Chair: Stephen Cook, California State University, Sacramento
Twister Marquiss, Texas State University, San Marcos: “Boom and Bust”
Iver Arnegard, Ohio University: “Wolf Lake”
Jackie Pugh Kogan, California State University, Northridge: “Shells”
Willard Wyman, Independent scholar: From High Country
9F (Clearwater) Early American Literature of Nature and the West
Chair: Tom J. Hillard, University of Arizona
Tom J. Hillard, University of Arizona: “Mary Rowlandson and the American Gothic Wilderness”
Brady Edwards, Utah State University: “Confronting the Interior Gothic Landscape of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry”
Jim Bishop, University of Nevada, Reno: “A Feeling Farmer: Masculinity, Nationalism, and Ecology in Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer”
Elizabeth Mack, University of Nebraska, Omaha: “Caroline Kirkland vs. Daniel Boone: How Women’s Memoir Helped Dispel the Frontier Myth”
9G (Ivy) Mortality and Place: Creative Readings
Chair: Amber Leonard, Leeward Community College
Lowell Mick White, Texas A&M University: “The Road Back to Destruction Bay”
Melinda M. White, Utah State University: “The Ink that Weights Us” and “Holding onto Breath”
Alice Maahs, University of Idaho: “Before Easter’s Sunrise”
Ben Quick, University of Arizona: “The Shape of Grief”
Saturday 9:30–10:30 Session Ten
10A (Evergreen) The Personal Essay and/as Literary Criticism
Chair: David Cremean, Black Hills State University
Heidi Naylor, Boise State University: “Opening the Chapel Doors: Taking Reader Response from Maxim to Practice”
Alisha Paxton, Utah State University: “Personal Criticism: An Experiment in Narrative”
David Cremean, Black Hills State University: “Mind-ing Waste as We W(a/o)nder; or, Excreta in the West(ern)”
10B (Cedar) Twice-Told Tales and Experimental Narratives
Chair: Leslie Durham, Boise State UniversityAngela Waldie, University of Calgary: “Klondike Raconteur: Robert Kroetsch’s (Re)citation of ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ in The Man from the Creeks”
Anne L. Kaufman, Milton, Massachusetts: “Stories Move in Herds: Sisters of Grass and Archives of Memory”
Melanie J. Martin, Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania: “Myths of Loss, Myths of Power: Disappearing Animals in American Indian Stories”
Slideshow and lecture by Judy Austin, Idaho Historical Society
Members of the Foote/Old Boise tour are encouraged to attend
10D (White Water) Interdisciplinary Approaches to Steinbeck
Chair: Rodney Rice, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology
Patrick K. Dooley, St. Bonaventure University: “John Steinbeck’s ‘Respect for’ and ‘Respectful Use of Persons’ Ethic in The Grapes of Wrath and Harvest Gypsies”
Daniel Griesbach, University of Washington: “The Red Pony’s Political Unconscious”
Elisa Warford, University of Maryland: “‘And That Feeling Must Go into It’: Sentimentality in The Grapes of Wrath”
10E (River Fork) Memoirs of Class and Consumption
Chair: Nancy Cook, University of Montana
Shay Casey, Idaho State University: “The Original versus the Ordinary: Two Methods of Authentic Western Presentation as seen in No Life for a Lady and The Life of an Ordinary Woman”
Nancy Cook, University of Montana: “Negotiating Class Difference in the American West: Wickenburg, AZ c. 1965”
Paul Bogard, University of Nevada, Reno: “Little House in the Biggest Little City”
10F (Clearwater) “Living in Your Own Private Idaho”: Modernism/Postmodernism in Modernity’s Hinterlands
Chair: Robert Bennett, Montana State UniversityRob Wallace, University of California, Santa Barbara: “‘Born in a Half Savage Country’: Ezra Pound and the West”
Jeffrey Hostetler, Montana State University: “Ben Franklin, Richard Brautigan, and the Death of Nature by Dissection”
Robert Bennett, Montana State University: “‘Underground like a wild potato’: Napoleon Dynamite’s Red-State Blues”
Saturday 10:30–11:30 (Evergreen) WLA Business Meeting