Monday, February 18th, 2019
Why should I book a room at the conference hotel if it’s not my most economical option?
Staying at our contracted hotel is the most important thing you can do to help our conference organizers avoid huge losses. When you book a room in a different hotel, a contracted room goes unsold. Unless that room is sold to an unrelated traveler within a certain timeframe before our conference, we must pay penalty fees to the hotel. In addition, the inability to fill the actual number of hotel rooms that we estimated weakens our negotiating power in the future. It also means that we will have to charge higher registration fees in the future to make up for the penalties paid to our contracted hotel. Please support the Western Literature Association by reserving your sleeping room at our official hotel. Yes, it may cost each individual a little more, but you are basically also supporting use of the conference rooms, which are part of the contract when we organize a conference. The more hotel rooms we fill, the cheaper the conference rooms often are. That helps keep our registration fees as low as possible.
>>> Please book your lodging within the official room block.
We live in a digital world. Why should I forego AV?
Most conference hotels hire the services of a separate company to provide audio-visual. The company’s representatives set up the equipment and remain on call to troubleshoot. Their fees are based on a given number of rooms for a given number of days. If we ask for equipment in a room and use it for just one session, we still must pay for the whole day. AV costs for a 3-day conference generally run between $15,000 and $30,000. Of course, we want to accommodate all AV needs, especially if you are talking about images or film, but if PowerPoint isn’t essential to understanding your paper, please consider whether AV is truly necessary for your presentation. Again, this is a matter of keeping our registration fees low.
>> >Please ask for AV only if it is critical to your presentation.
Tags: AV usage, FAQs, room blocks
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Tuesday, April 12th, 2022
Editor: Amy Hamilton
Summer 2021 (WAL 56.2)
Editors’ Letter | Amy Hamilton & Kyle Bladow |
ESSAYS | |
Staying with the White Trouble of Recent Feminist Westerns | Krista Comer |
Text, Encounter, Genre: Returning (Again) to Black Elk Speaks | Sam Stoeltje |
Simons Town as Heterotopia: The Dynamic Interplay of Barrioization and Barriology in The Brick People | Beilei Yan and Longhai Zhang |
REVIEWS | |
Toni Jensen, Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land | Doreen Pfost |
Kerry Fine, Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush, and Sara L. Spurgeon, eds. Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre | Travis Franks |
Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, Levi Romero, and Spencer Herrera, eds., Querencia: Reflections on the New Mexico Homeland | Daniel Arbino |
Geneva M. Gano, The Little Art Colony and US Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos | Robert Thacker |
James H. Cox, The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History | Joshua T. Anderson |
Brady Harrison and Randi Lynn Tanglen, eds., Teaching Western American Literature | Susan Kollin |
Kiara Kharpertian, We Who Work the West: Class, Labor, and Space in Western American Literature | Daniel Clausen |
Fall 2021/Winter 2022 (WAL 56.3/4)
Special Double Issue: California, Cli-Fi, and Climate Crisis
Guest editor: Daniel D. Clausen
Guest Editor’s Introduction: What Happens in California Cli-Fi | Daniel D. Clausen |
ESSAYS | |
Pre-apocalypse Now: Gold Fame Citrus as Weird Western Cli-Fi | Jennifer K. Ladino |
Old Chestnuts: Seeding Alternative Communities and Alternative Futures in/with The Overstory | Ryan Hediger |
Uncenter Yourselves: Revisiting Robinson Jeffers’ Inhumanism in the Age of The Overstory | Cory Willard |
“A Land of Missing Things”: Extraction, Belonging, and Chinese Immigrant Labor in C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold | Ashley E. Reis |
Cli-Fi Georgic and Grassroots Mutual Aid in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower | Daniel D. Clausen |
“Trees are better than stone”: Vital Commemoration in Octavia Butler’s Parable Novels | Matt Burkhart |
California Dreaming: Reading the Ski Film as Cli-Fi | Kevin Maier |
REVIEWS | |
Antonia Castañeda and Clara Lomas, Writing/Righting History: Twenty-Five Years of Hispanic Literary Heritage | Erin Murrah-Mandril |
Jim Hoy, My Flint Hills: Observations and Reminiscences from America’s Last Tallgrass Prairie | Timothy A. Schuler |
Arnold Krupat, Changed Forever: American Boarding-School Literature, Volume 2 | Lydia Presley |
Spring 2022 (WAL 57.1)
ESSAYS | |
Learning to Fly-Cast: Icarus and Myth in Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It | Stephen B. Dobranski |
“Taken from Their Self-found Paths”: Captivity and Creation in Mary Hallock Foote’s Idaho Fiction | Quinn Grover |
The Parthian Legacy: Irish Catholicism and Remaking Identity in Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy | Vera R. Foley |
REVIEWS | |
John N. Maclean, Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a River | O. Alan Weltzien |
Xabier Irujo and Iñaki Arrieta Baro, eds. Visions of a Basque American Westerner: International Perspectives on the Writings of Frank Bergon | Michael Kowalewski |
Ryanne Pilgeram, Pushed Out: Contested Development and Rural Gentrification in the US West | Jennifer K. Ladino |
Erin Flanagan, Deer Season | Joshua Doležal |
Mary Stoecklein, Native America Mystery Writing: Indigenous Investigations | Jessica Rios |
Gary Eller, True North | Hank Nuwer |
Summer 2022 (WAL 57.2)
Special Issue: Emerging Writers
Guest Edited by Surabhi Balachander and Jillian Moore
Guest Editors’ Introduction: Personal and Pedagogical Perspectives | Surabhi Balachander & Jillian Moore |
ESSAYS | |
Talking Tacos: Borderlands Culinary Rhetoric in A Taco Testimony | Alyssa Revels |
“Don’t leave out the cowboys!”: Black Urban Cowboydom and didactic Afrofuturist Countermemories in Ghetto Cowboy (2011) and Concrete Cowboy (2021) | Tracey Salisbury and Stefan Rabitsch |
Reimagining the West in/and the First-Year Writing Course | Sarah Jane Kerwin |
“Asian American and Pacific Islander” Studies in Boston and Hilo: Student Activism, Radical Imaginings, and Critical Ethnic Studies | Leanne Day |
Perfectly Designed for Connections: Zine Making in Denver Shelters | Alison Turner |
A Report on the Living West as Feminists Project | Zainab Abdali |
Peregrination 2036 | Mika Kennedy |
Afterword: Precarity, Pedagogy, and the Public | Krista Comer |
REVIEWS | |
Rafael Acosta Morales, Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes: Violent Myths of the U.S.-Mexico Frontier | Cordelia E. Barrera |
Curtis Bradley Vickers, This Here Is Devil’s Work: A Novel | Jeffrey Chisum |
Mary Emerick, The Last Layer of the Ocean: Kayaking through Love and Loss on Alaska’s Wild Coast | Sjana Schanning |
David Horgan. Helmi’s Shadow: A Journey of Survival from Russia to East Asia to the American West | David Rio |
Maximilian Werner, Wolves, Grizzlies, and Greenhorns: Death & Coexistence in the American West | Dan Aadland |
Astrid Haas, Lone Star Vistas: Travel Writing on Texas, 1821-1861 | Jennifer Dawes |
Patrick J. Mahoney, Recovering an Irish Voice from the American Frontier: The Prose Writings of Eoin Ua Cathail | Jill Brady Hampton |
Arnold Krupat, Boarding School Voices: Carlisle Indian School Students Speak | Susan D. Rose |
Jane Hafen, Help Indians Help Themselves: The Later Writing of Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša) | Julianne Newmark |
Fall 2022 (WAL 57.3)
ESSAYS | |
Fraught Prospects: California Landscape Poetry During and After the Gold Rush | Caroline Gelmi |
Necro-Settler Coloniality in Texan Mythology and Identity: Forgetting the Alamo | Chaney Hill |
“Theirs is a kind of ecological esthetics”: Three Mountain Poems by Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen | Todd Giles |
REVIEWS | |
Lisa Tatonetti, Written by the Body: Gender Expansiveness and Indigenous Non-Cis Masculinities | Tereza M. Szeghi |
Estella Gonzalez, Chola Salvation | Juan-Danniel Hernandez |
Bintrim, Timothy W., James A. Jaap, and Kimberly Vanderlaan, eds., Willa Cather’s Pittsburgh: Cather Studies | Elizabeth Turner |
Mary Clearman Blew, Waltzing Montana: A Novel | Randi Lynn Tanglen |
Sullivan, Shannon, Ed. Thinking the US South: Contemporary Philosophy from Southern Perspectives | Cristina Hernández Oliver |
John G. Neihardt, Eagle Voice Remembers: An Authentic Tale of the Old Sioux World | Sam Stoeltje |
Steven Wingate, The Leave-Takers | Rebecca Paredes |
Miriam C. Brown Spiers, Encountering the Sovereign Other: Indigenous Science Fiction | Sara L. Spurgeon |
Oscar Mancinas, To Live and Die in El Valle | Sophia Martinez-Abbud |
Mark Rifkin, Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form | Caitlin Simmons |
Winter 2023 (WAL 57.4)
ESSAYS | |
Mapping Intergenerational Diné Beauty: Reading Hózhǫ́ in the Poetry of Tacey M. Atsitty | Michael P. Taylor and Elena Arana |
“Do the Right Thing Always”: Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Global Pandemics of 1918 and 2020 | Amy Fatzinger |
Dao Strom’s Grass Roof, Tin Roof as Settler Refugee Critique | Michele Janette |
REVIEWS | |
Molly P. Rozum, Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies | Tracy Sanford Tucker |
Steven L. Davis and Sam L. Pfiester, eds., Viva Texas Rivers! Adventure, Misadventures, and Glimpses of Nirvana along Our Storied Waterways | Chaney Hill |
Jada Ach, Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West | Jenna Gersie |
Mary Pat Brady, Scales of Captivity: Racial Capitalism and the Latinx Child | Sarah J. Ropp |
Blake Allmendinger, Geographic Personas: Self-Transformation and Performance in the American West | Christine Bold |
Lawrence W. Gross, Native American Rhetorics | Danielle Donelson |
José F. Aranda Jr., The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848–1948 | Sandra Dahlberg |
Lee Bergthold, The Deadliest Shortcut | Thomas J. Lyon |
Melissa J. Homestead, The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis | Jada Ach |
Ladette Randolph, Private Way: A Novel | Manish Pandey |
Spring 2023 (WAL 58.1)
ESSAYS | |
Lost in the New West: Performing Western Identity in Thomas McGuane’s Deadrock Novels | Mark Asquith |
Shackle-Breakers and Adventure-Makers: Fantasies of the U.S. West at Oregon Health & Science University | Pamela Pierce |
Daring to Dream: Contextualizing B. M. Bower’s The Eagle’s Wing with Colorado River Compact History | Patricia J. Rettig |
REVIEWS | |
Kathryn Cornell Dolan, Cattle Country: Livestock in the Cultural Imagination | Tom Hertweck |
John Joseph Mathews, Our Osage Hills: Toward an Osage Ecology and Tribalography of the Early Twentieth Century, ed. by Michael Snyder | Sheldon Yeakley |
Taylor Brorby, Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land | O. Alan Weltzien |
Anna M. Nogar and A. Gabriel Meléndez, El feliz ingenio neomexicano: Felipe M. Chacón and Poesía y prosa | Juan M. Gallegos |
Tracy Daugherty, 148 Charles Street: A Novel | Max Frazier |
Gregory Smoak, Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West | Emily Gowen |
Michael P. Branch, On the Trail of the Jackalope: How a Legend Captured the World’s Imagination and Helped Us Cure Cancer | Hal Crimmel |
Mary Dartt, On the Plains, and Among the Peaks, or, How Mrs. Maxwell Made Her Natural History Collection | Erica Hannickel |
Barbara Schmitz, Sundown at Faith Regional | Mark Sanders |
Cordelia E. Barrera, The Haunted Southwest: Towards an Ethics of Place in Borderlands Literature | Bailey Moorhead |
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Friday, January 8th, 2021
Due to the uncertainties created by the Covid-19 pandemic, the WLA has decided not to hold a conference in 2021. Instead, there will be a variety of individual virtual events.
We gratefully acknowledge the support from the Kansas State University English Department and the Georgia State University English Department for these events.
We would also like to thank Lisa Tatonetti and Audrey Goodman, our WLA Co-Presidents, for handling the logistics surrounding the 2021 events in addition to hosting our conference in 2022.
Please direct any questions you might have regarding the 2021 virtual engagement events to Sabine Barcatta.
• • •
If you were looking for information on the conference to be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, please check WLA Conference 2022.
We’re excited to announce the WLA 2021 Virtual Awards Ceremony. This format allows us to give time to our graduate award winners and creative writers, as well as to celebrate the Walker and Lyons Award winners. Please join us to recognize and hear more about the excellent work that’s happening in the field. You may register at < http://tinyurl.com/wla2021awards>.
PLEASE JOIN US!
WLA 2021 Awards Ceremony: Thursday, October 21
7 pm EST/6 CDT/5 pm MST/4 pm PST
6:30-7:00 Zoom room open for cocktails and conversation
7:00-7:10 Welcome and thanks
7:10-7:20 Announcement of WLA 5K Prizes
7:20-7:40 Graduate Award and presentations
7:40-8:00 Creative Writing Award and reading
8:00-8:20 Walker and Lyons Award presentations
8:20-8:30 Concluding remarks and Santa Fe 2022 Conference preview
Workshop Leader: Jillian Moore, PhD Student, Duquesne University
Date: Saturday, September 11, 2021, 3-4:15pm EDT (2CDT, 1MDT, 12PDT)
The academic landscape is often a site of exclusion for those living in disabled bodies. Partly due the COVID-19 pandemic, colleges and universities have recently been forced to confront gaps in various teaching practices and modalities. The work of filling in such gaps can be prohibited by scarcity of academic resources, the precariousness of academic teaching lines, and personal fatigue, experiences that create a deeper divide between instructors and disabled students.
The Inclusive Teaching Practices for All Bodies, All Identities workshop responds both to academic labor practices and to the academic tendency to respond to rather than prepare for disabled students. In particular, it will offer both theoretical and practical information about inclusive pedagogical design and practices from the perspective of a disabled academic.
In order to participate, you must register by Sept. 10: tinyurl.com/wlainclusiveteaching.
Please contact Jillian directly at bennionj@duq.edu for assistive technology requests and needs.
If you’d like to forward this information to others and/or want to post a flyer in your department, please download this beautiful flyer that Jillion prepared for this purpose.
Fiction writer Rilla Askew and poet Quaraysh Ali Lansana in conversation with Kalenda Eaton, University of Oklahoma
Date: Monday, May 17, 2021 at 7 pm ET (6pm CT, 5pm MT, 4pm PT)
2021 marks the 100-year anniversary of the destruction of the famed “Black Wall Street” and neighboring community in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The events of a white mob who burned, looted, and terrorized black citizens is widely known as “The Tulsa Race Massacre.”
Novelist Rilla Askew (Fire in Beulah) and Poet Quraysh Ali Lansana (The Breakbeat Poets) consider what it means for writers and artists to document the history of racist violence in the west and imagine the possibility of a different future.
![]() Rilla Askew |
![]() Quraysh Ali Lansana |
Coordinator: Kalenda Eaton, University of Oklahoma
Participation is FREE to everyone. WLA membership is not required. But you must be registered by midnight the night before the event in order to receive a zoom link to participate in this webinar.
Register here: https://tinyurl.com/wlablackwallstreet
DATE: Saturday, April 17, 2021, 3 pm ET
From Standing Rock to Bears Ears, from Malheur to Nüümü Poyo, the politics of public lands in the US West remains contentious, divisive, and, occasionally, promising. This webinar, based on a special issue of Western American Literature (vol. 54.1/spring 2019), will examine issues of public lands from the perspective of literary studies, cultural studies, and settler colonial theory.
Coordinator: Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska – Lincoln
Moderator and special issue editor: Jennifer Ladino, University of Idaho
Participants (and contributors to the special issue):
April Anson, San Diego State University
Stephanie LeMenager, University of Oregon
Meagan Meylor, University of Southern California
Luke Morgan, Texas Tech University
Ashley Reis, University of North Texas
Marsha Weisiger, University of Oregon
Participation is FREE to everyone. WLA membership is not required.
Register here: https://tinyurl.com/wlapubliclands
You must be registered by midnight the night before the event in order to receive a zoom link to participate in this webinar.
All WAL issues can be accessed through Project Muse https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/418.
Tags: cultural studies, politics, public lands
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Thursday, October 29th, 2020
The Awards Coordinators: WLA has two awards coordinators who serve overlapping four-year terms. The new Awards Coordinator is chosen by the EC, with input from the current Awards Coordinator. Applicants for the position must have been a WLA member for at least five years. Applicants should consult the ongoing Award Coordinator for information about the position.
The Wylder Award for lifetime contributions to the Western Literature Association. The call for nominations will read: “In order to nominate someone for the Wylder award, please collaborate with WLA colleagues and solicit at least three detailed letters of support, from students, WLA members, or anyone else who seems appropriate. They can be submitted together or separately to the WLA Awards Coordinators. The Awards Coordinators will submit the nominations to the Past Presidents and current presidential line, who will make the decision.
Members who have previously won the award will not be considered for a second nomination.
Once the decision is made, the Awards Coordinators should immediately inform the winner, the current presidents as well as the Director of Operations. The winner chooses the person who s/he wants to do the introduction at the banquet.
The Lyon Award for the best monograph published in western literary or cultural studies in the previous calendar year. The committee of 3 members changes every year and must be made up of at least one Past President and one member of the EC. It is important that the three members represent the multiple areas of our field. Members should not have to recuse themselves if they know authors of the books but should consider doing so if they are relatives or advisors. It is the responsibility of the committee chair to inform winners and runners-up and to do so in a timely manner that will allow them to make arrangements to receive the award at the banquet. The chair should also immediately inform the Awards Coordinators, the current presidents, and the Director of Operations. A committee member introduces the winner at the banquet.
The Walker Award for the best article published in Western North American literary and cultural studies, published during the previous calendar year. The committee is headed for five years by a major scholar in the field. The chair (5-year term) is appointed by WLA executive committee. It is recommended that one member (3-year term) is from the Executive Committee, barring complications. Two members (each with 3-year terms) are appointed by committee chair. One member (1-year term) is a WLA Past President (practice has been for the chair to approach the immediate Past President; should that person be unwilling to serve, the chair can approach any Past President). After consultation with other WLA leaders, the chair proposes his/her successor to the EC for approval.
It is the responsibility of the chair to inform winners and runners-up and to do so in a timely manner that will allow them to make arrangements to receive the award at the banquet. The chair should also immediately inform the Awards Coordinators, the current presidents, and the Director of Operations. A committee member introduces the winner at the banquet.
The Taylor Award for the best graduate student essay submitted to the annual conference. This 3-member committee is chaired by the Executive Secretary and must include one past president and one member of the EC. The President(s) cull the best submissions and are responsible for getting them to the committee. The committee chair is responsible for informing the winners or runners-up. Once the decision is made, the chair should immediately inform the Awards Coordinators, the current presidents as well as the Director of Operations. A committee member introduces the winner at the banquet.
The Dorys Crow Grover Awards are given to two outstanding papers submitted by graduate students to the annual conference. Same committee as for Taylor. The President(s) cull the best submissions and are responsible for getting them to the committee. The committee chair is responsible for informing the winners or runners-up. Once the decision is made, the chair should immediately inform the Awards Coordinators, the current presidents as well as the Director of Operations. A committee member introduces the winners at the banquet.
The Creative Writing Award for the best creative writing submission at the annual conference. The Awards Coordinator seeks 3 self-described “creative writers” to serve on the committee every year, choosing when possible those who have degrees in or have published in the fields of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction or other fields, particularly those with national reputations. Contributors self-nominate and the president is responsible for getting the nominees to the committee members. The committee chair is responsible for informing the winner, any runners-up, and other self-nominated members. Once the decision is made, the chair should immediately inform the Awards Coordinators, the current presidents as well as the Director of Operations. A committee member introduces the winner at the banquet.
The Louis Owens Awards provide financial support for diverse—self-identified BIPOC, LGBTQ, etc.—and international graduate students to attend the annual conference. In addition to the chair, the Owens committee should consist of a grad student rep, a grad student rep who has cycled off (and may no longer be a grad student). The chair will rotate on a five-year basis. During the fourth year of their term, the chair will send out a call for those who might be interested in serving as chair, encouraging candidates with experience in fields related to diversity and social justice, who, ideally, have been associated with WLA for some time. Once the decision is made, the chair should immediately inform the Awards Coordinators, the current presidents as well as the Director of Operations. A committee member introduces the winner/s at the banquet.
The WLA/Charles Redd Center K-12 Teaching Award provides teachers with funding to attend and present at the annual conference. The chair should have some experience working with teachers and is a voting member. S/he will choose a two-person committee with an effort to get former K-12 teachers on it. The chair’s term is five years, but committee members rotate year by year. At the end of their term, the chair seeks a successor, to be approved by the EC. Because this position requires an ongoing relationship with the Redd Center to receive funding, the chair should have a relatively free hand in figuring out their successor. The chair is responsible for informing the awardee. Once the decision is made, the chair should immediately inform the Awards Coordinators, the current presidents as well as the Director of Operations. A committee member introduces the winner at the banquet.
The Rosowski Award goes to a generous and caring mentor and teacher of students and of colleagues in the Western Literature Association who has created a legacy within the organization as well as in the field of western studies. It will be given every other year, starting (again) in 2024. The committee will be comprised of three members with overlapping terms. They will remain on the committee for two cycles (4 years). If possible one member will be a former recipient of the award; a second member will, if possible, be a student of a Rosowski Award recipient. They will be chosen by the Awards Coordinators.
Once a winner has been selected, the chair should immediately inform the winner of the award, the Awards Coordinators, the current presidents as well as the Director of Operations. A committee member introduces the winner at the banquet.
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Monday, August 10th, 2020
Western Literature Association Code of Conduct and Behavioral Guidelines
In order to ensure our members and participants feel welcome and able to express themselves and speak to their lived experiences, The WLA asks that each conference attendee familiarize themself with the following behavioral and conduct standards.
The guidelines below are not intended to constrain responsible scholarly or professional discourse and debate. Constructive, scholarly and academic exchanges can feel uncomfortable at times. The WLA has a tradition of engaging in contentious conversations, discussing uncomfortable realities, and fostering collegiality despite differences in opinion, values, and beliefs. Like most academic organizations, The WLA is committed to free and open dialogue and debate in the name of freedom of expression. The WLA is also known for its collegiality and humor within and beyond academic dialogue—we don’t have an award for the most humorous presentation each year for no reason! In order to sustain our warm and collegial atmosphere, we hope to foster awareness and an ethic of conscientious academic citizenship in our membership and amongst our conference attendees.
Because fostering an inclusive and accessible conference environment goes beyond avoiding detrimental actions, The WLA encourages the following behavior and conduct:
The WLA has instituted a no-tolerance policy for harassment, discrimination, bullying, xenophobia, racism, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, sexism, and other exclusionary behaviors, whether online or at in-person conferences. Harassment and discrimination includes but is not limited to:
As a reminder, the following behaviors do not constitute discrimination or harassment:
As COVID-19 infections increase in the US, so too do feelings of fear, anxiety, and isolation. Additionally, the U.S. is experiencing an increase in misinformation, xenophobia, and racism. Our Asian American and Pacific Islander colleagues have been contending with physical, financial, emotional, and psychological harm, while our Black, Indigenous, and Latinx colleagues are coping with the emotional weight of disproportionate rates of infection and death in their communities. Accordingly, the WLA will not tolerate COVID-related harassment at this year’s virtual conference, and beyond. Please only use the names provided by the World Health Organization (WHO), “coronavirus” or “COVID-19” when discussing COVID-19 topics; and be sensitive to the varied nature of COVID-related experiences conference attendees are experiencing.
While we continue our work to implement an anonymous, online Misconduct Reporting System, those serving on The WLA’s Equity Committee will be making themselves available to anyone who wishes to report an incident or needs support or assistance during the conference. These individuals, from various stages in their academic careers and representing various areas of expertise, are prepared to listen, offer support, and to document instances of misconduct. Please note that advocates will not advise or investigate on their own, while they will stand ready to pass along documentation of incidents to the Executive Council, if the complainant wishes. As we further develop the reporting options we can make available to our membership and conference attendees, our goal is to meet misconduct reports with a process of survivor-centered, restorative justice. Until we have fully developed this system, The Equity Committee appreciates members sharing feedback and concerns, which will help us ensure the safety and well-being of conference attendees.
Should you need to report misconduct, the following individuals will be available to you via email to set up a time to talk:
Committee Chair:
Ashley E. Reis, Senior Lecturer, University of North Texas: Ashley.Reis@unt.edu
Committee Members:
Krista Comer, Professor, Rice University (WLA Executive Council Member): kcomer@rice.edu
Jennifer Dawes, Professor, Midwestern State University: jennifer.dawes@msutexas.edu
Carolyn Dekker, Assistant Professor, Finlandia University: carolyn.dekker@finlandia.edu
Mike Lemon, Instructor of English, Texas Tech University (WLA Executive Council Member): mike.lemon@ttu.edu
Nick Henson, Instructor of English, Citrus College: nhenson@citruscollege.edu
Jillian Moore, Ph.D. Candidate, Duquesne University (WLA Graduate Representative): benionj@duq.edu
Our hope is that this Code of Conduct and Behavioral Guidelines will serve to protect the safety of all WLA members and conference attendees. This is a living document that we will continue to revisit frequently and develop over time. We appreciate the support of The WLA community in making our organization and conferences more inclusive, accessible, and equitable.
We encourage our members and conference attendees to educate themselves on the addition of the asterisk after Trans*. You can learn more, via Jack Halberstam, here.
Tags: code of conduct and behavioral guidelines, WLA code of conduct, WLA Conference participation
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Thursday, June 11th, 2020
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Wednesday, June 10th, 2020
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Tuesday, August 20th, 2019
56th WLA Conference
Santa Fe, NM
Wednesday, October 19–Saturday, October 22, 2022
View the PROGRAM here:
https://www.westernlit.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Program-2022-for-distribution-side-by-side.pdf
The submission portal is now closed, but you can still attend.
Register at https://www.conftool.pro/wla-conference-2022.
[Please create a new login/PW. Those from previous conferences will not work.]
Palimpsests and Western Literatures:
The Layered Spaces of History, Imagination, and the Future
hosted by Professors Lisa Tatonetti and Audrey Goodman
Luci Tapahonso (Diné) was chosen as the 2022 Distinguished Achievement Award recipient. She will accept the award at the conference!
Other distinguished speakers include renowned Chicana author, activist, and playwright Denise Chávez and award-winning Akwesasne Mohawk poet James Thomas Stevens along with his students from the Institute of American Indian Arts.
GETTING TO SANTA FE: For information, click here.
The conference will be held at the beautiful Santa Fe Convention Center, Wed, October 19–Sat, October 22, 2022
https://www.santafe.org/meetings/meet-different/the-convention-center/
WE HAVE ROOMS RESERVED AT TWO WONDERFUL HOTELS.
The main conference hotel will be the Drury Plaza Hotel, 828 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM 87501. 505-424-2175.
PLEASE HELP US FILL THE ROOM BLOCK AT THE DRURY!
https://www.druryhotels.com/locations/santa-fe-nm/drury-plaza-hotel-in-santa-fe
Conference group rates: $169 single or double; $179 triple; $189 quad
Group rates include:
• Complimentary Hot Breakfast (6:00-9:00 am weekdays and 7:00-10:00 am weekends)
• Complimentary Evening Drinks and Snacks (5:30-7:00 pm)
• Complimentary Wi-Fi
• Reduced Valet Parking Fee ($10 per day—normally $24)
Reservations for the Drury Plaza Hotel in Santa Fe can be made by individual call-in or online at www.druryhotels.com. Our WLA Group number for the Drury is 2430688.
Reservations by group attendees must be received on or before Sunday, September 18, 2022. Reservations received after the cutoff date will be confirmed on a space-available basis at prevailing rates.
Individual reservations must be cancelled prior to 12:00 p.m. on the day before the reservation’s confirmed date of arrival in order to avoid a non-refundable fee equal to one night’s room rate plus tax.
Additional rooms at conference rate will be available at the Inn of the Governors
101 W. Almeda St.
Santa Fe, NM 87501
800-234-4534
https://innofthegovernors.com/amenities/tea-sherry-hour
Conference Group Rates: Single or Double $140
Group rates include:
• Complimentary Parking
• Complimentary Mountain Sunrise Breakfast
• Complimentary Sherry and Biscochitos
• Complimentary Wi-Fi
RESERVATIONS CANNOT BE MADE VIA THE HOTEL WEB SITE. GUESTS MUST CALL THE INN OF THE GOVERNORS DIRECTLY TO GET GROUP RATE
Making Reservations at the Inn of the Governors: Individuals making reservations may do so by calling 1-800-234-4534. Please request the group rate for WLA. This will ensure that you are charged properly.
BILLING: Attendees will be responsible for all individual charges. Credit Card information will be required at the time of reservations. No guests will be able to check in without a valid Credit Card. Any reservation arrival changed to a later date within group dates or cancelled within five days of the original arrival date will be subject to a charge of one night’s room and tax. This charge will be made to the credit card holding the reservation.
Call for Papers:
A palimpsest is a material, be it birchbark, slate, or parchment, upon which something is written, and then expunged or blotted out, only to be written upon again. It is a thing made of layers of inscription, a thing made of strata of expression, a thing made of traces that may not be visible but can never be fully erased or repressed.
Santa Fe, the location of WLA in 2022, is a place made of palimpsests at once beautiful and disturbing. It is on Pueblo and Jicarilla Apache land and, at the same time, is the oldest capital in the United States. Called Ogha Po’oge or “White Shell Water Place” in Tewa, Santa Fe’s more commonly known name translates as “holy faith,” declaring the incursion of Spanish Catholicism and colonialism in territory Anglo Europeans termed the New World. Until 2020, at the center of the Santa Fe Plaza, stood a nineteenth-century settler monument honoring U.S. soldiers. One side of the obelisk read:
“To the heroes
who have fallen in the various battles with XXXX
Indians in the territory
Of New Mexico”
The missing word in the inscription had long been chiseled out. The carved-out indentation, layered upon that original, elided slur, spoke volumes. In recent years, the word “courageous” was written atop that same loud space. In preparation for Indigenous Peoples’ Day in October 2020, a coalition of protesters gathered and succeeded in occupying the Plaza and toppling the monument, despite the city’s efforts to police the area and protect the structure. This palimpsest speaks to the ways that settler colonialism tries to erase both the presence of Indigenous peoples and its own histories of violence and confirms the urgency and momentum of social justice movements throughout the U.S. West.
WLA 2022 takes such layered spaces of history, of imagination, of present, and of the future as its call.
We ask, then, for participants to look at the layers, collisions, omissions, and the expressive possibilities of the palimpsest. From Indigenous-Indigenous encounters, to settler incursions, to Mexican, Spanish, and broader Latinx landscapes, what is the palimpsest in Western literatures writ large? Is it the double exposure of a photograph? The bi- or tri-lingual text of a public mural? Is it in the queer traces in an Indigenous poem, a Cather story, or a Ryan Coogler film? Or in the multiple narrators of a Midwest podcast? Is it a novel with a Black zombie-fighting hero that remaps both Post-Civil War Kansas and YA fiction? Or is it the elision of the words “climate change” from government documents about threats to the Ogallala aquifer?
Together with considering the above questions, participants at the 2022 WLA conference might explore:
• approaches to teaching texts and topics of the West in its broadest configuration;
• anti-racist pedagogies and practices;
• the work of invited speakers Luci Tapahonso, Denise Chávez, and James Thomas Stevens;
• creative submissions that take the West as their point of departure.
We invite presentations in the widest of varieties, including flash panels with numerous papers or provocations, staged or open discussions, book roundtables, photo or video essays and other formats that seek to describe, uncover, decipher, and animate the inscriptions in and beyond this layered western space.
This year, the WLA is debuting a poster session that will be held during cocktail hour. We encourage posters from senior scholars to graduate and high school students or community members. Bring your research, your classes, and your imagination.
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Tuesday, February 19th, 2019
An extensive holding of archival materials can be found in Special Collections at Utah State University. Some materials are also held at Boise State University.
Information can be obtained at Archives West: http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/. Type in “Western Literature Association” and click on the archive you’d like to explore.
If you have questions regarding the holdings of the Utah State University repository, please contact Clint Pumphrey, Archivist, Special Collections.
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Wednesday, August 25th, 2010
AN EASTERN DUDE RIDES WEST—AGAIN
Joseph M. Flora, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, WLA President 1992
WLA Past-presidential Address, given 1993 in Wichita, Kansas
Asked for a title for this address, I at first toyed with “A Tenderfoot Rides West.” I am, after all, the first WLA president to come from an eastern university, to have eastern roots, to have spent virtually all of his life east of the Mississippi. But tenderfoot hardly seemed right. I have been a WLA member for too long, and you have charged me with too many tasks for that sobriquet to work. You’ve rewarded me with merit badges and unbounded good fellowship—and in 1992 the honor of Head Scout. Thank you for the spurs.
So I opted for dude, which in one of its meanings carries the eastern connotation. Definition number one of my dictionary reads, “An easterner or city person who vacations on a western ranch.” Listed as slang in definition three, dude is “a fellow, a chap.” In any sense, the word is informal, as this address is designed to be. For any tautology, apologies.
The label West is, of course, a much more slippery word than dude. It conveys history as well as mythology. At the University of Michigan, we sang—and folks there still sing—“Hail, hail to Michigan, the champions of the West.” Michigan originated as a part of the Northwest Territory. “Easterners” certainly thought of it as a wild, wild West. As late as 1866, when native Ohioan William Dean Howells published Venetian Life, James Russell Lowell expressed amazement that a book of such “airy elegance” could have been written by someone from “the rough-and-ready West.” Such attitudes survived Lowell. I recall from my undergraduate days Austin Warren’s explaining to Michigan students that cultured Bostonians thought of anything west of Pittsburgh as one vast region known as “Ioway.” Easterners are wont to make midwesterners feel like westerners.
But though the tension between East and West has been one ingredient of American life, historically the pull west has been the dominant pull. Most Americans, in some ways, have been westerners. In his whole life, Thomas Jefferson never ventured more than a few miles west of Monticello, but he it was who maneuvered the Louisiana Purchase; he it was who sent Lewis and Clark on their great journey to the Pacific. To good purpose, J. Golden Taylor included Cambridge, Mass., poet E. E. Cummings in his anthology of western American literature, along with Robert Frost, who, though born in San Francisco, is counted the great poet of New England experience. Easterners and midwesterners of my generation and the generation before me grew up with a vision of the West. We thought about it a lot. We were guided by Zane Grey and a host of other popular writers who wrote Westerns. Almost weekly, we would see at least one Western film, sometimes more. And West was where California lay—still the promised land in those pre-Joan Didion days.
And so I remember the adventure of my first trip to the trans-Mississippi West. In graduate school, I thought a change of scene for a summer would enhance my preparations—two summer sessions in one summer at Berkeley would allow me to make a good start on my German, and I could take a couple of English courses besides. It was a happy choice: thirteen weeks on the campus by the Bay, in what seemed to me weather close to that of Heaven. It was wonderfully rewarding. One weekend took me to Yosemite, another to Napa Valley, and on another I flew to Los Angeles to see an aunt and uncle I hadn’t seen in years and a cousin I had never met. Los Angeles didn’t seem very different from Detroit, but Yosemite was terrain that spoke adventure. Unlike the owl in Mark Twain’s “Baker’s Blue Jay Yarn,” I was not disappointed. Mostly, of course, I was taking in the ambience of Berkeley and San Francisco. My thoughts had been Western in a larger sense mainly on the cross-country drive to Berkeley. How wonderful it was—and how keen was that very special moment when our automobile crossed the Mississippi. I was in the West.
I relived the magic of my first crossing some fifteen years later, when Scribner’s published Hemingway’s The Nick Adams Stories. It contained a fragment that Philip Young titled, aptly enough, “Crossing the Mississippi.” This was probably Hemingway’s first attempt at a story set west of the Mississippi. Nick is bound, apparently, for Kansas City, though we don’t know why. It may not be a bad guess that he was going to begin work on a newspaper. It’s October of 1917. News of a White Sox victory over New York in the World Series cheers Nick, helps him check the wasteland images that he sees as his train pauses before making its crossing. Nick takes with him the optimism that many travelers from the East or Midwest took as they made that crossing. Hemingway wrote, “Crossing the Mississippi would be a’ big event [Nick] thought, and he wanted to enjoy every minute of it.” The reality is different from what Nick had expected, but he observes carefully as the train progresses over the long bridge, “The river seemed to move solidly downstream, not to flow but to move like a solid, shifting lake, swirling a little where the abutments of the bridge jutted out. Mark Twain, Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and LaSalle crowded each other in Nick’s mind as he looked up the flat, brown plain of slow-moving water. ‘Anyhow, I’ve seen the Mississippi,’ he thought happily to himself.” A force of nature against a man-made structure, an author, his living characters, a French explorer “crowd” Nick’s mind—history and nature and myth and literature. Nick has one of those highly satisfying moments that Hemingway occasionally gave him: “‘Anyhow, I’ve seen the Mississippi,’ he thought.” The moment was so ecstatic that Hemingway stopped writing with that sentence. He didn’t give us a story, but the fragment satisfactorily catches a special moment that many Americans have experienced, me included, upon crossing the great river.
For Americans who cross that river east to west, there are usually consequences, often great consequences. Sometimes lives are changed unalterably. And many a Western story describes such transformation. Think about the easterner of Crane’s “The Blue Hotel.” The West has challenged his notion of himself, and he knows that he failed the test. His view of human nature will be ever dark: “Johnnie was cheating. I saw him. I know it. And I refused to stand up and be a man.” The poor Swede of Crane’s story was also a newcomer to the West, so caught up by his own stereotypes of the West that he ensured his own death. Though strangers sometimes meet violent ends, writers have also enjoyed describing positive transformations. We think of the narrator of Owen Wister’s The Virginian and of Molly Stark Wood.
Going west makes a difference not only in literature, but in life. Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Jack Schaefer, Willa Cather, Mary Hallock Foote, and a host of others provide ready examples. Of course, the Western Literature Association itself has its own history of consequences of eastern visits to the West. You will be interested in one of the most recent. Last year, Doris Betts of North Carolina gave the keynote address at WLA. Her novel Heading West described consequences of an unscheduled visit west by Nancy Finch, a librarian from North Carolina: Nancy had been kidnapped. At WLA, southerner Betts discussed her use of Western themes in that novel and reflected on the influence of Western writing on her. But while she was in Reno, Betts was listening and observing—as writers do. When Thomas Wolfe had visited Reno some fifty years earlier, he had been fascinated with the gaudiness of the city’s chief industry and all that surrounds it. Betts quickly got by that pleasure seeking and focused her inner eye elsewhere. She went on our Saturday outing, and it proved for her to be more than a tourist’s excursion. The country around Reno, especially Donner Lake and its surroundings, spoke to her. At WLA, Betts found the theme and setting for her next novel. She is now subscribing to the Sparks, Nevada, newspaper, suggesting that her novel won’t be a retelling of the Donner excursion. As Betts says, that has already been done, by Vardis Fisher and others, all of which she has been busily reading. But the Donner story will be reflected in her theme.
A graduate student when I first crossed the Mississippi, I was about to meet dimensions of the West I hadn’t before considered. A couple of years later in a seminar, I became acquainted with the work of Vardis Fisher. The rest is history. Through his work, I was often in imagination west of the Mississippi. The next physical trip I took was, in fact, to Hagerman, Idaho, and the Fisher ranch. That was a weekend to remember! It personalized a correspondence with Fisher that had been under way, one that after Fisher’s death was extended to Opal Fisher.
I learned from Fisher about the founding of the Western Literature Association, though several meetings would pass before I attended my first one. Back East, a member of MLA and SAMLA, I was making my way, with much naiveté, in a new region on a modest salary at a university with limited travel budgets. Attending WLA seemed a remote and exotic possibility. I’ll be ever grateful to Wilber Stevens of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, for his telephone call inviting me to be on a panel on the works of Vardis Fisher. “I’ll do it,” I said. Now I stress to graduate students: “You are your dissertation.”
The year of my first WLA meeting was 1975, the place Durango. My flight took me through Denver. In that airport, you knew you weren’t in the East or the Midwest. The clue was in the garb of all those Western Dudes—the cowboy boots and hats and the bolos. The women, however, could have been from Atlanta. As Melville might say, “Surely there is meaning in these things.” And I remember the Durango airport. That confirmed that I was in the West.
If the airport was small and remotely located, that quickly became unimportant. Western welcome really began there, for a group of WLA people were on the flight. Audrey Peterson was among them, and I was soon talking with someone who had not only heard of Vardis Fisher but knew my book on him! And so it continued in Durango, where at the convention hotel Jack Schaefer himself was one of the Western voices making me and others feel at home, part of a fellowship as well as a professional organization. Like other newcomers, I was meeting people who wished to see me again. The excitement of my first WLA meeting was such that already I was making plans to be present the next year in Bellingham. Helen Stauffer (Kearney is pronounced “Carney,” she taught me) was also among the first-timers that year. She will remember how we all hated to see the meeting end. To embellish would be tedious, but I am sure that many here could also testify to the special qualities of first WLA meetings, to the good fellowship and the bonds that were made.
A quick check of the membership directory will confirm how successful the band of western scholars who founded the association have been in attracting easterners to the organization. Many of us have served on the Executive Committee of the organization, and after I had been in WLA for a few years, some folks began to suggest that it might even be appropriate to have a president from the East, pointing out that the location of the meeting need not be tied to the school of the president. With the growing number of easterners, some began to suggest that the Association might even wish to meet one year in the East. Hints of manifest destiny! In 1980, WLA went to the great river itself for its meeting. In 1983, George Day carried us to Minneapolis and St. Paul—Big Ten country, where the ghosts are those of Sinclair Lewis and F. Scott Fitzgerald, though Fred Manfred could have given us a tour of the upper regions of the Father of Waters.
When in 1989 members of the Executive Committee asked me to accept nomination as vice president of WLA, with presidency two years down the road, I thought it a good moment for me to say yes, to agree to the work that would, I hoped, say thank you to an organization that had been not only extraordinarily welcoming, but extraordinarily supportive of my work and had opened my eyes to new opportunities and new ways of seeing. Ann Ronald agreed to hold the 1992 meeting in Reno. Let me here renew my thanks to her and to her splendid colleagues at the University of Nevada-Reno for their partnership. I might have managed local arrangements by phone, or a quick visit, but I was glad that I didn’t have to do that.
My election was the occasion for renewed discussion of the possibility for holding an annual meeting east of the Mississippi. There might, after all, be some point to our meeting in Asheville, North Carolina, let’s say, Vardis Fisher had keenly identified with Thomas Wolfe because of the similarities of their mountain origins. Or we might have met in Boone, North Carolina, and had a major focus on re-imagining older notions of West.
When the Executive Committee talked about the possibility of some day meeting in the East, we agreed that my election was a good moment to go beyond cocktail-hour talk; to see what the membership as a whole might think about meeting in the East now and then. So we devised a questionnaire, and in bright purple so it couldn’t be missed, it went to the membership.
For several weeks, the purple forms kept my mailbox full and enlivened my reading. One hundred thirty-seven members responded. That is a pretty strong survey response, I think. The responses that came after the deadline were less impassioned than those that came in the initial flurry and were often more thoughtful. There was, to be sure, a good deal of passion from the most eager respondents. For some members, going east of the Mississippi for WLA would approach something like blasphemy; others would be extremely reluctant to go in that direction—for any purpose—I gathered. When their time comes, they want to die in the West—and with their boots on.
Noting the increasing percentage of members who live in the East and suggesting that holding some conference meetings in the East might equalize the burden of the greater travel expenses easterners face, the questionnaire asked members to agree or disagree with this statement: “WLA conferences should be held ONLY in the region of North America WEST of the Mississippi River (or its average longitude).” The form provided space for comments. Fifty-seven members agreed with the statement; seventy-six members disagreed. Four members (hating to be bound by statements with only) did not check but explained; they would fit in the disagree column. So count the vote 76 for policy that might permit an occasional meeting in the East and 57 against such policy. That’s a bigger margin than President Clinton got on his budget, but it is hardly a pressing mandate for change. Certainly it did not seem to me strong enough to recommend that the Executive Committee consider a policy for meeting in the East every fourth year, as some recommend. Most easterners like coming west very regularly, though they tend to approve the notion that it might be desirable for WLA to meet in the East, at least occasionally. Some Westerners eloquently argued the same position. The Chaucer Society, as one of you noted, does not meet only in England. Likewise, Western literature is not just for the West. Nor are all who write it western by every standard.
There are, of course, practical considerations in these matters. An advisory vote does not chart a course, as a national budget vote might. WLA does, after all, want a good attendance at its meetings. So does SAMLA, which prides itself on being the largest of the regional MLAs. SAMLA has its best attendance when the meeting is in Atlanta; so we meet there most often, currently in alternate years. Washington, DC, does well for SAMLA, too. But a Florida site will cut down on attendance. It’s too far for too many people. Members in the Upper South tend to stay away. But SAMLA continues to experiment. Next year SAMLA meets in Baltimore, and probably Florida will get another chance in some distant year. Even now, the SAMLA membership is voting on the proposition that all meetings be held in Atlanta.
The drama for MLA is similar. New York is a sure draw, but there was a falling-off, some of you know, when the meeting was held in Houston, and I make no prediction about Toronto. But come what may, MLA will survive! Count on it.
WLA will wish to be similarly pragmatic, but like MLA it should not be afraid to experiment. It is encouraging that October 1995 will find WLA meeting in Canada for the first time ever. We seem agreed, however, that the Association does not want to meet in big eastern or midwestern cities. It doesn’t want Cleveland, but it might like Boone. Some year, we might want to meet on the shores of Lake George in New York, one of the beautiful Wests of James Fenimore Cooper.
There would be no point in holding SAMLA’s meeting in St. Louis, or in holding the Rocky Mountain MLA’s meeting there. And although there are members in those organizations not from the defining regions, the organizations exist first to serve a region. The Western Literature Association, by contrast, is a national organization; it has increasingly become national in membership and in vision. Recognizing West as a fluid concept in American history, we study the literature of many Wests.
I draw back from any formulas or ratios for future meeting sites, but I hope we will continue to keep our options open. If we make a mistake some year, WLA will survive. The survey responses—with that majority favoring experimentation—strike me as worthy of inclusion in the WLA archives, and I submit them this day to Tom Lyon.
Whatever glitches or triumphs lie ahead, I am confident that we will continue to be a noticeably welcoming and inclusive organization. “Roll on, WLA, roll on!” This eastern dude salutes you and cheers you on to even greater achievement.
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Wednesday, November 2nd, 2016
TOM LYNCH WAS THE EDITOR FOR THE ISSUES
FROM SPRING 2014 THROUGH SPRING 2021
Spring 2014 (WAL 49. 1)
Special Issue:
INDIGENOUS WESTS: LITERARY AND VISUAL AESTHETICS
Guest edited by Susan Bernardin
ESSAYS | |
The Significance of the Frontier in Comanche Poetry | Scott Andrews |
The End (of the Trail) Is the Beginning: Stephen Graham Jones’s The Bird Is Gone | John Gamber |
“This Is Our Playground”: Skateboarding, diy Aesthetics, and Apache Sovereignty in Dustinn Craig’s 4wheelwarpony | Joanna Hearne |
“Just by Doing It, We Made It Appear”: Dustinn Craig on We Shall Remain: Geronimo, 4wheelwarpony, and the Apache Scouts Project | Joanna Hearne with Dustinn Craig |
It’s a Good Day to Bike: Indigenous Futures in Ramona Emerson’s Opal | Susan Bernardin |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Chadwick Allen, Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies; Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism; and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, A Separate Country: Postcoloniality and American Indian Nations | Joseph Coulombe |
Joanna Hearne, Smoke Signals: Native Cinema Rising | Margaret Huettl |
Beth H. Piatote, Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature | Nicole Tonkovich |
Ralph Salisbury, So Far So Good | David Christensen |
Liz Stephens, The Days Are Gods | George Handley |
Michael Sowder, House under the Moon | Danielle Beazer Dubrasky |
Stella Pope Duarte, Women Who Live in Coffee Shops and Other Stories; and Demetria Martínez, The Block Captain’s Daughter | Laura Padilla |
Rudolfo Anaya, The Old Man’s Love Story | Sarah Stoeckl |
Charles L. Crow, History of the Gothic: American Gothic | Amber Bowden Whitlock |
Jennifer K. Ladino, Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature | Johanna R. Landis |
George Venn, Keeping the Swarm: New and Selected Essays | Laurie Ricou |
Robert L. Dorman, Hell of a Vision: Regionalism and the Modern American West | William V. Lombardi |
Janis Stout, South by Southwest: Katherine Anne Porter and the Burden of Texas History | Max Despain |
Summer 2014 (WAL 49. 2)
ESSAYS | |
The Chinaman’s Crime: Race, Memory, and the Railroad in Willa Cather’s “The Affair at Grover Station” | Julia H. Lee |
From Mysteries to Manidoos: Language and Transformation in Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse | Linda Krumholz |
What’s So Critical about Critical Regionalism?: The Case of Fray Angélico Chávez’s New Mexico Triptych | Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Review of Michael K. Johnson, Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos: Conceptions of the African American West | Bryant Keith Alexander |
Review of Michael C. Steiner, Regionalists on the Left: Radical Voices from the American West | Forrest G. Robinson |
Review of Wallis R. Sanborn, III, Animals in the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy | Maria O’Connell |
Review of Dr. Gordon Haber and Marybeth Holleman, Among Wolves: Gordon Haber’s Insights into Alaska’s Most Misunderstood Animal | Anne Coray |
Review of Don Rearden, The Raven’s Gift | Eric Heine |
Review of Lisa Knopp, What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte | Bernard Quetchenbach |
Review of Kayann Short, A Bushel’s Worth: An Ecobiography | Evelyn Funda |
Review of Kim Stafford, 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared | Jenny Emery Davidson |
Fall 2014 (WAL 49.3)
ESSAYS | |
Far from the Pastoral Myth: Basque Sheepherders in Contemporary Western American Fiction | David Rio |
“The Sterility of their art”: Masculinity and the Western in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony | Lydia R. Cooper |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Review of Amaia Ibarraran, Martin Simonson, and David Rio, eds., The Neglected West: Contemporary Approaches to Western American Literature | Nancy S. Cook |
Review of David L. Moore, That Dream Shall Have a Name: Native Americans Rewriting America | O. Alan Weltzien |
Review of Michelle H. Raheja, Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film | Scott D. Emmert |
Review of James H. Cox, The Red Land to the South: American Indian Writers and Indigenous Mexico | Lisa Tatonetti |
Review of Scott Knickerbocker, Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language | Robert Scott |
Review of William E. Tydeman, Conversations with Barry Lopez: Walking the Path of Imagination | Jason Hertz |
Review of Don Waters, Sunland | Andrea Clark Mason |
Review of Gerald Vizenor, Chair of Tears | Andy Meyer |
Review of N. Scott Momaday, Again the Far Morning: New and Selected Poems | Matthias Schubnell |
Review of Mary K. Stillwell, The Life & Poetry of Ted Kooser | Scott Knickerbocker |
Review of Jackson J. Benson, Haunted: The Strange and Profound Art of Wright Morris, a Biography and a Photo Gallery | Rodney P. Rice |
Review of Evelyn I. Funda, Weeds: A Farm Daughter’s Lament | Susan H. Swetnam |
Review of Jean Morgan Meaux, ed., In Pursuit of Alaska: An Anthology of Travelers’ Tales, 1879-1909 | Eric Heyne |
Review of R. Mark Liebenow, Mountains of Light: Seasons of Reflection in Yosemite | Scott Herring |
Review of SueEllen Campbell, et al., The Face of the Earth: Natural Landscapes, Science and Culture | Ann E. Lundberg |
Review of William deBuys, A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest | Sharman Apt Russell |
Winter 2015 (WAL 49.4)
ESSAYS | |
John Rollin Ridge’s Joaquín Murieta: Sensation, Hispanicism, and Cosmopolitanism | John C. Havard |
The First Last Generation: Queer Temporality, Heteropatriarchy, and Cultural Reproduction in Jovita González and Eve Raleigh’s Caballero | Lee Bebout |
“A New American Adam?” White Western Masculinity and American Indians in Dan O’Brien’s Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch | Peter L. Bayers |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Review of Melody Graulich and Nicolas S. Witschi, eds., Dirty Words in Deadwood: Literature and the Postwestern; and Paul Stasi and Jennifer Greiman, eds., The Last Western: Deadwood and the End of American Empire | Judy Nolte Temple |
Review of Don Lago, Canyon of Dreams: Stories from Grand Canyon History; and Lance Newman, ed., The Grand Canyon Reader | Hal Crimmel |
Review of Neil Campbell, Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West | James F. Scott |
Review of George Hart, Inventing the Language to Tell It: Robinson Jeffers and the Biology of Consciousness | Peter Quigley |
Review of Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbuster, eds., The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place | Sarah D. Wald |
Review of Julene Bair, The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning | Susan Naramore Maher |
Review of Philipp Meyer, The Son | Don Scheese |
Review of Mark Busby, Cedar Crossing | Randi Lynn Tanglen |
Spring 2015 (WAL 50.1)
ESSAYS | |
A Chaotic and Dark Vitalism: A Case Study of Cormac McCarthy’s Psychopaths amidst a Geology of Immorals | Sean Braune |
Social Space and the Suburb in Mike Cahill’s King of California:Mapping Race, Neoliberalism, and Narratives of the Past in the Southern California Landscape | Emily Cheng |
New Frontiers for Post-Western Cinema: Frozen River, Sin Nombre, Winter’s Bone | Jesús Ángel González |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Review of Michael K. Johnson, Hoo-Doo Cowboys and Bronze Buckaroos: Conceptions of the African American West | Bryant Keith Alexander |
Review of Stephen Miller and José Pablo Villalobos, eds., Rolando Hinojosa’s Klair City Death Trip Series: A Retrospective, New Directions | Martín Camps |
Review of Brandon D. Shuler, Robert Johnson, and Erika Garza-Johnson, eds. New Border Voices: An Anthology | Cristina Herrera |
Review of Claudine Chalmers, Chronicling the West for Harper’s: Coast to Coast with Frenzeny & Tavernier in 1873-1874. | Jessica Dallow |
Review of Stephen J. Mexal. Reading for Liberalism: The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West | Nicolas S. Witschi |
Review of Linda Scarangella McNenly, Native Performers in Wild West Shows: From Buffalo Bill to Euro Disney | Arnold Krupat |
Review of Wendy Harding, The Myth of Emptiness and the New American Literature of Place | O. Alan Weltzien |
Review of Bernard Mergen, At Pyramid Lake | Jeffrey Chisum |
Review of Ken Lamberton, Dry River: Stories of Life, Death, and Redemption on the Santa Cruz | Hal Crimmel |
Andrew Gulliford, ed., Outdoors in the Southwest: An Adventure Anthology | Linda Helstern |
Review of Julia Corbett. Seven Summers: A Naturalist Homesteads in the Modern West | Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy |
Review of Saúl Sánchez, Rows of Memory: Journeys of a Migrant Sugar-Beet Worker | Luis H. Moreno |
Review of Joshua Doleẑal. Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging | Gregory L. Morris |
Review of Tyra A. Olstad, Zen of the Plains: Experiencing Wild Western Places | Francis Moul |
Review of Iver Arnegard, Whip and Spur | Laura Rebecca Payne |
Summer 2015 (WAL 50.2)
ESSAYS | |
From the Editor: Fifty Years and Counting | Tom Lynch |
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism in True Grit: The Lovelorn Character of Mattie Ross |
Lloyd M. Daigrepont |
Ruth Nichols, Sky Girl, and the Aerial Frontier | Fred Erisman |
“August on Sourdough”: An Archival View of Gary Snyder’s Intercultural Poetics | Andrew Hageman |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Susan Naramore Maher, Deep Map Country: Literary Cartography of the Great Plains | Robert T. Tally Jr. |
John T. Price, The Tallgrass Prairie Reader | Matthew J. C. Cella |
Katheryn Cornell Dolan, Beyond the Fruited Plain: Food and Agriculture in U.S. Literature, 1850-1905 | Daniel Clausen |
Michael L. Tate, editor; with the assistance of Will Bagley and Richard L. Rieck. The Great Medicine Road, Part 1: Narratives of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trail, 1840-1848 | Deborah Lawrence |
Joshua B. Nelson, Progressive Traditions: Identity in Cherokee Literature and Culture | Phillip H. Round |
Maxine Oland, Siobhan M. Hart, and Liam Frink, eds., Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archeology | Ann E. Lundberg |
Manuel Broncano, Religion in Cormac McCarthy’s Fiction: Apocryphal Borderlands | Megan Riley McGilchrist |
Cathryn Halverson, Playing House in the American West: Western Women’s Life Narratives 1839-1987 | Margaret Doane |
Mark Asquith, The Lost Frontier: Reading Annie Proulx’s Wyoming Stories | Julie Scanlon |
David M. Wrobel, Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression | Susan Roberson |
David Gessner, All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West | Michael P. Branch |
Kim Bancroft, The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin: The Damn Good Times of a Fiercely Independent Publisher | Gioia Woods |
Lily Yuriko Nakai Havey, Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp: A Nisei Youth Behind a World War II Fence | Eve Oishi |
Fall 2015 (WAL 50.3)
ESSAYS | |
Performing a Strategic Transborder Citizenship: Delfina Cuero Remaps Kumeyaay Presence through Storytelling and Place Naming | Annette Portillo |
The Only Cure Is a Dance: The Role of Night Swan in Silko’s Ceremony | Tara Causey |
“The man was forever looking for that which he never found”: The Western and Automotive Tourism in the Early Twentieth Century | Clinton Mohs |
REVIEW ESSAY | |
“Journeys to the Interior”Christopher Cokinos, Bodies, of the Holocene; Melissa Kwasny, Pictograph; Lisa D. Simon and Brady Harrison, eds., These Living Songs: Reading Montana Poetry; and Mary K. Stillwell, Maps and Destinations | Bernard Quetchenbach |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
A. Jennie Bartlett, Elder Northfield’s Home, or, Sacrificed on the Mormon Altar [1882], ed. Nicole Tonkovich; and W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Struggle for Mormon Whiteness | Randi Lynn Tanglen |
Scott McClintock and John Miller, eds., Pynchon’s California | Casey Shoop |
David Rio, New Literary Portraits of the American West: Contemporary Nevada Fiction | Cheryll Glotfelty |
Robin Varnum, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: American Trailblazer | Mary Docter |
Richard W. Etulain, The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane | Brett Westbrook |
Peter Gough, Sounds of the New Deal: The Federal Music Project in the West | Steven Garabedian |
Miles Wilson, Fire Season | Gerald W. Haslam |
Blake Allmendinger, The Melon Capital of the World: A Memoir | Linda K. Karell |
Bethany Schultz Hurst, Miss Lost Nation | Harald Wyndham |
Denise Chávez, The King and Queen of Comezón | Lydia Presley |
Kim Zupan, The Ploughmen | Nancy S. Cook |
Winter 2016 (WAL 50. 4)
ESSAYS | |
“Sensation’s Imperial Narratives: Affect in the US’s Democracy of Print, 1846-1848” | Jason Ahlenius |
“New Materialism, Ecomysticism, and the Resolution of Paradox in Edward Abbey” | David Tagnani |
“Laughing for Survival: Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Language in Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger” | João Paulo Guimarães |
REVIEW ESSAY | |
Review Essay “A Language for Vast Space”:
Mark Gonnerman, ed., A Sense of the Whole: Reading Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End; ShaunAnne Tangney, ed., The Wild That Attracts Us: New Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers
|
Alan Williamson |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Anne L. Kaufman and Richard H. Millington, eds., Cather Studies 10: Willa Cather and the Nineteenth Century | Kristen R. Egan |
Evelyn P. Mayer, Narrating North American Borderlands: Thomas King, Howard F. Mosher, and Jim Lynch | Albert Braz |
James W. Parins, Literacy and Intellectual Life in the Cherokee Nation, 1820-1906 | Clarissa W. Confer |
Molly K. Varley, Americans Recaptured: Progressive Era Memory of Frontier Captivity | Andrea Tinnemeyer |
Paul Seydor, The Authentic Death and Contentious Afterlife of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid: The Untold Story of Peckinpah’s Last Western Film | Leonard Engel |
Mark J. Dworkin, American Mythmaker: Walter Noble Burns and the Legends of Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, and Joaquín Murrieta | William Katerberg |
Dan O’Brien, Wild Idea: Buffalo and Family in a Difficult Land | Franz Burnier |
Sharon Oard Warner, Sophie’s House of Cards: A Novel | Parley Ann Boswell |
Gaynell Gavin, Attorney-at-Large | Becky Faber |
Spring 2016 (WAL 51.1)
ESSAYS | |
“Too Vast, Too Complex, Too Grand”: Writing Space in John Wesley Powell’s Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons | José Liste Noya |
Resurrection after the “Blue Death”: Literature, Politics, and Ecological Redemption at Glen Canyon | Laura Smith |
“It had all become a natural condition”: California’s Garden Movement, Land Eugenics, and Naturalization in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland | Paul Formisano |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
James Karman, Robinson Jeffers: Poet and Prophet; James Karman, ed., The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers: Volume Three, 1940-1962 | ShaunAnne Tangney |
MaryEllen Higgins, Rita Keresztesi, and Dayna Oscherwitz, eds., The Western in the Global South | Susan Kollin |
Gary Scharnhorst, Owen Wister and the West | Bonney MacDonald |
Paul Lindholdt, Explorations in Ecocriticism: Advocacy, Bioregionalism, and Visual Design | O. Alan Weltzien |
Christina Robertson and Jennifer Westerman, eds., Working on Earth: Class and Environmental Justice | Daniel Clausen |
Paul Varner, ed., New Wests and Post-Wests: Literature and Film of the American West | Phillip A. Snyder |
Andrew Patrick Nelson, Still in the Saddle: The Hollywood Western, 1969-1980 | Kevin L. Stoehr |
Stephanie J. Fitzgerald, Native Women and Land: Narratives of Dispossession and Resurgence | Michael H. Auterson |
Theodore C. Van Alst, Jr., ed., The Faster Redder Road: The Best UnAmerican Stories of Stephen Graham Jones | John Gamber |
Rudolfo Anaya, Poems from the Río Grande | Sandra Dahlberg |
Rinker Buck, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey | Don Scheese |
Summer 2016 (WAL 51.2)
SPECIAL ISSUE: QUEER WESTS
Guest edited by Geoffrey Bateman
From the Editor | Tom Lynch |
ESSAYS | |
Queer Wests: An Introduction | Geoffrey Bateman |
Heterochronic West: Temporal Multiplicity in Bret Harte’s Regional Writing | Ryan Wander |
“Left All Alone in This World’s Wilderness”: Queer Ecology, Desert Spaces, and Unmaking the Nation in Frank Norris’s McTeague | Jada Ach |
“Say It Right, Say It Correct:” Documenting the American West in The Laramie Project | Tony R. Magagna |
“Turrrtle”: Displacing and Recovering a Queerly Gendered Body in Helena María Viramontes’ Their Dogs Came with Them | Keri-ann Blanco |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Donnelyn Curtis and Lawrence I. Berkove, eds., Before The Big Bonanza: Dan De Quille’s Early Comstock Accounts | Cheryll Glotfelty |
Arnold R. Krupat, Companion to James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk | Lori Burlingame |
Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden, eds., Oil Culture | Robert Lifset |
Lawrence Coates, Camp Olvido and The Goodbye House | Joe Plicka |
Richard Edwards, Natives of a Dry Place: Stories of Dakota Before The Oil Boom | Steven J. Bucklin |
Kyle Boelte, The Beautiful Unseen: Variations on Fog and Forgetting. A Memoir | Kathleen Boardman |
Annick Smith, Crossing the Plains with Bruno | Susan H. Swetnam |
Fall 2016 (WAL 51.3)
ESSAYS | |
“My dear Judge”: Owen Wister’s Virginian, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and Natural Law Conservatism | Stephen J. Mexal |
The Displaced Aristocrat as Tragic Hero in Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life | Myles Weber |
“Fables” of the Material World in James Ellroy’s Los Angeles | Joshua Meyer |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Carmen Boullosa, Cuando México se (re)apropia de Texas: Ensayos / When Mexico Recaptures Texas: Essays | Lorena Gauthereau |
Dominique Brégent-Heald, Borderland Films: American Cinema, Mexico, and Canada during the Progressive Era | Camilla Fojas |
Karen R. Jones, Epiphany in the Wilderness: Hunting, Nature, and Performance in the Nineteenth-Century American West | Lydia R. Cooper |
Deborah Fleming, Towers of Myth and Stone: Yeats’s Influence on Robinson Jeffers | Terence Diggory |
Steven M. Avella, Charles K. McClatchy and the Golden Era of American Journalism | Mark D. Ludwig |
Donna Coates, ed. Sharon Pollock: First Woman of Canadian Theatre | Anne Nothof |
Tim Sullivan, Ways to the West: How Getting Out of Our Cars Is Reclaiming America’s Frontier | Carlos A. Schwantes |
Eric Magrane and Christopher Cokinos, eds., The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide | Jennifer Lair |
David G. Pace, Dream House on Golan Drive | Katherine Bahr |
Winter 2017 (WAL 51. 4)
From the Editor | Tom Lynch |
ESSAYS | |
Up from the Ground: Living with/in Petrocultures in the US and Canadian Wests | Jenny Kerber |
From Fields of Wheat to Fields of Value: The Energy Unconscious of The Octopus | Jeff Diamanti |
Reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Three Californias Triptych as Petrofiction | Brent Ryan Bellamy |
A Formal Spilling: Leaking and Leaching in Warren Cariou’s Petrography and “Tarhands: A Messy Manifesto” | Taylor McHolm |
Salvage Ecology: annie ross’s Forest One and Happy Birthday Super Cheaper | Deena Rymhs |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Kenneth K. Brandt and Jeanne Campbell Reesman, eds., Approaches to Teaching the Works of Jack London; Joseph McAleer, Call of the Atlantic: Jack London’s Publishing Odyssey Overseas, 1902-1916 | Susan Nuernberg |
Jan Whitt, The Redemption of Narrative: Terry Tempest Williams and Her Vision of the West | Katherine R. Chandler |
Margery Fee, Literary Land Claims: The “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat | Jennifer Henderson |
Jean Toomer, A Drama of the Southwest: The Critical Edition of a Forgotten Play by Jean Toomer, edited by Carolyn J. Dekker | Bill D. Toth |
José Skinner, The Tombstone Race | Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán |
James Terry, Kingdom of the Sun: Stories | Evan Lavender-Smith |
Michael P. Branch, Raising Wild: Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness | English Brooks |
Shaun T. Griffin, Anthem for a Burnished Land: What We Leave in this Desert of Work and Words | Jeffrey Chisum |
George Hodgman, Bettyville: A Memoir | Chase Dimock |
Sharon Butala, Wild Rose | Megan Riley McGilchrist |
Spring 2017 (WAL 52.1)
Special Issue: Settler Colonial Studies and Western American Culture
Guest edited by Alex Trimble Young and Lorenzo Veracini
ESSAYS | |
“If I am native to anything”: Settler Colonial Studies and Western American Literature | Alex Trimble Young and Lorenzo Veracini |
“Do We Reverse the Medal?”: Settler Guilt, the Indian Speech, and the Untold Side of the Story | Rebecca Weaver-Hightower |
Beyond Possession: Animals and Gifts in Willa Cather’s Settler Colonial Fictions | Alex Calder |
Animating the Indigenous, Colonial Affects, and “Going Native” in the City: Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles | Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne |
REVIEW ESSAY | |
Willa Cather Here and Now, Out West | Daryl W. Palmer |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Susan Kollin, Captivating Westerns: The Middle East in the American West | Gioia Woods |
Lydia R. Cooper, Masculinities in Literature of the American West | James J. Donahue |
Sean P. Harvey, Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation Matthew N. Johnston, Narrating the Landscape: Print Culture and American Expansion in the Nineteenth Century |
Andrew B. Ross |
Brenda Beckman-Long, Carol Shields and the Writer-Critic | Wendy Roy |
Timothy G. Anderson, Lonesome Dreamer: The Life of John G. Neihardt | Pamela Gossin |
Julie Riddle, The Solace of Stones: Finding a Way through Wilderness | Nancy S. Cook |
Larry Watson, As Good as Gone: A Novel | Peter L. Bayers |
Patrick Madden, Sublime Physick | Russell Burrows |
Rudolfo Anaya, The Sorrows of Young Alfonso | Sandra Dahlberg |
Ron Hansen, The Kid | Richard W. Etulain |
Summer 2017 (WAL 52.2)
ESSAYS | |
A Failed Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the Indian: Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and the Power of Paratext | Kimberly E. Armstrong |
The Interconnected Bioregion: Transregional Networks in Mary Austin’s The Ford | John Peterson |
Amid the Mockingbird’s Laughter: Non-Indian Removals in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Depression-Era Novels | Amy S. Fatzinger |
REVIEW ESSAY | |
Cormac McCarthy: Prophecy and Metaphysics | Nell Sullivan |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Jon Gordon, Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts and Fictions | Nicholas Bradley |
Jeffrey Bilbro, Loving God’s Wildness: The Christian Roots of Ecological Ethics in American Literature | Will Lombardi |
Jayson Gonzales Sae-Saue,Southwest Asia: The Transpacific Geographies of Chicana/o Literature | Crystal Parikh |
Ángel Chaparro Sainz and Amaia Ibarraran Bigalondo, eds.,Transcontinental Reflections on the American West: Words, Images, Sounds beyond Borders | Stephen J. Mexal |
John E. Carter, ed., Solomon D. Butcher: Photographing the American Dream | Audrey Goodman |
Ken Ilgunas,Trespassing across America: One Man’s Epic, Never-Done-Before (and Sort of Illegal) Hike across the Heartland | Don Scheese |
Doreen Pfost, This River beneath the Sky: A Year on the Platte | Doug Meigs |
Richard Shelton, Nobody Rich or Famous: A Family Memoir | W. T. Pfefferle |
Shelley Armitage, Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place | Cynthia Brandimarte |
Melissa A. Sevigny, Mythical River: Chasing the Mirage of New Water in the American Southwest | Hal Crimmel |
Fall 2017 (WAL 52.3)
Special Issue: Nature and Culture in (and Outside) the Academy
Guest edited by by Helena Feder
ESSAYS | |
Introduction | Helena Feder |
“The Universe is Imaginative”: The Art of David Robertson | Helena Feder with David Robertson |
The Culture of Arboretums, or, My Adventures with Tree People | Cheryll Glotfelty |
Poetry and Place in Hawai‘i: Notes from a Writer and Resident | Eric Shaffer |
Two Farming Cultures in the Sacramento Valley | Mike Madison |
Nature Meets Culture in California’s Central Valley | Jan Goggans |
When the Water Hits the Road: The Return of the Westslope Cutthroat | Scott Herring |
Alchemy | Laurie Glover |
Teaching with Wolves | Scott Slovic |
The Move West: Gary Snyder | Alan Williamson |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Victoria Lamont, Westerns: A Woman’s History | Cathryn Halverson |
Sarah D. Wald, The Nature of California: Race, Citizenship, and Farming since the Dust Bowl | Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao |
Steven Frye, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American West | Geneva M. Gano |
Catherine Rainwater, ed., Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller: New Perspectives | René Dietrich |
Daniel Glick, dir., The Search for a Place to Stand: Jimmy Santiago Baca and the Forging of a Life of Letters | Seth Michelson |
James Perrin Warren, Other Country: Barry Lopez and the Community of Artists | David Thomas Sumner |
Red Shuttleworth, High Plains Fandango | Kathy L. Privatt |
Robert S. McPherson and Susan R. Neel, Mapping the Four Corners: Narrating the Hayden Survey of 1875, and Samuel Nugent Townshend and John George Hyde, Our Indian Summer in the Far West: An Autumn Tour of Fifteen Thousand Miles in Kansas, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and the Indian Territory. Ed. by Alex Hunt and Kristin Loyd | Tom Huber |
Michael Engelhard, American Wild: Explorations from the Grand Canyon to the Arctic Ocean | Jennifer Schell |
Ernestine Hayes, The Tao of Raven: An Alaska Native Memoir | Eric Heyne |
Alan Weltzien, Exceptional Mountains: A Cultural History of the Pacific Northwest Volcanoes | Jeff L. Smoot |
Bruce L. Smith, Stories from Afield: Adventures with Wild Things in Wild Places | Ashley E. Reis |
Inés Hernández-Ávila and Norma Elia Cantú, eds. Entre Guadalupe y Malinche: Tejanas in Literature and Art | Daniel Arbino |
Linda LeGarde Grover, The Sky Watched: Poems of Ojibwe Lives | Gwen N. Westerman |
Winter 2018 (WAL 52.4)
ESSAYS | |
Resistance to Containment and Conquest in Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Who Would Have Thought It? | A. Laurie Lowrance |
Literary Didacticism and Collective Human Rights in US Borderlands: Ana Castillo’s The Guardians and Louise Erdrich’s The Round House | Tereza M. Szeghi |
Wrighting the West: Leaving Marks in Frank X Walker’s York Poems | Jimmy Dean Smith |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Jennifer L. Jenkins, Celluloid Pueblo: Western Ways Films and the Invention of the Southwest | George Porter Thomas |
Matt Wanat and Leonard Engel, eds., Breaking Down Breaking Bad: Critical Perspectives | Maya Silver |
Billy J. Stratton, ed., The Fictions of Stephen Graham Jones: A Critical Companion | Eric Gary Anderson |
Joe Jackson, Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary | Lori Burlingame |
Alan Louis Kishbaugh, Deep Waters: Frank Waters Remembered in Letters and Commentary | Jolene K. Buehrer |
John Nichols, The Annual Big Arsenic Fishing Contest! | Cory Willard |
Kevin Holdsworth, Good Water | Russ Beck |
Cindy Crosby, The Tallgrass Prairie: An Introduction | Laura Jackson |
Scott Abbott, Immortal for Quite Some Time | Johnny Townsend |
Jennifer A. Smith, Magpie’s Blanket: A Novel | Kurt E. Kinbacher |
Daryl Farmer, Where We Land: Stories | Rob Davidson |
Martha Amore and Lucian Childs, eds., Building Fires in the Snow | Robert Lipscomb |
Julie Hungiville LeMay, The Echo of Ice Letting Go and Matt Schumacher, Ghost Town Odes | Michael J. Beilfuss |
Daniel Simon, ed., Nebraska Poetry: A Sesquicentennial Anthology 1867–2017 | Robert Brooke |
Spring 2018 (WAL 53.1)
Introduction: Pasts, Presents, Futures | Krista Comer and Susan Bernardin |
Genealogies | |
The Indigenous Erotics of Riding Bareback, or, the West Has Always Been Queer | Lisa Tatonetti |
Toward a Feminist Turn | Krista Comer |
Anthropocene Frontiers: The Place of Environment in Western Studies | Sylvan Goldberg |
Unhomely Wests | Stephen Tatum |
Keywords | |
Land | Cheryll Glotfelty |
Mexican | José Aranda |
Pedagogy | Randi Tanglen |
Postwestern | Susan Kollin |
Queer | Ryan Wander |
Regionality | Neil Campbell |
Settler | Alex Young |
Sovereignty | Kirby Lynn Brown |
Visuality | Audrey Goodman |
Methodologies | |
Lines of Sight in the Western | Joanna Hearne |
Outbreak from the Vaudeville Archive | Christine Bold |
Reviews | |
Daniel Robert King, Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Evolution: Editors, Agents, and the Crafting of a Prolific American Author | Herb Thompson |
Jennifer Sinor, Letters Like the Day: On Reading Georgia O’Keeffe | Luke Morgan |
Pete Fromm, The Names of the Stars: A Life in the Wilds | O. Alan Weltzien |
Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart’s Starling | Nathaniel Otjen |
Jennifer Sinor, Ordinary Trauma: A Memoir | Gaynell Gavin |
Melvin R. Adams, Atomic Geography: A Personal History of the Hanford Reservation | Max Frazier |
Michael P. Branch, Rants from the Hill: On Packrats, Bobcats, Wildfires, Curmudgeons, a Drunken Mary Kay Lady, and Other Encounters with the Wild in the High Desert | Jeremy Elliott |
Brit Bennett, The Mothers | Kalenda Eaton |
Summer 2018 (WAL 53.2)
ESSAYS | |
Social Critique in the Writings of Clarence King | G. A. Starr |
Modernist Mythologies: The Turquoise Trail Anthology and the Poets of Santa Fe | Michael S. Begnal |
Little House in Albania: Rose Wilder Lane and the Transnational Home | Donna Campbell |
“The seam of something else unnamed”: Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End | Neil Campbell |
REVIEWS | |
David J. Carlson, Imagining Sovereignty: Self-Determination in American Indian Law and Literature | Jace Weaver |
Sara Dant, Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West | James E. Sherow |
Tadeusz Lewandowski, Red Bird, Red Power: The Life and Legacy of Zitkala-Ša | Julianne Newmark |
James Perrin Warren, Placing John Haines | John Knott |
Richard W. Etulain, Ernest Haycox and the Western | Daniel Worden |
Rilla Askew, Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place | Lindsey Claire Smith |
Marc Beaudin, Seabring Davis, and Max Hjortsberg, editors, Unearthing Paradise: Montana Writers in Defense of Greater Yellowstone | Nathaniel Lewis |
Mark Spitzer, Beautifully Grotesque Fish of the American West | Cory Willard |
Michael Tate, editor, The Great Medicine Road: Narratives of the Oregon, California, and Mormon Trails, Part 3: 1850–1855 | Deborah Lawrence |
George Venn, editor, Beaver’s Fire: A Regional Portfolio (1970-2010) | Eleanor Berry |
Fall 2018 (WAL 53.3)
ESSAYS | |
The Pandora’s Box of Solomon Carvalho: Ethnic Transformation in the Age of Manifest Destiny | Scott Palmer |
The Museum as West and West as Museum: The Micro–Politics of Museum Display in George Catlin’s Vanishing American Indians | Nilak Datta |
Alternative Histories of the Old Indian Territory: John Milton Oskison’s Outlaw Hypotheses | Jenna Hunnef |
“I Think a Look at the West Would Do You Good”: Queer Visibility and Mythological Refuge in The Price of Salt | Lindsay Stephens |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Michael Lynn Crews, Books Are Made Out of Books: A Guide to Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Influences | Aihua Chen |
Antonio C. Márquez. Volver: A Persistence of Memory | Elena V. Valdez |
Phillip Garrison, What the Pig Said to Jesus: On the Uneasy Permanence of Immigrant Life | Louis Mendoza |
Robert Coover, Huck Out West: A Novel | Alex Hunt |
Winter 2019 (WAL 53.4)
ESSAYS | |
“We Ain’t a Christian Outfit”: Protestantism and Secularism in the Formation of the Popular Western Novel | Ben Nadler |
Sounding Silence in Sundown: Survivance Ecology and John Joseph Mathews’s Bildungsroman | April Anson |
The Child and the Latina Immigrant: Reimagining the Southern California Imaginary in Héctor Tobar’s The Barbarian Nurseries | Sarah Ropp |
REVIEWS | |
Robert J. Bertholf and Dale M. Smith, eds., An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson
Robert J. Bertholf and Dale M. Smith, eds., Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson |
Helmbrecht Breinig |
Linda Ray Pratt, Great Plains Literature | Matthew J. C. Cella |
Nathaniel Lewis and Stephen Tatum, Morta Las Vegas: CSI and the Problem of the West | Jeffrey Chisum |
Stacey Peebles, Cormac McCarthy and Performance: Page, Stage, Screen | Nell Sullivan |
Matt Wanat and Leonard Engel, eds., The Films of Clint Eastwood: Critical Perspectives | David Sterritt |
Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border | English Brooks |
Linda M. Hasselstrom, Gathering from the Grassland: A Plains Journal | Mary Clearman Blew |
John Nichols, My Heart Belongs to Nature: A Memoir in Photographs and Prose | Russell Burrows |
Christine Granados, Fight Like a Man and Other Stories We Tell Our Children | Diana Noreen Rivera |
Jonis Agee, The Bones of Paradise | Diane D. Quantic |
Spring 2019 (WAL 54.1)
Special Issue: THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC LANDS IN THE CONTEMPORARY US WEST
Guest Editor: Jennifer Ladino
ESSAYS | |
Introduction: Setting the Stage for Justice: The Politics of Public Lands in the Contemporary US West | Jennifer Ladino |
Revisiting the Radical Middle (What’s Left of It)
|
Stephanie LeMenager and Marsha Weisiger |
“Trespassing in sovereign territory”: Place, Patriarchy, and the Ideology of Public Lands in Longmire | Luke Morgan |
Performing the Empty Archive: Feeling and Public Lands in the Bundy Case and Percival Everett’s Grand Canyon, Inc. | Meagan Meylor |
The President Stole Your Land: Public Lands and the Settler Commons | April Anson
|
#EquityOutdoors: Public Lands and the Decolonial Mediascape | Ashley E. Reis |
REVIEWS | |
Natchee Blu Barnd, Native Space: Geographic Strategies to Unsettle Settler Colonialism | Mika Kennedy |
Michael Snyder, John Joseph Mathews: Life of an Osage Writer | Frances W. Kaye |
Christian Knoeller, Reimagining Environmental History: Ecological Memory in the Wake of Landscape Change | William Barillas |
Jeb Rosebrook, Junior Bonner: The Making of a Classic with Steve McQueen and Sam Peckinpah in the Summer of 1971 | Leonard Engel |
Steven Frye, Understanding Larry McMurtry | John E. Dean |
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, That Guy Wolf Dancing | Kathleen Danker |
Armistead Maupin, Logical Family: A Memoir | Robert Kellerman |
Michael P. Branch, How to Cuss in Western (And Other Missives from the High Desert) | Paul Lindholdt |
Gertrude Skivington, Echevarria | Hank Nuwer |
Summer 2019 (WAL 54.2)
Special Issue: WRITING THE GLOBAL WESTERN: CIRCULATIONS AND TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE AMERICAN WEST IN WORLD LITERATURE
Guest editors: Christopher Conway and David Rio
ESSAYS | |
Introduction: The Case for Transnationalism in the American Literary West | Christopher Conway and David Rio |
What West? Worlding the Western in Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance | Neil Campbell |
Captives on the Frontier: Perla Suez and the Cultural Genealogies of the Argentinian Western | Christopher Conway |
The American West as a Space of Re-Inscription: Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz’s Polish Adaptation of Mayne Reid’s The Headless Horseman | Marek Paryz |
The Norwegian Imagination of the American West as Presented in Louis Masterson’s Morgan Kane | Karoline Aksnes |
A Basque Chronicle of Nine Months in the New West: Bernardo Atxaga’s Nevada Days | David Rio |
Doomed Quests in the Old West: An Interview with Dominique Scali, Author of In Search of New Babylon | Victoria Addis |
REVIEWS | |
Amanda J. Zink, Fictions of Western Domesticity: Indian, Mexican, and Anglo Women in Print Culture, 1850-1950 | Cathryn Halverson |
Priscilla Solis Ybarra, Writing the Goodlife: Mexican American Literature and the Environment | Linda Garcia Merchant |
Gary Scharnhorst, The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years 1835-1871 | Bonney MacDonald |
Anthony Shafton, The Nevada They Knew: Robert Caples and Walter Van Tilburg Clark | Jeffrey Chisum |
Tom Lynch, Susan Naramore Maher, Drucilla Wall, and O. Alan Weltzien, eds., Thinking Continental: Writing the Planet One Place at a Time | John Shoptaw |
Gary Lantz, Heart Stays Country: Meditations from the Southern Flint Hills | Jim Hoy |
Mary Clearman Blew, Ruby Dreams of Janis Joplin | O. Alan Weltzien |
Jeff Metcalf, Back Cast: Fly-Fishing and Other Such Matters | Cory Willard |
Denise Low, The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival | Lisa King |
Fall 2019 (WAL 54.3)
ESSAYS | |
The Other “Others”: The construction of the West in José Mallorquí’s El Coyote | Amaia Ibarrarán-Bigalondo |
Foundational Myths and National Identity in European Transnational Post-Westerns | Jesús Ángel González |
Make Settler Fantasy Strange Again: Unsettling Normative White Masculinity in Robert E. Howard’s Weird West | Travis Franks |
REVIEWS | |
Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Sovereignty: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination | Penelope Kelsey |
Katherine Ann Roberts, West/Border/Road: Nation and Genre in Contemporary Canadian Narrative | Johannes Fehrle |
Amy T. Hamilton, Peregrinations: Walking in American Literature | Beth Boyens |
Charles J. Shields, The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel: John Williams, Stoner, and the Writing Life | John Plotz |
Daniel Davis, Across the Continent: The Union Pacific Photographs of Andrew J. Russell | Emily J. Rau |
Tracy Daugherty, Leaving the Gay Place: Billy Lee Brammer and the Great Society | Don Graham |
Michael K. Johnson, Can’t Stand Still: Taylor Gordon and the Harlem Renaissance | O. Alan Weltzien |
Neil Campbell, ed., Under the Western Sky: Essays on the Fiction and Music of Willy Vlautin | Justin St. Clair |
Winter 2020 (WAL 54.4)
ESSAYS | |
Property and the Ideology of Improvement in María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don and California Travel Narratives | Valerie Sirenko |
Homes On-the-Road, Terrorized Cabins, and Prophetic Nightmare-scapes: Emma J. Ray’s Unsettling Western Fantasies | Shelly Jarenski |
Willa Cather’s Southwestern Grave Robbers | Carolyn Dekker |
REVIEWS | |
Jennifer K. Ladino, Memorials Matter: Emotion, Environment, and Public Memory at American Historical Sites | Teresa Bergman |
Annette Angela Portillo, Sovereign Stories and Blood Memories: Native American Women’s Autobiography | Alicia Cox |
Kyle Bladow and Jennifer Ladino, eds., Affective Ecocriticism | Patrick D. Murphy |
Justin A. Joyce, Gunslinging Justice: The American Culture of Violence in Westerns and the Law | Marek Paryz |
Laura K. Davis and Linda M. Moria, eds., Margaret Laurence & Jack McClelland Letters | Frances W. Kaye |
Kenneth K. Brandt, Jack London | Earle Labor |
Frank Bergon, Two-Buck Chuck and The Marlboro Man: The New Old West | Gregory L. Morris |
Louise O’Connor, Wild Rose: The Life and Times of Victor Marion Rose, Poet and Early Historian of Texas | Sally Ann Schutz |
Don Graham, Giant: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Edna Ferber, and the Making of a Legendary American Film | Daniel Worden |
Edward Lueders, The Salt Lake Papers: From the Years in the Earthscapes of Utah | Shelby E. E. Grauberger |
Kimberly G. Wieser, Texas . . . To Get Horses | Geary Hobson |
Julia Corbett, Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday | John Tallmadge |
Spring 2020 (WAL 55.1)
Carceral Colonialism in Arizona Territory |
Joe Lockard |
Variations of Time: The Crafting of Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs through It” |
George H. Jensen and Heidi Skurat Harris |
Survivalism, the Jeremiad and the Settler Colonial Utopian Imaginary in James Wesley Rawles’s Survivors: A Novel of the Coming Collapse |
Brittany Henry |
REVIEWS | |
Brad Bannon and John Vanderheide, eds., Cormac McCarthy’s Violent Destinies: The Poetics of Determinism and Fatalism |
Nell Sullivan |
Gina Colvin and Joanna Brooks, eds., Decolonizing Mormonism: Approaching a Postcolonial Zion |
Alicia Cox |
Terry Beers, The End of Eden: Agrarian Spaces and the Rise of the California Social Novel |
Lawrence Coates |
Kerry Driscoll, Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples |
Joseph L. Coulombe |
James Maynard, Robert Duncan and the Pragmatist Sublime |
Joshua Hoeynck |
Shaun T. Griffin, Because the Light Will Not Forgive Me: Essays from a Poet |
Bernard Quetchenbach |
Téa Obreht, Inland |
Margaret Doane |
Summer 2020 (WAL 55.2)
Gunshots, Indian Scouts, and Train Robberies: Frontier Mythology in William Dean Howells’ A Hazard of New Fortunes | Margie Judd |
Queering the Waters: The Subversive Potential in E. Pauline Johnson’s Canoe | Kristen Brown |
Pretty Shield’s Thumbprint: Body Politics in Paratextual Territory | Amy Gore |
REVIEWS | |
Sarah D. Wald, David J. Vázquez, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, and Sarah Jaquette Ray, eds., Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial | Regina Marie Mills |
Robert Nichols, Theft Is Property: Dispossession and Critical Theory | Caitlin Simmons |
Peter Quigley, The Forbidden Subject: How Oppositional Aesthetics Banished Natural Beauty from the Arts | David Copland Morris |
Joe Lockard and A. Robert Lee, eds., Louis Owens: Writing Land and Legacy | Raymond Pierotti |
Leslie Miller and Louise Excell, eds., Reimagining a Place for the Wild | James Barilla |
John Gifford, Red Dirt Country: Field Notes and Essays on Nature | Rodney Rice |
Nick Neely, Alta California: From San Diego to San Francisco, A Journey on Foot to Rediscover the Golden State | Alan Weltzien |
Mary Clearman Blew, Sweep Out the Ashes: A Novel | Evelyn Funda |
Rebecca Wigod, He Speaks Volumes: A Biography of George Bowering | Miriam Nichols |
Fall 2020 (WAL 55.3)
Plotting Class: A Marxist Introduction to “Trio” Westerns | Jerry D. Leonard |
“Young America” and the Anti-Emersonian Western: John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing | Anthony Hutchison |
“He’s a ghost. But he’s out there”: Borderlands Science Fiction and the Gothic in No Country for Old Men | Micah K. Donahue |
REVIEWS | |
Dean J. Franco, The Border and the Line: Race, Literature, and Los Angeles | Richard T. Rodríguez |
Guy J. Reynolds, ed. Willa Cather and the Arts | Holly Blackford |
Gary Scharnhorst, The Life of Mark Twain: The Middle Years, 1871-1891 | Nicolas S. Witschi |
Donald Anderson, Below Freezing: Elegy for the Melting Planet | Daryl W. Palmer |
Bernard Quetchenbach, Accidental Gravity: Residents, Travelers, and the
Landscape of Memory |
Ryan McWilliams |
Winter 2021 (WAL 55.4)
History and Bakhtin’s Chronotopes in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop | Molly Metherd |
Pragmatist Individuals and the Nineteenth-Century American West in
Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose and John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing |
Gregory Alan Phipps |
The Metahybrid Environment: Rewilding, Religion, and the Buffalo Commons Novel | Jerome Tharaud |
REVIEWS | |
Cathryn Halverson, Faraway Women and the Atlantic Monthly | Susan Goodman |
Josh Garrett-Davis, What is a Western? Region, Genre, Imagination | Richard Aquila |
Erin Murrah-Mandril, In the Mean Time: Temporal Colonization and the Mexican American Literary Tradition | Guadalupe Escobar |
Miranda A. Green-Barteet and Anne K. Phillips, eds. Reconsidering Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House and Beyond | Cathryn Halverson |
Renée M. Laegreid and Shannon D. Smith, eds. Women in the Writings of Mari Sandoz | Nicole Gray |
Frank Bergon, The Toughest Kid We Knew: The Old New West, a Personal History | Elliott J. Gorn |
Charles Bowden, Dakotah: The Return of the Future | Maria O’Connell |
Jennifer Sinor, Sky Songs: Meditations on Loving a Broken World | Gaynell Gavin |
Spring 2021 (WAL 56.1)
Solitary Walking as Feminist Practice: Mary Austin’s “The Walking Woman” and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild | Nina Bannett |
A Body Without a Story: The Immortal Spectacle in The Ballad of Little Jo | Shelby E. E. Grauberger |
“There Is No Plan B”: Anthropocene Architecture in T. C. Boyle’s The Terranauts | John Schwetman |
REVIEWS | |
Lee Clark Mitchell, Late Westerns: The Persistence of a Genre | Rebecca Trammell Couch |
Justin Farrell, Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West | Maura Bradshaw |
Steven L. Davis, ed., The Essential J. Frank Dobie | William Jensen |
Alan Weltzien, Savage West: The Life and Fiction of Thomas Savage | Paul Lindholdt |
Cherrie Moraga, Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir | Sandra K. Soto |
Joanna Pocock, Surrender: The Call of the American West | Alan Weltzien |
Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem | Deborah A. Miranda |
DJ Lee, Remote: Finding Home in the Bitterroots | Linda Karell |
Posted in TOC | Comments Off on Tables of Contents 2014 to mid-2021
Thursday, June 23rd, 2016
Libraries that would like to subscribe to Western American Literature directly through the Western Literature Association may do so right here. The higher rate for non-US mailing addresses is due to international mailing rates.
Prices are for the print edition. We do not offer an online edition through this website. Claims for missed issues should be submitted within 6 months. Refunds for cancellations cannot be processed.
Your subscription will start with the current issue and include 4 issues of the journal. Please be aware that our volume year does not coincide with the calendar year. The issues for 2020, for instance, are issues 54.4, 55.1, 55.2, and 55.3. If you’d like to start with a specific issue, please be sure to put a note in the “Note to Merchant” once you get to PayPal or to send an email in advance.
If you have any questions, please contact Sabine Barcatta, Director of Operations.
Tags: institutional subscriptions, journal rates
Posted in WAL | Comments Off on Institutional Subscriptions
Friday, June 12th, 2015
Note: To be eligible for this award, you must be registered as a graduate student at your institution at the time of the awards ceremony. And the award can only be received once.
Year | Recipient |
---|---|
2022 | Dylan Couch, University of Idaho |
2022 | Cara Schwartz, University of Saskatchewan |
2021 | Sarah Jane Kerwin, University of Michigan—Ann Arbor |
2020 | Sarah Nolan, University of Southern California |
2020 | Renee Sprinkle, West Texas A&M University |
2019 | Maria Alberto, University of Utah |
2019 | Travis Franks, Arizona State University |
2018 | Meagan Meylor, University of Southern California |
2018 | Amanda Monteleone, University of Texas at Arlington |
2017 | April Anson |
2017 | Lisa Fink |
2016 | Amy Gore |
2016 | Michael Olausen |
2015 | William V. Lombardi |
2015 | Michael P. Taylor |
2014 | Brittany Henry |
2014 | Lisa Locascio |
2014 | Ashley Reis |
Posted in Grad Students, WLA Awards | Comments Off on The Dorys Crow Grover Awards
Monday, April 6th, 2015
Note: This award will be given in 2023.
Most years, the Western Literature Association and the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies are sponsoring up to two K-12 Teaching Awards that will provide teachers with the opportunity to attend and present at the Western Literature Association Annual Meeting.
The prize then includes conference registration, an award banquet ticket, a WLA membership, and $700 cash toward conference related costs such as hotel and airfare. Prize winners must attend the WLA conference and present on the WLA/Redd Center K-12 Educator Prize panel on Saturday. Continuing Education credit may be available. Please check with your district’s professional development office.
• Resumé
• Instructional Plan (K-12, any level)
• Teaching Statement (how the Instructional Plan contributes to your teaching goals)
• One letter of support (from principal, administrator, or colleague)
Instructional plans may focus on any author or theme related to the literature of the American West, broadly defined. We encourage teachers to submit their new and existing teaching ideas. The following topics and approaches are encouraged:
Instructional Plans should be based on a focused 2-4-week unit on a specific theme, author, work of literature, etc. You do not need to include daily lesson plans, but you may submit supplemental discussion questions, assignment sheets, etc. The provided instructional plan format is very flexible and just a guideline. You are welcome to develop a format and structure that applies to your teaching and classroom context and grade level.
Award details, including the instructional plan format and scoring rubric, can be downloaded by clicking on the links.
All applicants for the prize will be sent a written release that allows the WLA and the Charles Redd Center to post your lesson plans on their websites and to possibly include your lesson plans in other publications. Your work will remain your own and you will be given appropriate citation and credit in any digital or print reproductions of your work. The release must be signed and returned for you to be eligible to win the prize.
2019:
Katharine Amber Anthony, Palo Duro High School, Amarillo Independent School District, TX, “Establishing Roots: Place-Based Learning in a Multicultural, Title I High School”
2018:
Nathan Parker, Holland Hall School, Tulsa, OK, “Teaching Plains Writer Susan Glaspell’s ‘A Jury of Her Peers’”
2017:
Jennifer Kawecki and Hakan Armagan, Burke High School, Omaha, NE, “My Land, Our Land: Exploring the Ethics of Energy Policy, Consumption, and Sustainability Using Aldo Leopold’s ‘The Land Ethic’,” a cooperative effort by an English and a physics teacher.
2016:
Hali Kirby, Gardiner Public Schools, Gardiner, MT, “‘Letters from Yellowstone’: Stories of Women Scientists in Yellowstone National Park”
2015:
Tom McGuire, Santa Cruz Catholic School, Austin, TX, “The Forgotten Role of Native Americans in the Texas Revolution”
Jamie Crosswhite, Canyon High School, Canyon, TX, “Identity through Place”
Cheryl Hughes, Sentinel High School, Missoula, MT, “Using Service Learning and Oral History Projects to Teach Indian Creek Chronicles by Pete Fromm”
**********
Tags: k-12, teaching prize, WLA Conference participation
Posted in WLA Awards | Comments Off on WLA/Charles Redd Center K-12 Teaching Awards
Monday, February 3rd, 2014
The WLA is interested in exchanging ideas with other organizations. Below is a list of existing affiliations. Generally, this means that WLA members present a panel at the affiliate’s conference and vice versa. Please look for CFPs either here or on our NEWS page. If you are interested in participating in a WLA-panel at another conference, please contact the liaison for that particular conference. You must be a WLA member at the time of the conference, to participate in a WLA-sponsored panel.
As of 2010, the Western Literature Association has affiliate status with the Modern Language Association. What does this mean for WLA? This affiliate status guarantees the WLA to be able to present a panel at each MLA Conference. The first such panel was presented during the 2011 MLA Conference in Los Angeles, California.
The next MLA convention will take place in Vancouver, Canada, January 8-11, 2015. If you are interested in participating in a WLA panel, please contact Elisabeth Bayley.
In continuation of the Western Literature Association 2014 conference theme, we welcome any papers on the literatures of the North American West: possible topics include, border crossings broadly interpreted, first nations/Native American writing, depictions of the cowgirl/cowboy, the storyteller, and settings/ecocritical depictions or interpretations of western writing.
The WLA is one of the affiliated organizations in the American Literature Association’s “coalition of societies devoted to the study of American authors” <http://americanliteratureassociation.org>. Since 1989, the ALA has convened on the weekend prior to Memorial Day for its annual conference, with the location alternating between the East Coast in odd-numbered years and the West Coast in even-numbered years. Most of the conference revolves around panel presentations/sessions organized by the various member societies; as an affiliated society, the WLA has the option of presenting two sessions at the western meetings and one session at the eastern meetings.
Calls for proposals are initially made and discussed at the WLA’s business meeting, held each fall at the conclusion of the annual WLA conference. Subsequent calls for proposals are distributed via various online modes of communication, including both the WLA and ALA websites. The WLA’s liaison to the ALA is appointed by the WLA Executive Secretary, and the chief duties of the liaison consist of issuing the calls for proposals, organizing the conference sessions and communicating the final details of them to the organizers of the ALA, and when possible attending the meeting of society liaisons at the ALA conference.
The current WLA liaison is Nicolas Witschi at Western Michigan University.
ASLE was established at the annual WLA conference in 1992, and the two organizations continue to share common membership, with each organization regularly well represented at the other’s conference. In 2011, the two organizations entered affiliate status. The WLA liaison is appointed for a 3-year term.
ASLE conferences are organized every other year (in odd years). The next conference will be held June 23-27, 2015, in Moscow, Idaho. The call for proposals will be posted in the summer of 2014.
If you have any questions or would like to participate in a WLA-sponsored panel, please contact our liaison to ASLE, William V. Lombardi.
Posted in news | Comments Off on WLA and Its Affiliations
Friday, November 19th, 2010
During the year 2000, Western American Literature asked readers to nominate a notable novel published since 1990. This list of “not-to-be-missed works of contemporary fiction of the American West” was a chance for all readers to recognize and applaud recent novels in the field. Rather than thinking only in terms of absolutes—a kind of “Best West” list—we asked readers to nominate books they think might be the subject of future scholarship in the field, as well as books notable enough to recommend to colleagues looking for the right contemporary novel to add to a syllabus or to offer to a friend just looking for a “good read.” The results are listed below, arranged alphabetically by the novelist’s last name. The response to the call for nominations was not overwhelming, but the modest list that did result was interesting nevertheless. Happy reading!
—Evelyn I. Funda, Utah State University, Logan
Strange Angels. By Jonis Agee. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993. $12.00.
Agee is the most prolific of the recent Great Plains novelists that includes Kent Haruf, Dan O’Brien, Douglas Unger, Ron Hansen, and, in Canada, Sharon Butala, but while these latter writers, with the exception of Butala, have produced one or two fine fictional treatments of the region, Agee produces stories and novels at a steady clip. Recently, she joined the faculty in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, where, we can hope, she will continue to focus her fictional attention on the people who populate the small towns and rural reaches of the Great Plains.
Strange Angels is set in the Nebraska Sandhills made familiar by Mari Sandoz, and like Sandoz’s family in Old Jules, the children in Agee’s Bennet family must come to terms with their father’s legacy, left to each in equal measure. Agee creates characters who see themselves as losers and throw-aways while revealing strengths and sympathies the reader comes to admire. The Bennet children’s lives are intricately connected with each other, with the other complex and colorful characters in their ranching community, and with the land that, as in any good western work, is an important character in her novel.
—Diane Quantic, Wichita State University
The Temptations of St. Ed & Brother S. By Frank Bergon. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1993. $22.00.
Frank Bergon knows his Nevada, and the characters and issues so sharply defined in this novel will resonate with Westerners especially. The battle for the book’s fictional Shoshone Mountain, the site of a proposed nuclear waste dump, becomes a reflection of the battle going on in the souls of the modern monks St. Ed and Brother S in their struggles with the temptations of this world. Backed by an assortment of Native American activists, Desert Rats, a BLM ranger, and drop-out kids, the monks find themselves up against talk-show hosts, technicians, and the cool and scary bureaucrats of the Department of Energy, with their vacant materialism, loveless view of sexuality, and destructive ideas of power. The outcome is inconclusive, but the book holds out the possibility of other kinds of power and knowledge, which are represented not by the nuclear clouds of the technocrats but by the mystics’ Cloud of Unknowing and the ancient energy of the sun. This is a comic novel in the great tradition.
—Zeese Papanikolas, San Francisco Art Institute
Wild Game. By Frank Bergon. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1995. $22.00.
Frank Bergon is a writer intensely concerned with the contemporary West, and in particular with Nevada, and in Wild Game he weaves together a number of issues that help describe the modern western condition.
Based loosely upon the story of Claude Dallas, Wild Game follows the pursuit of a modern-day, self-fashioned mountain man by an all-too-human, all-too-male Nevada state wildlife biologist, Jack Iragaray. Iragaray is a man powerfully shaped by certain masculine myths and mythologies of the West, as well as by his own Basque heritage. Bergon brings these several forces to bear upon his character and upon his greater narrative; as he does so, he interrogates the very western history which has, in many ways, produced both the pursued and the pursuer in his novel. Writing in a realistic mode, Bergon manages to comment insightfully upon both the past and the present; he also points to ways in which some of the contemporary dilemmas facing the American West might be approached, if not solved.
—Gregory L. Morris, Penn State Erie, Behrend College
When We Were Wolves. By Jon Billman. New York: Random, 1999. $21.95.
Jon Billman’s debut collection, When We Were Wolves, features stories set exclusively in the contemporary West, mostly Wyoming and South Dakota. The book received immediate praise from Pulitzer prize winners Annie Proulx and Larry McMurtry, and also from Rick Bass. McMurtry later used one of Billman’s stories in his new anthology of western stories, Still Wild (2000). Billman, who calls Wyoming home, covers a broad range of western issues in his various stories: dustbowl-era baseball, fighting forest fires, crop dusting, religious conflicts with the Mormon church, and history—from George Custer and Jim Bridger to present-day politics. The stories are witty and, at turns, heart-breaking.
—Twister Marquiss, Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos
Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. By Sandra Cisneros. New York: Vintage, 1991. $11.00.
Sandra Cisneros’s is a richly textured exploration about sustaining identity in the American West. You get a diversity of voices here—male, female, contemporary, and historical. The stories weave myth, history, language, and popular culture to acknowledge the complexity and the beauty of western American and Mexican American experience.
—Gioia Woods, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff
The Blossom Festival. By Lawrence Coates. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1999. $20.00.
Lawrence Coates, who teaches at Southern Utah University, was chosen as a Great New Writer by Barnes & Noble, and the novel—Lawrence’s first— was in its third printing by mid-December of 1999. It was chosen as a book of the year by the Southern California Booksellers Association, as the leading fiction by a Utah writer for 1999, and has won a prestigious WESTAF award. I am daring to nominate a book that I acquired for our press not only because it meets your criteria so well, but because it was very hard for me to get it published, and I am delighted that this first book by a very promising author has been so well received. It’s at the top of my “good read” list of recommendations, and I have bought copies for a number of my friends.
The Blossom Festival is a richly panoramic chronicle of rural life in the Santa Clara Valley during the decades before World War II. Against the lush backdrop of literally millions of fruit trees unfold the personal dramas of a fascinating cast of characters.
Young Harold Madison, taking a page from his own father’s book, seduces and abandons Betsy Moreberg, whose tyrannical father, a successful home builder, packs her off to bear her illegitimate child at a distance. The boy, Peter, returns when his mother agrees to marry Steen Denisen, an ambitious immigrant who wants Betsy’s father’s business as well as Betsy. Steen seeks nothing better than to bulldoze thousands of fruit trees to make way for new homes as little San Natoma becomes a bedroom community for San Jose, and the land-rich father of Olivia and Albin Roberts must sell prime orchards to keep his family afloat during the depression.
As Peter struggles with his harsh stepfather, he becomes fascinated with Olivia, who has always wanted to star in the annual Blossom Festival, the traditional spring pageant that heralds the new growing season. Olivia has befriended Fumiko Yamamoto, the nisei daughter of Japanese fruit growers, and they make grand plans for their lives following high school graduation. The rancorous politics of race and the palpable presence of the overseas war conspire to mar the Blossom Festival of 1940, however, and the friends will scatter, Fumiko’s family to a Japanese relocation camp.
The Blossom Festival is an honest rendering of the complex relationships between parents and children in the changing context of a rich region of California that is leaving behind its agricultural past to become Silicon Valley.
—Trudy McMurrin, Acquiring Editor, University of Nevada Press, Las Vegas
Ride with Me, Mariah Montana. By Ivan Doig. New York: Atheneum, 1990. $14.00.
The third in Ivan Doig’s series of Montana novels about the McCaskill family, Ride with Me, Mariah Montana takes place during Montana’s centennial year, 1989. Sixty-five-year-old Jick McCaskill tells about his travels throughout Montana as “chaperon” to his grown daughter, Mariah, and her ex-husband, Riley Wright. The young divorced journalists both work for the same Missoula newspaper, he as a reporter, she as a photographer; and their editor has told them to drive around Montana to find subjects suitable for the paper’s series on the state’s centennial. Using this picaresque set-up gives Doig the chance to touch on dozens of subjects that show how Montana’s past has shaped its present. Ride with Me (which Doig dedicated to Wallace Stegner) mirrors Stegner’s Angle of Repose, since both novels show how the past provides benchmarks that allow us to gauge how well we’re weathering the pervasive changes that, with all the force of a Montana blizzard, batter our cultural and moral moorings. Moreover, the ending of Ride with Me illustrates Doig’s belief that Westerners can find ways to save the land they love. He builds effectively on the West’s literary tradition while also pointing the way to a postfrontier future.
—James H. Maguire, Boise State University
The Meadow. By James Galvin. New York: Henry Holt, 1992. $12.00.
The paperback edition of James Galvin’s The Meadow carries a quote from Bill Kittredge on its cover: “A masterpiece. The Meadow is one of the best books ever written about the American West.” I agree wholeheartedly. Told through shifting perspectives and points of view, Galvin’s novel tells of a single western landscape and of the generations who worked to make this inhospitable environment into a home. “Who does the meadow belong to?” one character wonders. “No one owns it, no one ever will,” is the authorial reply. With his own voice and a complex of others, Galvin examines the profound dilemma of western settlement, where the land has always been a presence more powerful than the men and women seeking to tame it. Even as he addresses significant issues of land use and of human interaction, Galvin does so with compelling characterizations and with a poetic prose that evokes a keenly imagined setting and scene. The Meadow is indeed a masterpiece. It reads well; it teaches well; it has that indefinable quality that brings a reader back to a text again and again. In my opinion, The Meadow should top any list of contemporary western fiction.
—Ann Ronald, University of Nevada, Reno
Plainsong. By Kent Haruf. New York: Knopf, 1999. $24.00.
I am nominating Plainsong, an extraordinary novel. It falls within the tradition of American regional fiction, set in an absolutely authentic high plains town in eastern Colorado. The stories of the seven main characters weave together and reveal the soul of a community, in a language that is spare and lovely. Plainsong is a fully realized work of art.
—Lawrence Coates, Southern Utah University, Cedar City
[Note: Plainsong was also suggested by George F. Day and Susan J. Rosowski.]
Remember Me. By Laura Hendrie. New York: Henry Holt, 1999. $24.00.
Wallace Stegner rejected western myths about romantic loners on a boundless frontier and perceived survival as dependent not on self-reliance but on the cooperation of neighbors. Laura Hendrie’s first novel, set in the tiny town of Queduro in northern New Mexico, where she lives, not only affirms Stegner’s thesis but also takes aim against a contemporary national malaise, the inability to become attached to anything. In a story that pits an individual against society, she wisely leaves room for the embroidery of belonging, identity, and love. Her voice is tough and tender, skeptical and cheerful.
Rose Devonic, a twenty-nine-year-old outcast, struggles to win respect from lifelong neighbors who have treated her with brutal indifference. Having lost home and family, she lives in an abandoned motel or out of her car, but she, like most others in Queduro, earns a living selling traditional embroidery and is thus an insider, not easily put down. “When it comes to love,” she says, “most people don’t even want to see the real thing.” She is determined to face such people down and the ghosts of the past that have alienated them. Authentically western, Remember Me acknowledges the possibility of alienation—and says to hell with it.
Hendrie’s story collection Stygo won the Rosenthal Foundation Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Mountain and Plains Regional Booksellers’ Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award.
—Alexander Blackburn, Colorado Springs, Colorado
Liar’s Moon: A Long Story. By Philip Kimball. New York: Henry Holt, 1999. $23.00.
I want to nominate Philip Kimball, a little-known Kansas-based writer of rare power and talent, whose Liar’s Moon: A Long Story is a grand and mythic story of the settling of Kansas during and after the Civil War, when former slaves, cattle drovers, immigrating farmers, and Indians came together in a complex swirl up and down the Great Plains. The action takes place from about 1852 to 1890 when Wounded Knee marked the subduing of the West. Kids falling off the wagon being raised by coyotes, white children being captured and adopted by Indians, Buffalo Bill recruiting cowboys, Indians, and adventurers to be part of his wild west show, politics, and, oh yes, the loss of innocence—this novel has it all. It is an original tall tale pieced together from folklore and history, a wonderfully entertaining fiction. His first novel, published in 1984, Harvesting Ballads, is actually the second book in his planned trilogy about the Great Plains, Liar’s Moon being the first.
—Theodore C. Humphrey, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
Green Grass, Running Water. By Tom King. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. $21.95/ New York: Bantam, 1994. $11.95.
Green Grass, Running Water by Cherokee author Thomas King is a comic, postmodern novel that satirizes sacred texts of the dominant North American culture from the Bible to the Lone Ranger from an indigenous point of view. It is also a story about identity, representation, exploitation of natural resources, heroes, heroines, and scapegoats using wordplay and a trickster’s sense of language. Coyote and four old Indians from the indigenous, oral tradition escape from their “prison” where they are held by The Word in the body of a psychiatrist named Joe Hovaugh. On their journey they assist their grandchildren from the Blackfoot nation in setting the world back in balance. The narrative is an epic word war for the rights to tell the real story of North America. As the human characters live their stories and the mythic characters retell theirs, Canadian and U.S. history and literature are reconstructed in terms of indigenous witnesses and storytellers from the past and the present.
—Melissa Hearn, Northern Michigan University, Marquette
Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water is an ambitious book that takes on pressing issues that are currently of concern to the fields of western American literature and American Indian studies. Postmodernist narrative strategies meet tricksterism head-on as four Indian escapees—aptly named Ishmael, the Lone Ranger, Robinson Crusoe, and Hawkeye—make their way to the Canadian town of Blossom near the Blackfoot Indian Reserve where they set about fixing things that seem wrong. Elements that need to be reworked here include the master narrative of westward expansion, the clichéd endings of classic Hollywood Westerns, romantic plot devices, and white myths of Indian identity. King’s novel is a complicated but entertaining text that examines issues of politics, knowledge, identity, narrative, and power. Green Grass, Running Water is also a favorite among students.
—Susan Kollin, Montana State University, Bozeman
Animal Dreams. By Barbara Kingsolver. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991. $14.00.
Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams is a favorite of mine. Among the many things that I like about the novel is the bond between the sisters—the older, Cosima (Codi), and the younger, Halimeda (Hallie). An adult Codi returns to her home of Grace, Arizona, after fourteen years because their father, Dr. Homer Noline, seems to be suffering from senility. Codi, with her punk-rocker haircut and stylish shoes, accepts a job at the high school, having abruptly terminated her medical career. Meanwhile, Hallie, who recently gave up her job as a pest-control expert at the local extension office, is heading toward war-torn Nicaragua to help the farmers. Without a mother, the girls are intensely close, and Codi, reluctant to see Hallie head toward the dangers in Nicaragua, savors her last call before Hallie crosses the border; Codi “just stood still for a minute, giving Hallie’s and my thoughts their last chance to run quietly over the wires, touching each other in secret signals as they pass, like a column of ants.” I feel the connection between Codi and Hallie is tangible. Kingsolver gives us multiple points of view; Codi tells her own story in first-person narration, Doc Homer’s is told from third-person perspective, and Hallie’s is revealed in her letters to Codi. This is a rich, satisfying read.
—Elizabeth A. Turner, William Rainey Harper College, Palatine, Illinois
Man from the Creeks: A Novel. By Robert Kroetsch. Toronto: Random House of Canada. Out of Print.
Robert Kroetsch’s Man from the Creeks might be his best novel. It begins with the Robert Service poem “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and goes from there, as only Kroetsch can, into flights of gorgeous language and tall tale at once.
—Anne Kaufman, Sidwell Friends School, Washington, D.C.
Mother Tongue. By Demetria Martinez. New York: Ballantine, 1997. $12.00.
For those not dissuaded by the brutal history of the Americas fictionally recrafted by Leslie Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1992), Demetria Martinez’s Mother Tongue offers a fresh depiction of survivors of Central American atrocities and their North American allies. Salved by the passage of time and the curative powers of remembering and storytelling, Martinez’s novel dissolves much of the brittle ironic distance found in Silko’s text. Martinez successfully “break[s] a few hearts . . . [and] make[s] people look ugliness in the face.” But she also successfully humanizes her protagonist, Maria, depicting her realization that her “heart needed to be broken and reset properly so it could carry her through life.”
Mother Tongue is narrated by Maria, who recounts her experiences as a nineteen-year-old, Mexican American Albuquerquean coming to consciousness while serving the 1980s sanctuary movement. Into this narrative, Martinez weaves the voices of Maria’s lover, José Luis Romero, a Salvadoran refugee; her wizened godmother, Solédad; Amnesty Internationalesque “Urgent Action” documents; reactionary U.S. newspaper articles; and her unfocused, idealistic son. This polyphony disrupts Maria’s romanticized depictions of her lover, just as it radically undermines the media misrepresentations of U.S.-supported El Salvadoran military repression.
Revealing Martinez’s poet’s eye and pen, Maria’s narrative is frequently overwrought. Yet her decadent metaphors are tempered by Solédad’s “words short and fiery as fuses” and by Maria’s self-consciousness regarding the limited ability of memory and words to represent reality. Martinez also creates tension between Maria’s dilettantish dabbling in a heady pastiche of Eastern religions and psychobabble and José Luis’s grounded experience of liberation theology: stating that “when a refugee told his or her story, it was not psychoanlysis, it was testimonio, story as prophecy, facts assembled to change not the self but the times.” Having partially healed “invisible wounds” inflicted amidst North American privilege, Maria jealously confesses that her wounds were “not on the same scale as death squads and disappearances. . . . [But] I keep feeling like it’s all part of the same pattern. Of people loving power, or some such thing, more than life.” Through passages such as this, Martinez’s novel reminds us of the limited powers of witnessing and of oppressive historical forces that love can transcend. Almost.
—Matt Burkhart, Utah State University, Logan
The Crossing. By Cormac McCarthy. New York: Random House, 1994. $13.00.
OK, I’ll bite. As I think over this quasi-delicate problem of selection, at least two things come to mind. One is to think seriously about whether any fiction of the American West in the past decade has literally brought me to tears—you know, simply made me cry. The other thing is that in a dominant surveillance culture so invested, to paraphrase Dave Hickey, in parenting us all into early senility, I would like to wander around on occasion in excess, in risky business. Now this particular desire of course might also bring one to tears, if not also to candidacy in a twelve-step or witness protection program. But in terms of western fiction of the last decade where, among other things, excess is courted and where one might also be brought to tears, there’s just one book for me that will never get voted off the mesa: Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing.
In terms of “excess,” this novel—unlike All the Pretty Horses—does not foreground a straightforward linear quest plot, and its prose delivers some of the greatest action sequences and philosophical monologues in verbal registers resonant of Hemingway and Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor at their best. The journeys and the issues confronted and worked through are quite simply immense: love and fraternity, kinship and justice, the elusiveness of mastery and the mystery of death. Billy Parham’s eventual border crossing to locate stolen horses or his [dead] brother is in some way about the integrity of the family, which is always threatened in McCarthy’s world. But such crossings and the violence in McCarthy’s work are really more about the very style of the endeavor, the way things are done in the world to establish and then forward values. And while a certain etiquette of violence links McCarthy’s work with Wister’s The Virginian, here old Dad is no longer at the head of the table and the deal thus comes down to improvisatory competency and collaboration, the ethics of emergent tasks which, at times, miraculously bind people together in the face of all odds. And in terms of tears, the combination of beauty and terror rendered by McCarthy in the novel’s opening section as Billy tries to return a captured wolf to its homeland in Mexico is just overwhelming, too much to bear, really. McCarthy is dangerous, for this novel just refuses to be burdened by its larger culture’s nostalgia and its avoidance of all things which just might produce really raw emotions. So for me there’s The Crossing. All the rest is journalism and infomercials. (Well, there IS this new novel by James Welch…)
—Steve Tatum, University of Utah, Salt Lake City
My Year of Meats. By Ruth L. Ozeki. New York: Viking, 1999. $12.95.
Wouldn’t you like the recipe for meatloaf made with a half gallon of Pepsi—not Coke, has to be Pepsi. (Is this one of those deep hidden literary allusions? To John Belushi on SNL in the 1970s?) Or beef fudge? By far the funniest book I’ve read in the past couple of years is My Year of Meats, by Ruth L. Ozeki, a kind of postmodern and multinational The Jungle. Japanese American documentary filmmaker Jane Takagi-Little is hired by a Japanese advertising agency representing a beef lobbying group to produce and direct a show for Japanese TV entitled “My American Wife.” “Meat is the Message.” Throughout the novel she receives faxes from her Japanese boss (John Ueno, pronounced, he says, Wayno) with instructions like the following list of “DESIRABLE THINGS” her “American Wives” should possess:
1. Attractiveness, wholesomeness, warm personality
2. Delicious meat recipe (NOTE: Pork and other meats is second class meats, so please remember this easy motto: “Pork is Possible, but Beef is Best!”)
3. Attractive, docile husband
4. Attractive, obedient children
5. Attractive, wholesome lifestyle
6. Attractive, clean house
Initially gung ho, Jane becomes increasingly critical as she finds out more about meat production and packing, and soon she begins to focus shows on subversive “unattractive”—perhaps even disobedient—subjects. Like the videotaped shows and the faxes, the novel moves back and forth between the United States and Japan, exposing the effects of global capitalism with humor and outrage. Japanese readers might find Ozeki’s critiques of Japanese men, marketing, and media too heavy-handed, but she’s equally sharp and cynical about Americans, and her book shows an awareness of class issues too often lacking in current fiction. Ozeki can’t avoid a fantasy feminist ending, but her wit, cleverness, and social satire make My Year of Meats a great read.
—Melody Graulich, Utah State University, Logan
Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. By Tom Robbins. New York: Bantam Books, 1995. $12.95.
Global markets, cancer gurus, missing amphibians, loose monkeys, and the safe sex rapist all converge one rain-soaked Seattle weekend and transform lives in Robbins’s comic econovel. A work of antic wildness, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas proves one can approach a serious subject like environmental catastrophe with quick wit, satiric vision, and humor that hits high and low. Robbins has been curiously ignored by scholars of western American literature, though his demythologized western settings, inventive narrative, and virtuosic style place him among the finest of “New West” novelists. Seattle is a New Western urban space, posteverything (postmodern, postindustrial, posthip) and globally, even galactically connected. As a place of transience, it provides the kinds of confusion and diffusion Robbins sees as necessary conditions of change. Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas is part polemic, part romance, part satire, and part spiritual tract. Blurring all kinds of distinctions, including species boundaries, Robbins has created a unique narrative that stays with one and remains a memorable artifact of a tumultuous decade.
—Susan Naramore Maher, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Diamond Trump: Events Surrounding the Great Powder-House Blowup by the Man Who Lit the Fuse. By Ron Robinson. Sioux Falls, S.D.: Ex Machina, 2000. $l9.95.
You can’t help but like Raymond G. “Preacher” Hardokker, the reluctant safecracker who lit the fuse in Ron Robinson’s latest suspense novel Diamond Trump. You have to pull for a man who is trying to go square, especially when every step he takes carries him deeper into a deadly quagmire of underworld intrigue and he ends up with a gun at his head and a match in his hand and half the dynamite in South Dakota at his feet.
And if you pull hard enough and can read the signs, you may track Preacher all the way from prison to “the whole truth” that the shot-down and blown-up powder-house woman never told the authorities in those days after the blast. One truth, most assuredly, is that the 1930s in Siouxland had no more cataclysmic event than the l936 New Year’s detonation of the Larson Hardware powder-house east of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. But the whole truth is that the 1990s in Siouxland had no more startling revelation than the story behind the blast, buried until now in the notes of Argus Leader reporter Alice Marie Sutherland.
In Diamond Trump Robinson has produced a prize winner, a tale of suspense with one of the most intriguing yet disturbing endings in American fiction.
—Arthur R. Huseboe, Augustana College, Sioux Falls, South Dakota
A Thousand Acres. By Jane Smiley. New York: Ballantine, 1991. $12.00.
The Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award might alone be enough to recommend this novel about the struggle between the three Cook daughters and their father as they work a thousand-acre farm. Although it has been tauted as an Iowa remake of Shakespeare’s King Lear (even more so since the Jessica Lange-Michelle Pfeiffer film), the book defies simplistic pigeon-holing, and I recommend it because I see Smiley writing a novel that eloquently questions the land ethic so central to western American literature, the myth that, no matter what, the relationship between land and humans remains sacred, inviolable, and beneficial to the human. By writing a book focused on the poisoning of land (which, in turn, poisons everything else: morality, relationships, body, and spirit), Smiley creates a novel that is painful to read, but one that is profound and courageous.
—Evelyn I. Funda, Utah State University, Logan
The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton. By Jane Smiley. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. $12.00
From the beginning of her story, Lidie Newton is a charming and engrossing narrator. She admits she’s plain, still unmarried, and therefore, “an odd lot, not very salable, and ready to be marked down.” Even the most sympathetic reader must admit, as Lidie sits near an upstairs floor grate simultaneously eavesdropping on her sisters and hiding from housework, that she is a flake.
Lidie soon stumbles into marriage with Thomas Newton, an abolitionist, and moves with him to Kansas, a hotly contested territory in the 1850s slavery debate. And that’s when the story really gets good. There are plenty of novels with plucky first-person narrators. But the real joy here is that Lidie grows and develops, and her perspective on life goes beyond clever ploys to evade womanly duties.
Jane Smiley succeeds in making politics fascinating. She also confidently crisscrosses her character through the era’s classes and regions. Lidie encounters slaves, slave owners, abolitionists, political activists, uneducated ruffians, rich people and poor ones, finding points of identification and empathy among all of them. For example, her happiness over her own husband’s safety sours when she thinks of another wife’s loss: “I thought of Mrs. Brown, who seemed, in my mind, to be myself in a different dress.” Lidie’s adventures take her through every social stratum. She even spends time disguised as a young man.
The book’s format makes it a fun read. Chapters have titles like “I Eaves-drop, and Hear Ill of Myself” and “I Sully My Character.” Jane Smiley makes her fictional Lidie Newton a former student at the real-life Miss Catharine Beecher’s “Hartford Female Seminary” and includes snippets from Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and at School (1841). Lidie tries to pattern her life after the advice in her tattered copy of Miss Beecher’s manual. Where Miss Beecher’s advice falls short, Lidie finds ways to forge ahead. Her story is enjoyable and honest.
—Angela Ashurst-McGee, Mesa, Arizona
A Deeper Wild. A Novel. By William L. Sullivan. Eugene, Oreg.: Navillus Press, 2000. $18.95.
At last there is a “cracking good” novel based on the life of Joaquin Miller (1839/41?1913) whom William Everson has called “the creator of the ‘Western Archetype.’” A Deeper Wild by William L. Sullivan is so far the most engaging and nearly factually correct interpretation of Miller’s experiences in the gold fields and in matrimony. Sullivan graciously provides the reader with chapter notes delineating the facts from his fiction. Fortunately, Sullivan has hiked and written of much of the country covered by Miller in his day, and so Sullivan brings a fresh new approach to interpreting the much maligned and misreported life of Joaquin Miller, author of Life amongst the Modocs (1873), which Malcolm Margolin says “still has the power to catch us and move us as no other work of this era can.”
—Margaret Guilford-Kardell, Editor, Joaquin Miller Newsletter
The Englishman’s Boy. By Guy Vanderhaeghe. New York: St. Martin, 1996. $14.00.
My nomination for the list is Guy Vanderhaeghe’s The Englishman’s Boy, a 1996 historical novel that brilliantly interleaves the history of the Cypress Hills massacre of Assiniboine by U.S. wolfers in 1873—one of the formative events for the North West Mounted Police—with a fictional rendering of Hollywood’s fixation with Westerns during the 1920s. A story remiscent in some ways of The Great Gatsby, Vanderhaeghe’s is a postmodern meditation on western mythologizing. The book won Canada’s Govenor-General’s Award for Fiction in 1996.
—Robert Thacker, St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York
Restlessness: A Novel. By Aritha van Herk. Red Deer, Alberta: Red Deer College Press, 1998. $14.98.
Aritha van Herk’s novel Restlessness is set in Calgary (and almost entirely in the Palliser Hotel). Its protagonist is a nameless woman who has hired an assassin to end her life. The novel continues van Herk’s explorations of story/ language/voice/gender and, of course, genre and form. A number of her earlier novels have taken some critical heat for the mix of genres but this one, I think, shows most clearly the power of challenging established notions of order.
—Anne Kaufman, Sidwell Friends School, Washington, D.C.
La Maravilla. By Alfredo Véa Jr. New York: Penguin, Plume, 1993. $13.95.
Imagine a place inhabited by an aristocratic Spanish-Catholic curandera, Yaqui Indians, Blacks, Whites, Chicanos, Okies, Arkies, and Asians; a place of juke joints, transvestites, prostitutes, and the ghosts of wandering hoboes; a place where the pious and sinful alike can run their extension cords to draw electricity from the Mighty Clouds of Joy Church; a place where an enormous feast can bring them all together for “history you can eat.” Such was the sort of world in which Alfredo Véa grew up during the 1950s, and such is the world that he brings to life again in this at once comic, tragic, and magical novel about a squatter settlement located to the east of Phoenix, in the city’s “unofficial trash heap.” Centered largely on the experiences of young Beto, grandson to the curandera and her Yaqui husband, La Maravilla explores the ways in which the people of “Buckeye Road” are sustained in their passions, fears, and relationships. Much more than just an evocative memoir, this highly significant reworking of Chicano literary tradition weaves together most, if not all, of the variegated cultural forces and identities that converge in the American West, and it does so in a richly textured style that supports the alternately mystical and material conditions at the heart of Beto’s initiation into community.
—Nicolas Witschi, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo
Montana 1948. By Larry Watson. New York: Pocket, 1993. $12.00.
My entry for the contemporary fiction would be Larry Watson’s Montana 1948 because it tells an accessible, intelligent story about the New West and about the very way that history is “told,” “written,” and “remembered.” Its deceptively simple style belies the complex range of ideas that the novel addresses: borders, white-Indian relations, gender issues, family loyalties and jealousies, growing up. Above all, it is a book that makes me think about the nature of history and how in the West it has been the product of myth and of “post mortem cover ups” (as Watson terms it). However, as the novel also shows, it is often easier to run with the myth than have to deconstruct it and offer some convincing alternative in its place.
—Neil Campbell, University of Derby, Great Britain
Posted in wal-research | Comments Off on Reading Suggestions (for “Not-to-Be-Missed Contemporary Fiction of the American West,” 1990-2000)
Thursday, November 18th, 2010
WESTERN AMERICAN LITERATURE
Spring 2010 (vol. 45, no. 1)
ESSAYS | |
Locating the Modern Mexican in Josefina Niggli’s Step Down, Elder Brother | Emily Lutenski |
“Truer ’n Hell”: Lies, Capitalism, and Cultural Imperialism in Owen Wister’s The Virginian, B. M. Bower’s The Happy Family, and Mourning Dove’s Cogewea | Sara Humphreys |
Stepping onto the Yakama Reservation: Land and Water Rights in Raymond Carver’s “Sixty Acres” | Chad Wriglesworth |
BOOK REVIEWS | REVIEWER |
Joshua David Bellin, Medicine Bundle: Indian Sacred Performance and American Literature, 1824–1932 | Katherine Young Evans |
Sherman Alexie, War Dances | Loree Westron |
John Lloyd Purdy, Writing Indian, Native Conversations | Stuart Christie |
Paul Chaat Smith, Everything You Know about Indians Is Wrong | Bryan Russell |
Stuart Christie, Plural Sovereignties and Contemporary Indigenous Literature | Linda Lizut Helstern |
John Bierhorst, transl., Ballads of the Lords of New Spain: The Codex “Romances de los Señores de la Nueva España” | Keri Holt |
Patricia Nelson Limerick, Andrew Cowell, and Sharon K. Collinge, eds., Remedies for a New West: Healing Landscapes, Histories, and Cultures | Corey Lee Lewis |
Rudolfo A. Anaya, Rudolfo Anaya: The Essays | Francisco A. Lomelí |
Donald Pizer, American Naturalism and the Jews: Garland, Norris, Dreiser, Wharton, and Cather | Charles L. Crow |
Keith Newlin, Hamlin Garland: A Life | Philip Joseph |
Joan Kane, The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife | Eric Heyne |
Linda A. Fisher and Carrie Bowers, Agnes Lake Hickok: Queen of the Circus, Wife of a Legend | Jan Cerney |
Jeanne Campbell Reesman, Jack London’s Racial Lives: A Critical Biography | Gary Scharnhorst |
Nancy Lord, Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life | Ann Ronald |
Gregg Cantrell and Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas | Daniel D. Arreola |
Patrick D. Murphy, Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies: Fences, Boundaries, and Fields | Shane Billings |
John Daniel, The Far Corner: Northwestern Views on Land, Life, and Literature | Glen Love |
Linda M. Hasselstrom, No Place Like Home: Notes from a Western Life | Kerry Fine |
Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna | Pamela Pierce |
Scott Slovic, Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility | Linda Underhill |
Summer 2010 (vol. 45, no. 2)
ESSAYS | |
“It was all a hard, fast ride that ended in the mud”: Deconstructing the Myth of the Cowboy in Annie Proulx’s Close Range: Wyoming Stories | Katie O. Arosteguy |
Haunting and History in Louis Sachar’s Holes | Kirsten Møllegaard |
Down the Santa Fe Trail to the City upon a Hill | Andrew Menard |
BOOK REVIEWS | REVIEWER |
Robert McKee Irwin, Bandits, Captives, Heroines, and Saints: Cultural Icons of Mexico’s Northwest Borderlands | David Peterson |
Rebecca M. Schreiber, Cold War Exiles in Mexico: U.S. Dissidents and the Culture of Critical Resistance | Helen Delpar |
Ann Putnam, Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye | Nancy Lord |
Jimmy Santiago Baca, A Glass of Water | Sean McCray |
Michelle Burnham, A Separate Star: Selected Writings of Helen Hunt Jackson | Raúl Coronado |
William H. Katerberg, Future West: Utopia and Apocalypse in Frontier Science Fiction | David Mogen |
Stephanie C. Palmer, Together by Accident: American Local Color Literature and the Middle Class | Matthew J. Lavin |
Jim Charles, Reading, Learning, Teaching N. Scott Momaday, and Robert M. Nelson, Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony”: The Recovery of Tradition | Lee Schweninger |
Patrick Dobson, Seldom Seen: A Journey into the Great Plains | Susan Naramore Maher |
Rinda West, Out of the Shadow: Ecopsychology, Story, and Encounters with the Land | Mark C. Long |
Brian Booth and Glen A. Love, Davis Country: H. L. Davis’s Northwest | Paul Crumbley |
Mike Barenti, Kayaking Alone | Jeffrey McCarthy |
Steven L. Davis, J. Frank Dobie: A Liberated Mind | Verne Huser |
Eric Gardner, Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature | Michael K. Johnson |
Susan Sleeper-Smith, Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives | Kym S. Rice |
Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola, The War in Words: Reading the Dakota Conflict through the Captivity Literature, and Victoria Smith, Captive Arizona, 1851–1900 | Randi Lynn Tanglen |
Kenneth Scambray, Queen Calafia’s Paradise: California and the Italian American Novel | Charles Scruggs |
Dorothy Allred Solomon, In My Father’s House: A Memoir of Polygamy | Bonnie Bastian Moore |
Louise Erdrich, Shadow Tag | James Cihlar |
Fall 2010 (vol. 45, no. 3)
ESSAYS | |
Cultural Resistance and “Playing Indian” in Thomas King’s “Joe the Painter and the Deer Island Massacre” |
Timothy Glenn |
“Terrible Women”: Gender, Platonism, and Christianity in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House | Anne Baker |
Unmapping Adventure: Sewing Resistance in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms | T. Christine Jespersen |
BOOK REVIEWS | REVIEWER |
Shirley A. Leckie and Nancy J. Parezo, eds., Their Own Frontier: Women Intellectuals Re-Visioning the American West | Andrea G. Radke-Moss |
Joan Stauffer, Behind Every Man: The Story of Nancy Cooper Russell, and Candace C. Kant, ed., Dolly & Zane Grey: Letters from a Marriage | David Fenimore |
Lucy Marks and David Porter, Seeking Life Whole: Willa Cather and the Brewsters | Laura Winters |
Kimberli A. Lee, ed., “I Do Not Apologize for the Length of This Letter”: The Mari Sandoz Letters on Native American Rights, 1940–1965 | Katherine Bahr |
Daniel H. Usner Jr., Indian Work | Jeanette Palmer |
N. Scott Momaday, The Journey of Tai-me | William M. Clements |
Diane Glancy, Pushing the Bear: After the Trail of Tears | Erin Murrah-Mandril |
John Morán González, Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature | Juan Alonzo |
Conrado Espinoza, Under the Texas Sun/El Sol de Texas | Maria O’Connell |
Américo Paredes, Cantos de adolescencia/Songs of Youth (1932–1937) | Grisel Y. Acosta |
Silvio Sirias, Meet Me under the Ceiba | Lucrecia Guerrero |
Daryl J. Maeda, Chains of Babylon: The Rise of Asian America | Moon-Ho Jung |
Brian Flota, A Survey of Multicultural San Francisco Bay Literature, 1955–1979: Ishmael Reed, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, and the Beat Generation | Brett C. Sigurdson |
Eileen O’Keefe McVicker and Barbara Scot, Child of Steens Mountain, and Robin Cody, Another Way the River Has: Taut True Tales from the Northwest | J. T. Bushnell |
James Karman, ed., The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers: Volume One, 1890–1930 | Tim Hunt |
Dan Aadland, In Trace of TR: A Montana Hunter’s Journey, and Robert Root, Following Isabella: Travels in Colorado Then and Now | Ann Ronald |
Nguyen Qúi Dú’c, Where the Ashes Are: The Odyssey of a Vietnamese Family | Sophie Quinn-Judge |
Lisa Jones, Broken: A Love Story | Summer Wood |
Lucha Corpi, Death at Solstice: A Gloria Damasco Mystery | María Herrera-Sobek |
Kent Meyers, Twisted Tree | Robert Headley |
Pamela Carter Joern, The Plain Sense of Things | Tyler S. Holzer |
Winter 2011 (vol. 45, no. 4)
ESSAYS | |
Practicing Sovereignty in Greg Sarris’s Watermelon Nights | Reginald Dyck |
Clean Hands and an Iron Face: Frontier Masculinity and Boston Manliness in The Rise of Silas Lapham |
Matthew J. Lavin |
The Sentimental Politics of Language: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s and José María Sánchez’s Texan Stories |
Marissa López |
ESSAY REVIEW | REVIEWER |
The Mark Twain Biography Wars | Charles L. Crow |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
John Beck, Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature | Bill D. Toth |
Leonard Engel, ed., A Violent Conscience: Essays on the Fiction of James Lee Burke | Jon A. Jackson |
Megan Riley McGilchrist, The Western Landscape in Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegner: Myths of the Frontier | Stacey Peebles |
Carol Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life | Chad Wriglesworth |
Frances McCue, The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs: Revisiting the Northwest Towns of Richard Hugo | Kim Stafford |
Phyllis Morgan, N. Scott Momaday: Remembering Ancestors, Earth, and Traditions: An Annotated Bio-Bibliography | Larry Evers |
James R. Boylston and Allen J. Wiener, David Crockett in Congress: The Rise and Fall of the Poor Man’s Friend, with Collected Correspondence, Selected Speeches, and Circulars | Paula Marks |
William Haywood Henderson, Native | Elizabeth Abele |
Tim Z. Hernandez, Breathing, In Dust | Gerald Haslam |
Steven L. Davis, J. Frank Dobie: A Liberated Mind | Tom Pilkington |
Michelle Wick Patterson, Natalie Curtis Burlin: A Life in Native and African American Music | Martha Viehmann |
Virginia Scharff and Carolyn Brucken, Homelands: How Women Made the West | Sue Armitage |
Maria Melendez, Flexible Bones | Cynthia Hogue |
Angie Chau, Quiet As They Come | Christopher Schaberg |
David Toscana, The Last Reader | Beth Pollack |
Spring 2011 (vol. 46, no. 1)
ESSAYS | |
Sacred Spaces, Profane “Manufactories”: Willa Cather’s Split Artist in The Professor’s House and My Mortal Enemy | Kim Vanderlaan |
“A Terrible Genius”: Robinson Jeffers’s Art of Narrative | Robert Zaller |
The Quilt as (Non-)Commodity in William S. Yellow Robe Jr.’s The Star Quilter | Deborah Weagel |
ESSAY REVIEW | REVIEWER |
Crossing Territories: New Spaces in Six Works of Fiction | Manuel Muñoz |
New West or Old? Men and Masculinity in Recent Fiction by Western American Men |
David J. Peterson |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Review of J. M. Ferguson Jr., Westering: A Novel in Stories | Martin Bucco |
Review of John Addiego, Tears of the Mountain | Brett Garcia Myhren |
Review of Lisa Knopp, Interior Places | Gaynell Gavin |
Review of Ann Ronald, Friendly Fallout 1953 | David Mazel |
Review of Jim Dwyer, Where the Wild Books Are: A Field Guide to Ecofiction | O. Alan Weltzien |
Review of Lowell Jaeger, ed., New Poets of the American West | Peggy Shumaker |
Review of Bill Sherwonit, Changing Paths: Travels and Meditations in Alaska’s Arctic Wilderness | Jennifer Schell |
Review of John J. Murphy, Françoise Palleau-Papin, and Robert Thacker, eds., Willa Cather: A Writer’s Worlds | Timothy W. Bintrim |
Review of Joanna Levin, Bohemia in America, 1858–1920 | Brett C. Sigurdson |
Review of Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson,Mary Austin and the American West | Karen S. Langlois |
Review of Jennifer L. McMahon and B. Steve Csaki, eds., The Philosophy of the Western |
Brian McCuskey |
Review of Frank Maynard, Cowboy’s Lament: A Life on the Open Range | Richard Hutson |
Review of Linwood Laughy, The Fifth Generation: A Nez Perce Tale | Loree Westron |
Summer 2011 (vol. 46, no. 2)
ESSAYS | |
The Fat Man on Snow Dome: Surprise and Sense of Place (or, Reading Laurie Ricou’s David Wagoner) | Nicholas Bradley |
Untidy Borders: Eamonn Wall’s Negotiation of the American West | Susan Naramore Maher |
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence Inhabits Film Noir | Alan P. Barr |
ESSAY REVIEW | REVIEWER |
Down on the Farm: Memoirs and Nonfiction on Agricultural Lives | Evelyn I. Funda |
Book History Comes West | Tara Penry |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Review of Thomas McGuane, Driving on the Rim | Stephen P. Cook |
Review of Richard C. Rattenbury, Arena Legacy: The Heritage of American Rodeo | Demetrius W. Pearson |
Review of Annie Proulx, Bird Cloud | Matt Low |
Review of Monica Perales and Raúl A. Ramos, eds., Recovering the Hispanic History of Texas | Cordelia E. Barrera |
Review of Jordan Stouck, ed., “Collecting Stamps Would Have Been More Fun”: Canadian Publishing and the Correspondence of Sinclair Ross, 1933–1986. | Dick Harrison |
Review of Flannery Burke, From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s | Tyler Nickl |
Review of David Mogen, Honyocker Dreams: Montana Memories | O. Alan Weltzien |
Review of Ruth McLaughlin, Bound Like Grass: A Memoir from the Western High Plains and of Mary Zeiss Stange, Hard Grass: Life on the Crazy Woman Bison Ranch | Linda M. Hasselstrom |
Review of Graciela Limón, The River Flows North | Elisa Bordin |
Review of Phillip Connors, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout | John Charles Gilmore |
Fall 2011 (vol. 46, no. 3):
Special Issue: Western Suburbia
ESSAYS | |
Special Issue on Western Suburbia | Neil Campbell |
“An assemblage of habits”: D. J. Waldie and Neil Campbell—A Suburban Conversation | D. J. Waldie and Neil Campbell |
Space, Gender, Race: Josephine Miles and the Poetics of the California Suburbs | Jo Gill |
Lakewood: Portraits of a Sacred American Suburb | Tom M. Johnson |
Tract Homes on the Range: The Suburbanization of the American West | Robert Bennett |
“A kingdom of a thousand princes but no kings”:The Postsuburban Network in Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs | Tim Foster |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Review of Lawrence Culver, The Frontier of Leisure in California and the Shaping of Modern America | William Philpott |
Review of John Addiego, Barbara Berglund, Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846–1906 | Raymond W. Rast |
Review of Char Miller, ed., Cities and Nature in the American West | Lawrence Culver |
Review of Kevin R. McNamara, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles | Jaquelin Pelzer |
Review of Susan Suntree, Sacred Sites: The Secret History of Southern California | Brett Garcia Myhren |
Review of Raymond D. Gastil and Barnett Singer, The Pacific Northwest: Growth of a Regional Identity | Stephen Trimble |
Review of William R. Handley, ed., The Brokeback Book: From Story to Cultural Phenomenon | Michael K. Johnson |
Review of Jim Reese, ghost on 3rd | David Cremean |
Review of Krista Comer, Surfer Girls in the New World Order | Robert Bennett |
Winter 2012 (vol. 46, no. 4)
ESSAYS | |
John Russell Bartlett’s Literary Borderlands: Ethnology, War, and the United States Boundary Survey | Robert Gunn |
No Laughing Matter: William Saroyan’s Californians in Crisis | Greg Levonian |
Morta Las Vegas | Stephen Tatum and Nathaniel Lewis |
ESSAY REVIEW | REVIEWER |
On the Border, on the Edge: Charles Bowden’s Twinned Trilogies | David N. Cremean |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Review of Harriet Elinor Smith et al., eds., Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 | Chad Rohman |
Review of Lawrence I. Berkove and Joseph Csicsila, Heretical Fictions: Religion in the Literature of Mark Twain | Chad Rohman |
Review of Gary Scharnhorst, ed., Twain in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates | Robert C. Evans |
Review of John Morán González, The Troubled Union: Expansionist Imperatives in Post-Reconstruction American Novels | David Anthony |
Review of Todd Simmons, ed., Matter 13: Edward Abbey | David Joplin |
Review of Audrey Goodman, Lost Homelands: Ruin and Reconstruction in the 20th-Century Southwest | Ann E. Lundberg |
Review of Dan Flores, Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photographing the Northern Rocky Mountain West | Flannery Burke |
Review of Jake Silverstein, Nothing Happened and Then It Did: A Chronicle in Fact and Fiction | Barbara Barney Nelson |
Review of George B. Handley, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River | Jeffrey McCarthy |
Review of David Wyatt, Secret Histories: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literature | Lars Erik Larson |
Review of Anne Coray, Violet Transparent | Marybeth Holleman |
Review of James R. Dow, Roger Welsch, and Susan Dow, eds., Wyoming Folklore: Reminiscences, Folktales, Beliefs, Customs, and Folk Speech | Lisa Gabbert |
Review of Rev. Santiago Tafolla, A Life Crossing Borders: Memoir of a Mexican-American Confederate | Leigh Johnson |
Review of Garrick Bailey, ed., Traditions of the Osage: Stories Collected and Translated by Francis La Flesche and of Geary Hobson, Janet McAdams, and Kathryn Walkiewicz, eds., The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing after Removal | Matt Low |
Review of Steven Trout, On the Battlefield of Memory: The First World War and American Remembrance, 1919–1941 | Sarah Stoeckl |
Review of Aparajita Nanda, ed., Black California: A Literary Anthology | Blake Allmendinger |
Spring 2012 (vol. 47, no. 1)
ESSAYS | |
“Perhaps the Words Remember Me”: Richard Brautigan’s Very Short Stories | Christopher Gair |
Translating the American West into English: The Case of Hendrik Conscience’s Het Goudland | Michael Boyden & Liselotte Vandenbussche |
West by Southeast: Peter Matthiessen’s Florida Trilogy as Western Fiction | Carl Abbott |
Peyote in the Kitchen: Gendered Identities and Imperial Domesticity in Edna Ferber’s Cimarron | Amanda Zink |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Review of Mary Clearman Blew, This Is Not the Ivy League: A Memoir | Lois M. Welch |
Review of James C. Work, Don’t Shoot the Gentile | Levi S. Peterson |
Review of Todd James Pierce and Jarret Keene, eds., Dead Neon: Tales of Near-Future Las Vegas, and of Hal K. Rothman, Nevada: The Making of Modern Nevada | Gerald Haslam |
Review of Brian Doyle, Mink River | Chad Wriglesworth |
Review of N. Scott Momaday, In the Bear’s House | William M. Clements |
Review of Richard Yañez, Cross Over Water | Bob J. Frye |
Review of William Kloefkorn, Swallowing the Soap: New and Selected Poems | Michael Sowder |
Review of Genaro M. Padilla, The Daring Flight of My Pen: Cultural Politics and Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s “Historia de la Nueva Mexico,” 1610 | Ralph Bauer |
Review of Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy, Vistas, 1520–1820: Visual Culture in Spanish America/Cultura Visual de Hispanoamérica | Keri Holt |
Review of Tyche Hendricks, The Wind Doesn’t Need a Passport: Stories from the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands | Maria O’Connell |
Review of James Skillen, The Nation’s Largest Landlord: The Bureau of Land Management in the American West, and of Martin Nie, The Governance of Western Public Lands: Mapping Its Present and Future | Debbie Lee |
Review of Heather Fryer, Perimeters of Democracy: Inverse Utopias and the Wartime Social Landscape in the American West | Audrey Goodman |
Review of Jace Weaver, Notes from a Miner’s Canary: Essays on the State of Native America | Reginald Dyck |
Review of Forrestine C. Hooker, Child of the Fighting Tenth: On the Frontier with the Buffalo Soldiers, ed. by Steve Wilson | Mary Clearman Blew |
Review of David Remley, Kit Carson: The Life of an American Border Man | Jennifer Schell |
Review of David Theis, ed., Literary Houston | Alexander Adkins |
Review of Rudolfo Anaya, Randy Lopez Goes Home | Cordelia E. Barrera |
Review of Hart Stilwell, Glory of the Silver King: The Golden Age of Tarpon Fishing, ed. by Brandon D. Shuler | Maria O’Connell |
Summer 2012 (vol. 47, no. 2):
Special Issue: Television in the West
ESSAYS | |
Introduction: Television and the Depiction of the American West | Michael K. Johnson |
The Dangers of Driving the Dalton: The Paradoxical Industrial and Environmental Aesthetics of Ice Road Truckers | Jennifer Schell |
She Hits Like a Man, but She Kisses Like a Girl: TV Heroines, Femininity, Violence, and Intimacy | Kerry Fine |
The Warp, Woof, and Weave of This Story’s Tapestry Would Foster the Illusion of Further Progress: Justified and the Evolution of Western Violence | Justin A. Joyce |
Rejuvenating “Eternal Inequality” on the Digital Frontiers of Red Dead Redemption | Sara Humphreys |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Review of Alvin H. Marill, Television Westerns: Six Decades of Sagebrush Sheriffs, Scalawags, and Sidewinders | Cynthia J. Miller |
Review of Rhonda V. Wilcox and Tanya R. Cochran, eds., Investigating “Firefly” and “Serenity”: Science Fiction on the Frontier | Corey Dethier |
Review of Christine Cornea, ed., Genre and Performance: Film and Television | Sue Matheson |
Review of Michael G. Fitzgerald and Boyd Magers, Ladies of the Western: Interviews with 25 Actresses from the Silent Era to the Television Westerns of the 1950s and 1960s | Holly Jean Richard |
Review of Ed Andreychuk, Louis L’Amour on Film and Television | D. B. Gough |
Review of John L. Simons and Robert Merrill, Peckinpah’s Tragic Westerns: A Critical Study | Leonard Engel |
Review of Mary C. Beltrán, Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom and of Isabel Molina-Guzmán, Dangerous Curves: Latina Bodies in the Media | Melinda Linscott |
Review of Manuel Muñoz, What You See in the Dark | John Hursh |
Fall 2012 (vol. 47, no. 3)
ESSAYS | |
Narrative, Being, and the Dialogic Novel: The Problem of Discourse and Language in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing | Alan Noble |
Speaking Chinook: Adaptation, Indigeneity, and Pauline Johnson’s British Columbia Stories | Martha L. Viehmann |
Before the West Was West: Rethinking the Temporal Borders of Western American Literature | Amy T. Hamilton and Tom J. Hillard |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Don Graham, State of Minds: Texas Culture and Its Discontents | Andrew Husband |
Paul Lindholdt, In Earshot of Water: Notes from the Columbia Plateau | Hal Crimmel |
Brady Harrison, ed., All Our Stories Are Here: Critical Perspectives on Montana Literature | Capper Nichols |
William H. Truettner, Painting Indians and Building Empires in North America, 1710–1840 | Rebecca M. Lush |
Scott Richard Lyons, X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent | Daniel M. Radus |
John Lloyd Purdy, Riding Shotgun into the Promised Land | Dallin Jay Bundy |
Panthea Reid, Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles | Susanne George Bloomfield |
Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush, eds., Sherman Alexie: A Collection of Critical Essays | Janet Dean |
Hugh J. Reilly, Bound to Have Blood: Frontier Newspapers and the Plains Indian Wars | William V. Lombardi |
Eamonn Wall, Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions | David Mogen |
Lydia R. Cooper, No More Heroes: Narrative Perspective and Morality in Cormac McCarthy | Trenton Hickman |
Dean Rader, Engaged Resistance: American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI | Breanne Roberson |
Drucilla Wall, The Geese at the Gates | Joshua Doležal |
Summer Wood, Wrecker | Lawrence Coates |
Winter 2013 (vol. 47, no. 4)
ESSAYS | |
A Case for Enchantment: Re-reading Jean Stafford with “The Mountain Day” | Cathryn Halverson |
Writing against Wilderness: María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Elite Environmental Justice | Karen L. Kilcup |
“What manner of heretic?”: Demons in McCarthy and the Question of Agency | J.A. Bernstein |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Christine Bold, ed., The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume Six: US Popular Print Culture 1860–1920 | Tara Penny |
Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández, Un-speakable Violence: Remapping US and Mexican National Imaginaries | Joshua O’Brien |
Frances W. Kaye, Goodlands: A Meditation and History on he Great Plains | Robert Thacker |
Sara L. Spurgeon, ed., Cormac McCarthy: All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, The Road | Christopher Schaberg |
Lawrence Rodgers and Jerrold Hirsch, eds., America’s Folklorist: B. A. Botkin and American Culture | Ennifer Eastman Attebery |
Lee Schweninger, ed., The First We Can Remember: Colorado Pioneer Women Tell Their Stories | Udy Nolte Temple |
Tom Lynch and Susan N. Maher, eds., Artifacts & lluminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley | Andrew Angyal |
Gerald W. Haslam with Janice E. Haslam, In Thought and Action: The Enigmatic Life of S. I. Hayakawa | Frank Bergon |
Stephen Tatum, In the Remington Moment | Kenneth Haltman |
Clay S. Jenkinson, The Character of Meriwether Lewis: Explorer n the Wilderness | Ryan Badger |
Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, he History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty | Gabriel S. Estrada |
Scott Lauria Morgensen, Spaces be-tween Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization | Lisa Tatonetti |
Michael Hames-García, Identity Complex: Making the Case for Multiplicity and of David J. Vázquez, Triangulations: Narrative Strategies for Navigating Latino Identity | Maria Damon |
Kippra D. Hopper and Laurie J. Churchill, Art of West Texas Women: A Celebration | Kerry Fine |
Steven W. Hackel, ed., Alta California: Peoples in Motion, dentities in Formation | Anne Goldman |
Nicholas Monk, ed., Inter-textual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy | Darryl Hattenhauer |
James Karman, ed., The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers: Volume Two, 1931–1939 | Tim Hunt |
Donald Pizer, ed., Hamlin Garland, Prairie Radical: Writings from he 1890s | Eric Morel |
Maylei Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power! Contested Histories of Feminism in the Chicano Movement and of AnaLouise Keating and Gloria González-López, eds., Bridging: How Gloria Anzaldúa’s Life and Work Transformed Our Own | Yolanda Padilla |
Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner, eds., West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965–1977 | Lois Rudnick |
Patrick Madden, Quoti-diana: Essay | Brandon R. Schrand |
John Joseph Mathews, ed. by Susan Kalter, Twenty Thousand Mornings: An Autobiography | James H. Cox |
Willard Wyman, Blue Heaven | Dynette Reynold |
Robert Alexander González, Designing Pan-America: US Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere | Amanda Ellis |
Double Issue Spring & Summer 2013 (vol. 48, nos. 1&2)
INTRODUCTION | |
Assessing the Postwestern | Krista Comer, guest editor |
ESSAYS | |
Inhabiting the Icon: Shipping Containers and the New Imagination of Western Space | Sarah Hirsch |
Third Cinema Goes West: Common Ground for Film and Literary Theory in Postregional Discourse | Courtney Fellion |
Narcocorridos and the Nostalgia of Violence: Postmodern Resistance en la Frontera | Chris Muniz |
“‘Refusing to halt’: Mobility and the Quest for Spatial Justice in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange | Sarah Wald |
Shaking Awake the Memory: The Gothic Quest for Place in Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo | Paul Wickelson |
Settler Sovereignty and the Rhizomatic West, or, The Significance of the Frontier in Postwestern Studies | Alex Trimble Young |
“It All Comes Together” in … Reno?: Confronting the Postwestern Geographic Imaginary in Willy Vlautin’s The Motel Life | William V. Lombardi |
The Past and the Postwestern: Garland’s Cavanagh, Closure, and Conventions of Reading | Eric Morel |
Critical Regionalism, the US-Mexican War, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary History | Randi Lynn Tanglen |
“Might be going to have lived”: The West in the Subjunctive Mood | Andy Meyer |
Fall 2013 (vol. 48, no. 3)
From the Editor | Melody Graulich |
ESSAYS | |
Written on the Body: A Third Space Reading of Larry McMurtry’s Streets of Laredo | Cordelia E. Barrera |
“No Transient Spectacle”: Bayard Taylor, Wilderness Tourism, and the Re-creation of the United States | James Weaver |
“New England Innocent” in the Land of Sunshine: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and California | Jennifer S. Tuttle |
Panel Discussion: From Blood Simple to True Grit: A Conversation about the Coen Brothers’ Cinematic West | Neil Campbell, Susan Kollin, Lee Clark Mitchell, and Stephen Tatum |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Review of Nicolas S. Witschi, A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West | David Wrobel |
Review of Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, eds., The Harlem Renaissance in the American West: The New Negro’s Western Experience | Emily Lutenski |
Review of David Rio, Amaia Ibarraran, and Martin Simonson, eds., Beyond the Myth: New Perspectives on Western Texts | O. Alan Weltzien |
Nina Baym, Women Writers of the American West, 1833–1927 | Christie Smith |
Review of Denice Turner, Writing the Heavenly Frontier: Metaphor, Geography, and Flight Auto-biography in America 1927–1954 | Bernard Quetchenbach |
Review of Bill Mohr, Hold-Outs: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance, 1948–1992 | Lisa Locascio |
Review of Qwo-Li Driskill, Daniel Heath Justice, Deborah Miranda, and Lisa Tatonetti, eds., Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature | Andrew Uzendoski |
Review of Ernest J. Finney, Sequoia Gardens: California Stories and of Lawrence Coates, The Garden of the World | Chris Muniz |
Review of Forrest G. Robinson, Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr., and Catherine Carlstroem, The Jester and the Sages: Mark Twain in Conversation with Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx | Corey Dethier |
Review of Ned Buntline, The Hero of a Hundred Fights: Collected Stories from the Dime Novel King, from Buffalo Bill to Wild Bill Hickok | Adele H. Bealer |
Review of David Carpenter, A Hunter’s Confession | Henry Hudson |
Review of Daniel Worden, Masculine Style: The American West and Literary Modernism | David Peterson |
Review of Patrick Hicks, ed., A Harvest of Words: Contemporary South Dakota Poetry | Jeffrey Howard |
Review of Melissa J. Homestead and Guy J. Reynolds, eds., Cather Studies 9: Willa Cather and Modern Cultures | Steven B. Shively |
Winter 2014 (vol. 48, no. 4)
ESSAYS | |
“Nothing but land”: Women’s Narratives, Gardens, and the Settler-Colonial Imaginary in the US West and Australian Outback | Tom Lynch |
“Learn to talk Yaqui”: Mexico and the Cherokee Literary Politics of John Milton Oskison and Will Rogers | James H. CoX |
All the Pretty Mexican Girls: Whiteness and Racial Desire in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses and Cities of the Plain | Jennifer A. Reimer |
Resisting the Border: Natural Narrative, Everyday Story | Pattie Cowell |
BOOK REVIEWS | |
Review of Nathan Straight, Autobiography, Ecology, and the Well-Placed Self: The Growth of Natural Biography in Contemporary American Life Writing | Tyler Nickl |
Review of Andrew Menard, Sight Unseen: How Frémont’s First Expedition Changed the American Landscape | Robert Thacker |
Review of Lori Lee Wilson, The Joaquín Band: The History behind the Legend | Elisa Warford |
Review of Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann, Gunfight at the Eco-Corral: Western Cinema and the Environment | Linda Mizejewski |
Review of John Blair Gamber, Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins: Waste and Contamination in Contemporary U.S. Ethnic Literatures | Kristin Ladd |
Review of Robin Troy, Liberty Lanes | Matthew Heimburger |
Review of Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed, In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country in 1908–09, with an introduction by Susan Bernardin | Anne L. Kaufman |
Review of Lois Palken Rudnick, The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan: Sex, Syphilis, and Pyschoanalysis in the Making of Modern American Culture | Judy Nolte Temple |
Review of Martin Etchart, The Last Shepherd | David Río |
Review of A. Gabriel Meléndez and Francisco Lomelí, eds. and trans., The Writings of Eusebio Chacón | Laura Padilla |
Review of Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice | Monica Linford |
Review of Kathleen Johnson, Subterranean Red | Elizabeth Toombs |
Review of Larry McMurtry, Custer | Brian Dippie |
Review of Ann Moseley and Sarah Cheney Watson, eds., Willa Cather and Aestheticism: From Romanticism to Modernism | Max Despain |
Review of Elizabeth Dodd, Horizon’s Lens: My Time on the Turning World | Sarah Stoeckl |
Review of Julian Murphet and Mark Steven, eds., Style of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” | Alex Engebretson |
Review of Christopher Schaberg, The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight | Andy Hageman |
Review of Claire Vaye Watkins, Battleborn: Stories | D. Seth Horton |
Review of Rene S. Perez II, Along These Highways | Monica E. Montelongo |
Review of Greg Kuzma, Mountains of the Moon | Harald Wyndham |
Review of Glenn Frankel, The Searchers: The Making of an American Legend | Edwin Whitewolf |
Review of Sherman Alexie, Blasphemy | Loree Westron |
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