Frequently Asked Conference Questions

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Frequently Asked Conference Questions

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.


 

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Tables of Contents Summer 2021 – Present

Tuesday, April 12th, 2022

Editor: Amy Hamilton


Summer 2021 (WAL 56.2)

Editors’ LetterAmy Hamilton &
Kyle Bladow
ESSAYS 
Staying with the White Trouble of Recent Feminist WesternsKrista Comer
Text, Encounter, Genre: Returning (Again) to Black Elk SpeaksSam Stoeltje
Simons Town as Heterotopia: The Dynamic Interplay of Barrioization and Barriology in The Brick PeopleBeilei Yan and Longhai Zhang
REVIEWS 
Toni Jensen, Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen LandDoreen Pfost
Kerry Fine, Michael K. Johnson, Rebecca M. Lush, and Sara L. Spurgeon, eds. Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, GenreTravis Franks
Vanessa Fonseca-Chávez, Levi Romero, and Spencer Herrera, eds., Querencia: Reflections on the New Mexico HomelandDaniel Arbino
Geneva M. Gano, The Little Art Colony and US Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, TaosRobert Thacker
James H. Cox, The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary HistoryJoshua T. Anderson
Brady Harrison and Randi Lynn Tanglen, eds., Teaching Western American LiteratureSusan Kollin
Kiara Kharpertian, We Who Work the West: Class, Labor, and Space in Western American LiteratureDaniel 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-FiJennifer K. Ladino
Old Chestnuts: Seeding Alternative Communities and Alternative Futures in/with The OverstoryRyan Hediger
Uncenter Yourselves: Revisiting Robinson Jeffers’ Inhumanism in the Age of The OverstoryCory 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 NovelsMatt Burkhart 
California Dreaming: Reading the Ski Film as Cli-FiKevin Maier
REVIEWS 
Antonia Castañeda and Clara Lomas, Writing/Righting History: Twenty-Five Years of Hispanic Literary HeritageErin Murrah-Mandril
Jim Hoy, My Flint Hills: Observations and Reminiscences from America’s Last Tallgrass PrairieTimothy A. Schuler
Arnold Krupat, Changed Forever: American Boarding-School Literature, Volume 2Lydia Presley

Spring 2022 (WAL 57.1)

ESSAYS 
Learning to Fly-Cast: Icarus and Myth in Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through ItStephen B. Dobranski
“Taken from Their Self-found Paths”: Captivity and Creation in Mary Hallock Foote’s Idaho FictionQuinn Grover
The Parthian Legacy: Irish Catholicism and Remaking Identity in Willa Cather’s My Mortal EnemyVera R. Foley
REVIEWS 
John N. Maclean, Home Waters: A Chronicle of Family and a RiverO. Alan Weltzien
Xabier Irujo and Iñaki Arrieta Baro, eds. Visions of a Basque American Westerner: International Perspectives on the Writings of Frank BergonMichael Kowalewski
Ryanne Pilgeram, Pushed Out: Contested Development and Rural Gentrification in the US WestJennifer K. Ladino
Erin Flanagan, Deer SeasonJoshua Doležal
Mary Stoecklein, Native America Mystery Writing: Indigenous InvestigationsJessica Rios
Gary Eller, True NorthHank 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 TestimonyAlyssa 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 CourseSarah Jane Kerwin
“Asian American and Pacific Islander” Studies in Boston and Hilo: Student Activism, Radical Imaginings, and Critical Ethnic StudiesLeanne Day
Perfectly Designed for Connections: Zine Making in Denver SheltersAlison Turner
A Report on the Living West as Feminists ProjectZainab Abdali
Peregrination 2036Mika Kennedy
Afterword: Precarity, Pedagogy, and the PublicKrista Comer
REVIEWS 
Rafael Acosta Morales, Drug Lords, Cowboys, and Desperadoes: Violent Myths of the U.S.-Mexico FrontierCordelia E. Barrera
Curtis Bradley Vickers, This Here Is Devil’s Work: A NovelJeffrey Chisum
Mary Emerick, The Last Layer of the Ocean: Kayaking through Love and Loss on Alaska’s Wild CoastSjana Schanning
David Horgan. Helmi’s Shadow: A Journey of Survival from Russia to East Asia to the American WestDavid Rio
Maximilian Werner, Wolves, Grizzlies, and Greenhorns: Death & Coexistence in the American WestDan Aadland
Astrid Haas, Lone Star Vistas: Travel Writing on Texas, 1821-1861Jennifer Dawes
Patrick J. Mahoney, Recovering an Irish Voice from the American Frontier: The Prose Writings of Eoin Ua CathailJill Brady Hampton
Arnold Krupat, Boarding School Voices: Carlisle Indian School Students SpeakSusan 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 RushCaroline Gelmi 
Necro-Settler Coloniality in Texan Mythology and Identity: Forgetting the AlamoChaney Hill
“Theirs is a kind of ecological esthetics”: Three Mountain Poems by Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and Philip WhalenTodd Giles
REVIEWS 
Lisa Tatonetti, Written by the Body: Gender Expansiveness and Indigenous Non-Cis MasculinitiesTereza M. Szeghi
Estella Gonzalez, Chola SalvationJuan-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 NovelRandi Lynn Tanglen
Sullivan, Shannon, Ed. Thinking the US South: Contemporary Philosophy from Southern PerspectivesCristina Hernández Oliver
John G. Neihardt, Eagle Voice Remembers: An Authentic Tale of the Old Sioux WorldSam Stoeltje
Steven Wingate, The Leave-TakersRebecca Paredes 
Miriam C. Brown Spiers, Encountering the Sovereign Other: Indigenous Science FictionSara L. Spurgeon
Oscar Mancinas, To Live and Die in El ValleSophia Martinez-Abbud
Mark Rifkin, Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political FormCaitlin Simmons

Winter 2023 (WAL 57.4)

ESSAYS
Mapping Intergenerational Diné Beauty: Reading Hózhǫ́ in the Poetry of Tacey M. AtsittyMichael P. Taylor and
Elena Arana
“Do the Right Thing Always”: Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Global Pandemics of 1918 and 2020Amy Fatzinger
Dao Strom’s Grass Roof, Tin Roof as Settler Refugee CritiqueMichele Janette
REVIEWS
Molly P. Rozum, Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian PrairiesTracy Sanford Tucker
Steven L. Davis and Sam L. Pfiester, eds., Viva Texas Rivers! Adventure, Misadventures, and Glimpses of Nirvana along Our Storied WaterwaysChaney Hill
Jada Ach, Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American WestJenna Gersie
Mary Pat Brady, Scales of Captivity: Racial Capitalism and the Latinx ChildSarah J. Ropp
Blake Allmendinger, Geographic Personas: Self-Transformation and Performance in the American WestChristine Bold
Lawrence W. Gross, Native American RhetoricsDanielle Donelson
José F. Aranda Jr., The Places of Modernity in Early Mexican American Literature, 1848–1948Sandra Dahlberg
Lee Bergthold, The Deadliest ShortcutThomas J. Lyon
Melissa J. Homestead, The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith LewisJada Ach
Ladette Randolph, Private Way: A NovelManish 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 HistoryPatricia J. Rettig
REVIEWS
Kathryn Cornell Dolan, Cattle Country: Livestock in the Cultural ImaginationTom Hertweck
John Joseph Mathews, Our Osage Hills: Toward an Osage Ecology and Tribalography of the Early Twentieth Century, ed. by Michael SnyderSheldon Yeakley
Taylor Brorby, Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured LandO. Alan Weltzien
Anna M. Nogar and A. Gabriel Meléndez, El feliz ingenio neomexicano: Felipe M. Chacón and Poesía y prosaJuan M. Gallegos
Tracy Daugherty, 148 Charles Street: A NovelMax Frazier
Gregory Smoak, Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American WestEmily Gowen
Michael P. Branch, On the Trail of the Jackalope: How a Legend Captured the World’s Imagination and Helped Us Cure CancerHal Crimmel
Mary Dartt, On the Plains, and Among the Peaks, or, How Mrs. Maxwell Made Her Natural History CollectionErica Hannickel
Barbara Schmitz, Sundown at Faith RegionalMark Sanders
Cordelia E. Barrera, The Haunted Southwest: Towards an Ethics of Place in Borderlands LiteratureBailey Moorhead

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Virtual Events 2021

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.


WLA 2021 Virtual Awards Ceremony

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


 

Inclusive Design:
Teaching Practices for
All Bodies, All Identities

Workshop Leader: Jillian Moore, PhD Student, Duquesne University

Date: Saturday, September 11, 2021, 3-4:15pm EDT (2CDT, 1MDT, 12PDT)

[Image used with permission from Disabled And Here Collection.]

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.


 

 

The Tulsa Race Massacre at 100: Creative Writers Reflect on Its Impact, Legacy, and Lessons  

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. 

 

Novelist Rilla Askew

Rilla Askew

 
Poet Quraysh Ali Lansana

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


 

The Politics of Public Lands in the Contemporary US West: A Roundtable Discussion  

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.

Photo by Richard Wilhelm

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.

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Composition of Award Committees

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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Code of Conduct

Monday, August 10th, 2020

Western Literature Association Code of Conduct and Behavioral Guidelines  

 

Introduction

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.

 

A Note Re: Freedom of Expression

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.  

 

Welcomed and Encouraged Behaviors

Because fostering an inclusive and accessible conference environment goes beyond avoiding detrimental actions, The WLA encourages the following behavior and conduct:

  • • Listening as much as, or even more than, you speak;
  • • Sharing “air time” by yielding speaking time to those whose viewpoints may be under-represented. For instance, Black folx, Indigenous peoples, Latinx individuals, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and anyone else who also identifies as under-represented based on race or ethnicity; Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans*, Queer, Intersex, Asexual, and Two-Spirit colleagues; and graduate students and attendees from beyond academia);
  • • Using welcoming language, for instance by honoring individuals’ correct pronouns and favoring gender-neutral, collective nouns and language that is sensitive to disabled colleagues, members, and conference attendees (think: “people,” “folks/folx,” or “y’all” rather than “you guys,” and “wild,” “shocking,” etc., rather than “crazy,” “nuts,” or “lame”)
  • • Accepting critique graciously;
  • • Offering critique constructively and with care; Seeking concrete ways to make physical and online spaces, as well as resources, more universally accessible (e.g. printing and providing access copies of papers and presentations, using a microphone, providing trigger warnings before presentations begin, using closed captioning when possible, providing descriptions of visuals, and more);
  • • Making proactive moves, as bystanders, to advocate for the welfare of conference attendees, and remaining prepared to intervene, if necessary.

 

Harassment and Discrimination

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:

  • • Disruption of talks or other events;
  • • Deliberate misgendering or use of “dead” or rejected names;
  • • Unwelcome sexual attention, pursuit, or pressure; verbal or physical Threats or acts of violence, including intimidation, stalking, or following;
  • • Cyber-harassment, -bullying, trolling, doxing, etc.  
  • • Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behavior

As a reminder, the following behaviors do not constitute discrimination or harassment:

  • • Discussion of sensitive topics;
  • • Feeling persecuted for your social privilege;
  • • Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “please leave me alone,” or “I’m not comfortable discussing this”;
  • • Refusal to expend the emotional labor to explain or debate social justice issues when the person being asked feels threatened based on their lived experience, personal identity, or safety;
  • • Communication in a “tone” you don’t find congenial;
  • • Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions.

 

A Note Re: COVID-19, Xenophobia, and Racism

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.

 

Misconduct Reports

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  

 

Future Goals  

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.  

 

Notes

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.  

 

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Black Lives Matter

Thursday, June 11th, 2020

The Western Literature Association (WLA) is in solidarity with Black communities, after the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, and the ongoing pattern of systemic racism and injustice that targets black and brown bodies. We recognize, as well, that the United States is built on a history of stolen lands and bodies and that Indigenous people, as well as other people of color, are targeted by racial violence. In light of these dark realities, we support the right to freedom of speech and the outcry against continuing patterns of government and police violence that has led to protests across the nation. They are both righteous and necessary. 
 
As an organization, the WLA supports those fighting the racism, historical oppression, and structural injustices so deeply embedded in the United States. We mourn those who have been murdered as well as the senseless violence enacted against those voicing their grief and anger. 
 
This is more than our commitment to celebrating the diverse voices and experiences of the American West: it is also our duty as an organization with its own social privilege. With recent WLA conferences held in Minneapolis (2017) and St. Louis (2018), we have enjoyed the hospitality of the communities that were home to George Floyd, Philando Castile, and Michael Brown. In their memory, we say their names and condemn the acts of violence that ended their lives. The institutions and laws of this country have failed individuals and communities of color, and we recognize the need to address such systemic racism and every act of violence it engenders.  
 
WLA is donating a portion of the registration fees from our upcoming conference meeting to an organization dedicated to social justice, antiracism, and the promotion of equitable political and social practices for Black communities to demonstrate our solidarity. We also encourage scholars to continue their support of Black communities in their classrooms; as educators we can facilitate difficult but necessary conversations and through our syllabi provide spaces for Black voices.
 
#BlackLivesMatter

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Black Lives Matter

Wednesday, June 10th, 2020

The Western Literature Association (WLA) is in solidarity with Black communities, after the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, and the ongoing pattern of systemic racism and injustice that targets black and brown bodies. We recognize, as well, that the United States is built on a history of stolen lands and bodies and that Indigenous people, as well as other people of color, are targeted by racial violence. In light of these dark realities, we support the right to freedom of speech and the outcry against continuing patterns of government and police violence that has led to protests across the nation. They are both righteous and necessary. 
 
As an organization, the WLA supports those fighting the racism, historical oppression, and structural injustices so deeply embedded in the United States. We mourn those who have been murdered as well as the senseless violence enacted against those voicing their grief and anger. 
 
This is more than our commitment to celebrating the diverse voices and experiences of the American West: it is also our duty as an organization with its own social privilege. With recent WLA conferences held in Minneapolis (2017) and St. Louis (2018), we have enjoyed the hospitality of the communities that were home to George Floyd, Philando Castile, and Michael Brown. In their memory, we say their names and condemn the acts of violence that ended their lives. The institutions and laws of this country have failed individuals and communities of color, and we recognize the need to address such systemic racism and every act of violence it engenders.  
 
The WLA donated a portion of the registration fees from the 2020 conference meeting to an organization dedicated to social justice, antiracism, and the promotion of equitable political and social practices for Black communities to demonstrate our solidarity. We also encourage scholars to continue their support of Black communities in their classrooms; as educators we can facilitate difficult but necessary conversations and through our syllabi provide spaces for Black voices.
 
#BlackLivesMatter

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WLA Conference 2022

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.


NEW INFO:
SATURDAY EXCURSION:
Trip to the Randall Davey Audubon Center & Sanctuary
About three miles east of the Plaza lies one of Santa Fe’s hidden gems, the Randall Davey Audubon Center & Sanctuary. This Saturday afternoon excursion, coordinated by Martin Padget, will consist of a visit to the gardens of the Audubon Center, where 190 species of birds make use of the Sanctuary’s 135 acres of land. 
 
We’ll meet at the Audubon Center at 2 pm (transportation will be coordinated by Martin). We’ll then walk the Nature Conservancy’s Santa Fe Canyon Preserve Trail, which can be joined from the Audubon Center. This 1.5-mile interpretive trail takes hikers into a restored riparian environment through which the Santa Fe River and to which beavers have returned. 
 
For those who wish to stretch their legs further, there will be an opportunity to walk a section of the Dale Balls Trails. 


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:

Craig Dan Goseyun (San Carlos Apache), Apache Mountain Spirit Dancer (Courtesy Tourism Santa Fe)

Craig Dan Goseyun (San Carlos Apache), Apache Mountain Spirit Dancer (Courtesy Tourism Santa Fe)

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.

POSTER SUBMISSIONS ACCEPTED THROUGH SEPTEMBER 15, 2022. (Paper and panel submissions closed.) Abstracts of 200 words or less should be submitted via ConfTool: https://www.conftool.pro/wla-conference-2022
[Note: You must create a new password for this year’s submission.]

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WLA Archives

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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Past President’s Address 1993

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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Tables of Contents 2014 to mid-2021

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: Geronimo4wheelwarpony, 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 Mockingbirds Laughter: Non-Indian Removals in Laura Ingalls Wilders 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

 

 

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Institutional Subscriptions

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.

 

Institutional Subscription Rates

 

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The Dorys Crow Grover Awards

Friday, June 12th, 2015

In 1966, Washington State University graduate student Dorys Crow Grover joined the fledgling Western Literature Association and started attending its conferences. From her books on WLA’s first Distinguished Achievement Award recipient, Vardis Fisher, to her work on Hemingway and Graves, Professor Grover helped to develop the field of western American literary studies. After teaching for over two decades at East Texas State University, Professor Grover retired in 1993, splitting her time between Texas and Pendleton, Oregon, where she grew up.

One of her doctoral students, Joyce Kinkead, Professor of English at Utah State University, created the Dorys Crow Grover Awards in recognition of her mentor’s dedication to both western American literature and to graduate students. She funded two awards until Dr. Grover’s passing at 101 in 2023.

The WLA is happy to announce the continuation of the Dorys Crow Grover Awards, with support from the WLA and Nic Witschi.

Two graduate students whose papers given at the conference contribute to our critical understandings of region, place, and space in western American literatures will receive a $200 cash prize and a conference banquet ticket.

Creative work is not considered for the Dorys Crow Grover Awards.

Please submit an essay (not exceeding 15 pages) that you plan to deliver at the conference with a cover letter indicating that you wish to be considered for the Dorys Crow Grover Award. 

Email your submission to Bill Handley, chair of the Dorys Crow Grover Judging Committee, with the subject line “GROVER AWARD SUBMISSION.”

Deadline for submission: August 1, 2023.

The award consists of a $200 cash prize plus a banquet ticket.

You may submit the same paper for the Taylor Award, if you wish.

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. 


The Dorys Grover Award Recipients

YearRecipient
2022Dylan Couch, University of Idaho
2022Cara Schwartz, University of Saskatchewan
2021Sarah Jane Kerwin, University of Michigan—Ann Arbor
2020Sarah Nolan, University of Southern California
2020Renee Sprinkle, West Texas A&M University
2019Maria Alberto, University of Utah
2019Travis Franks, Arizona State University
2018Meagan Meylor, University of Southern California
2018Amanda Monteleone, University of Texas at Arlington
2017April Anson
2017Lisa Fink
2016Amy Gore
2016Michael Olausen
2015William V. Lombardi
2015Michael P. Taylor
2014Brittany Henry
2014Lisa Locascio
2014Ashley Reis

 

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WLA/Charles Redd Center K-12 Teaching Awards

Monday, April 6th, 2015

WLA/Charles Redd Center K-12 Teaching Awards


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.

 

Required application materials

•    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

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:

•    Women writers of the American West
•    American Indian authors
•    Latina/o authors
•    Creative slants to teaching the “canonical” authors of the American West
•    Interdisciplinary teaching plans as well as approaches to teaching drama of and about the American West
•    Environmental Writing
•    Instructional plans that integrate the conference theme, “Home on the Rez

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.


 

Interested in viewing the winning instructional plans of previous years?

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”

**********

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WLA and Its Affiliations

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.


Modern Language Association (MLA)

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.

CFP: WLA-sponsored panel at the MLA Conference 2015: Literatures of the North American West

Affiliate Organization Session of the Western Literature Association

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.

Please send a 300-word abstract to Elisabeth Bayley at wlamla2015@gmail.com
Deadline for Submission is March 7, 2014
cfp categories:
american cultural studies and historical approaches
ecocriticism and environmental studies
gender studies and sexuality
travel writing

American Literature Association (ALA)

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.


Association for the Study of Literature & Environment (ASLE)

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.

 

 

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Reading Suggestions (for “Not-to-Be-Missed Contemporary Fiction of the American West,” 1990-2000)

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

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Tables of Contents 2010-2013

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

WESTERN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Tables of Contents

2010-2013

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 1908–09with 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

 

 

 

Posted in TOC, wal-research | Comments Off on Tables of Contents 2010-2013

  • Western Literature Association (WLA)

    Founded in 1965, the Western Literature Association (WLA) is a non-profit, scholarly association that promotes the study of the diverse literature and cultures of the North American West, past and present.

  • Western American Literature (WAL)

    (The Journal)

    Published by the Western Literature Association, Western American Literature is the leading journal in western American literary studies.

  • Black Lives Matter

    The Western Literature Association (WLA) is in solidarity with Black communities, after the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, and the ongoing pattern of systemic racism and injustice that targets black and brown bodies. ...http://www.westernlit.org/black-lives-matter/