West of 98 : living and writing the new American West / edited by Lynn Stegner and Russell Rowland ; with an introduction by Lynn Stegner.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Stegner, Lynn, editor, author of introduction, etc.

Rowland, Russell, editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--West (U.S.).

American literature.

West (U.S.)--Literary collections.

West (U.S.).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (419 p.)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Austin : University of Texas Press, 2011.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

What does it mean to be a westerner? With all the mythology that has grown up about the American West, is it even possible to describe "how it was, how it is, here, in the West—just that," in the words of Lynn Stegner? Starting with that challenge, Stegner and Russell Rowland invited several dozen members of the western literary tribe to write about living in the West and being a western writer in particular. West of 98 gathers sixty-six literary testimonies, in essays and poetry, from a stellar collection of writers who represent every state west of the 98th parallel—a kind of Greek chorus of the most prominent voices in western literature today, who seek to "characterize the West as each of us grew to know it, and, equally important, the West that is still becoming." In West of 98, western writers speak to the ways in which the West imprints itself on the people who live there, as well as how the people of the West create the personality of the region. The writers explore the western landscape—how it has been revered and abused across centuries—and the inescapable limitations its aridity puts on all dreams of conquest and development. They dismantle the boosterism of manifest destiny and the cowboy and mountain man ethos of every-man-for-himself, and show instead how we must create new narratives of cooperation if we are to survive in this spare and beautiful country. The writers seek to define the essence of both actual and metaphoric wilderness as they journey toward a West that might honestly be called home. A collective declaration not of our independence but of our interdependence with the land and with each other, West of 98 opens up a whole new panorama of the western experience.

Contents:

Big grass / Louise Erdrich

Wealth of the west / Larry Woiwode

Whose west? Which west? West of what? / Larry Watson

Viewed from ground level / Dan O'Brien

Naked time / Kent Meyers

Why the west? / Ron Hansen

The fence / Jonis Agee

Or three places / Antonya Nelson

The light at the bottom of the mind / Rick Bass

Points / Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

Between the Sans Bois and the Kiamichi / Jim Barnes

Excerpt from Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen / Larry McMurtry

Slurry, drainage, frontage road / Susanna Sonnenberg

Geopiety ; River sequence I/VII / Jim Harrison

Wolf and coyote and kumbaya / Gary Ferguson

What we leave / Judy Blunt

Reading Montana / Ed Kemmick

Ranching in suburbia / Dan Aadland

Chasing the lamb / Russell Rowland

The summer of now / Annick Smith

The native home of governors on horseback / John Clayton

The way home / Willard Wyman

The imaginary book of cave paintings / Melissa Kwasny

Livingston blows / Walter Kirn

Where should we be? / William Kittredge

Self-portrait as the strong and silent type / Alyson Hagy

Blood west / Kenneth Lincoln

Motherlands and mother tongues : five reflections on language and landscape / Lee Ann Roripaugh

Blame it on Rancho Deluxe / C. J. Box

The conceit of girls / Teresa Jordan

Pinus contorta / Beth Loffreda

Where the burn meets the dead / Gretel Ehrlich

Illustrations of the west : the first being second-hand, the second first / Stephen Graham Jones

Cowboy up, cupcake? No thanks / Laura Pritchett

The fatal west / Patricia Nelson Limerick

A shape-shifting land / Page Lambert

Moving west, writing east / Tom Miller

Tasting a sense of place in the arid west / Gary Nabhan

Entre mundos/Between worlds / Denise Chávez

Matins in the cathedral of wind / David Lee

On language : a short meditation / Kim Barnes

Utah cabin under heaven, July 3 / Ron Carlson

Plucked from the grave / Debra Gwartney

Two poems / Robert Wrigley

Tumbling toward the sea / Stephen Trimble

Friendship / Stephen Trimble

Red / Amy Irvine

Growing up western / Jim Hepworth

No direction home / Charles Bowden

Beyond this place there be dragons / Sally Denton

City of nomads, city of second chances / Douglas Unger

Places names / Ursula K. Le Guin

East to the west / John Daniel

Three poems / David Guterson

Celilo Falls / Craig Lesley

A dark light in the west : racism and reconciliation / Barry Lopez

Dirty stories / David Mas Masumoto

Two poems / Gary Snyder

"It's like they tilted the whole country east-to-west and everything that wasn't tied-down slid" / Louis B. Jones

Star struck / Peter Fish

Dias de los muertos / Maxine Hong Kingston

The San Francisco psyche / Harold Gilliam

Three poems / Jane Hirshfield

Maria Evangeliste / Greg Sarris

Headed / Kris Saknussemm

The sense of no place / Page Stegner.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-292-73585-5

OCLC:

900540630