Linda Wagner-Martin Classroom Issues and Strategies Welch's fiction is immediately accessible.
Students find it powerful.
They shirk from its relentlessly depressing impact, but Welch has written Winter in the Blood , The Death of Jim Loney , and much of his poetry to create that impact. His writing is protest literature, so skillfully achieved that it seems apolitical. Sometimes hostile to the completely new, students today seem to be willing to rely on canon choices. Once Welch is placed for them, they respond with empathy to his fiction. The general setting of the culture, the hardships generations of Native Americans have learned to live with, the socioeconomic issues make deciphering characters' attitudes easier.