West of 98
Subtitle: living and writing the new American West
By: edited by Russell Rowland and Lynn Stegner ; with an introduction by Lynn Stegner
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Austin
Language: eng
Number of pages: 392
ISBN-13: 9780292723436; 9780292726864; 9780292735859
Subjects: Literary collections; American literature
Other titles: West of Ninety-eight
Description: 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.
Table of contents: title: Big grass / Louise Erdrich; title: Wealth of the west / Larry Woiwode; title: Whose west? Which west? West of what? / Larry Watson; title: Viewed from ground level / Dan O'Brien; title: Naked time / Kent Meyers; title: Why the west? / Ron Hansen; title: The fence / Jonis Agee; title: Or three places / Antonya Nelson; title: The light at the bottom of the mind / Rick Bass; title: Points / Allison Adelle Hedge Coke; title: Between the Sans Bois and the Kiamichi / Jim Barnes; title: Excerpt from Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen / Larry McMurtry; title: Slurry, drainage, frontage road / Susanna Sonnenberg; title: Geopiety ; River sequence I/VII / Jim Harrison; title: Wolf and coyote and kumbaya / Gary Ferguson; title: What we leave / Judy Blunt; title: Reading Montana / Ed Kemmick; title: Ranching in suburbia / Dan Aadland; title: Chasing the lamb / Russell Rowland; title: The summer of now / Annick Smith; title: The native home of governors on horseback / John Clayton; title: The way home / Willard Wyman; title: The imaginary book of cave paintings / Melissa Kwasny; title: Livingston blows / Walter Kirn; title: Where should we be? / William Kittredge; title: Self-portrait as the strong and silent type / Alyson Hagy; title: Blood west / Kenneth Lincoln; title: Motherlands and mother tongues : five reflections on language and landscape / Lee Ann Roripaugh; title: Blame it on Rancho Deluxe / C. J. Box; title: The conceit of girls / Teresa Jordan; title: Pinus contorta / Beth Loffreda; title: Where the burn meets the dead / Gretel Ehrlich; title: Illustrations of the west : the first being second-hand, the second first / Stephen Graham Jones; title: Cowboy up, cupcake? No thanks / Laura Pritchett; title: The fatal west / Patricia Nelson Limerick; title: A shape-shifting land / Page Lambert; title: Moving west, writing east / Tom Miller; title: Tasting a sense of place in the arid west / Gary Nabhan; title: Entre mundos/Between worlds / Denise Chávez; title: Matins in the cathedral of wind / David Lee; title: On language : a short meditation / Kim Barnes; title: Utah cabin under heaven, July 3 / Ron Carlson; title: Plucked from the grave / Debra Gwartney; title: Two poems / Robert Wrigley; title: Tumbling toward the sea / Stephen Trimble; title: Friendship / Stephen Trimble; title: Red / Amy Irvine; title: Growing up western / Jim Hepworth; title: No direction home / Charles Bowden; title: Beyond this place there be dragons / Sally Denton; title: City of nomads, city of second chances / Douglas Unger; title: Places names / Ursula K. Le Guin; title: East to the west / John Daniel; title: Three poems / David Guterson; title: Celilo Falls / Craig Lesley; title: A dark light in the west : racism and reconciliation / Barry Lopez; title: Dirty stories / David Mas Masumoto; title: Two poems / Gary Snyder; title: "It's like they tilted the whole country east-to-west and everything that wasn't tied-down slid" / Louis B. Jones; title: Star struck / Peter Fish; title: Dias de los muertos / Maxine Hong Kingston; title: The San Francisco psyche / Harold Gilliam; title: Three poems / Jane Hirshfield; title: Maria Evangeliste / Greg Sarris; title: Headed / Kris Saknussemm; title: The sense of no place / Page Stegner.