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West of 98: Living and Writing the New American West
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.
392 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 2, 2013
This is a book that peaks early. The contributions by Erdrich, Woiwode, and Watson are among the best in the anthology, and they are frontloaded. West of 98 will be useful to me as a reference in discussions of the sense of place, but the overall quality of essays does not hold up. The most common problem is that an author forces the issue. He thinks, hey, I have to say something notable about place, and so he pulls out the purple stop, or is deliberately provocative in a tinny way. How else to explain a sentence like "Sometimes I crave the Western earth like food, or breath, or sex, or water"? And yet there are insights scattered through the volume, as when John Clayton points out that is newcomers to the West who are likely to buy into its mythology and, therefore, become involved citizens. Or when Larry Watson points out that even if an author does not embrace the mythos of place, he might still have characters who do. And I had to cheer when Larry Woiwode renounced citizenship in the Midwest and declaimed his distaste for the very word. Maybe I should have awarded 4 stars just for that.
June 7, 2016
great compilation of essays on the west of usa. some are excerpts of older or other essays, some seem to be specially for this book. the editor is daughter-in-law of wallace. here is an excerpt from Kent Meyers "Naked time": "Growing up, i imagined ancient time through a lens of ice. But in the Midwest the truly ancient lies inaccessible beneath ten feet of topsoil. The door to imaging it is blocked by glacial ice. But cross the Missouri River--a single step, the glacier's abrupt, tumbling terminus---and that door stands unhinged. Time yaws, drops away. Twenty thousand years lurch into a hundred million. It's the difference between a borrow pit and the Grand Canyon.....
In the South Dakota Badlands, dinosaur and ancient turtle bones, the beings of the ancient Bearpaw Sea, drip up from the ground as eroding rains drip down: another world as surely as those we might travel to through space. Walking in the Badlands there is always the possibility you will stumble upon time drowsing naked, floating up from the slow liquid soil as if from green, algaeic waters."
In the South Dakota Badlands, dinosaur and ancient turtle bones, the beings of the ancient Bearpaw Sea, drip up from the ground as eroding rains drip down: another world as surely as those we might travel to through space. Walking in the Badlands there is always the possibility you will stumble upon time drowsing naked, floating up from the slow liquid soil as if from green, algaeic waters."
December 27, 2011
http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainme...
Book review: West of 98 and Best of the West 2011
By JENNY SHANK Special Contributor, The Dallas Morning News
Published: 23 December 2011 07:01 PM
“Westerners have been reminded … that we are interesting in some of the same ways that cavemen or headhunters are interesting,” writes Montana novelist Russell Rowland in West of 98, one of two new anthologies published by the University of Texas Press. But what’s clear from these collections, one of fiction and the other of essays, is that Westerners are curiosities to ourselves as much as we are to outsiders.
The 20 stories in the fiction collection, Best of the West 2011, display a wide range of styles and structures, with a few common themes recurring — the primacy of characters’ interaction with gorgeous, yet treacherous, Western landscapes; their penchant for road trips; and their frequent bouts of criminal behavior.
K.L. Cook vividly imagines a boy’s encounter with legendary outlaws in Depression-era Texas in the moving “Bonnie and Clyde in the Backyard.” Meth addicts steal the identities of unsuspecting Nebraskans in Judy Doenges’ “Melinda.” A bereaved couple unknowingly enjoys a moment of respite amid the ongoing drug war in Nuevo Laredo in Peter LaSalle’s elegant “Lunch Across the Bridge,” while an Oklahoma couple reignites old sparks when they play chicken with oncoming traffic in Aaron Gwyn’s startling “Drive.”
In Ron Carlson’s “Escape from Prison,” an embezzling banker retreats to his Colorado cabin after his malfeasance is discovered. The narrator of Claire Vaye Watkins’ clever, epistolary “The Last Thing We Need” reveals a shooting that has haunted him his entire life. In Shawn Vestal’s innovative “Opposition In All Things,” Rulon Warren returns from World War I to the Idaho Mormon community where he grew up and is possessed by the spirit of a gun-toting pioneer forebear, who urges him to go down with his gun blasting.
The essayists featured in West of 98, which the novelist Rowland edited with Lynn Stegner, are of a more law-abiding sort than the characters in Best of the West. Fans of contemporary Western American literature will recognize most of the authors — the editors gathered contributions from many of the most eloquent writers in the region.
They approach the question of what it means to be a Westerner from a variety of angles — geological, environmental, personal and political, to name a few. Some essayists pick an unexpected aspect of the topic to approach, such as in Louise Erdrich’s lyrical tribute to prairie grass (“Big Grass”) and Walter Kirn’s cranky fist shake toward cruel Montana winds (“Livingston Blows”).
West of 98 contains several fist-shaking essays, most of them lamenting environmental degradation. It’s the same as it ever was, writes Patricia Nelson Limerick: “Mourning the devastation of ecosystems, the loss of free-flowing rivers, the homogenization of once distinctive communities, and the constriction of a legendary freedom, Westerners have established themselves as the master practitioners of eulogy and elegy.”
But there are just as many funny essays, particularly those that confront Western stereotypes. Tom Miller moved from the East Coast to Tucson in his 20s and made a living out of selling colorful stories to The New York Times. What “editors valued most was stories [that] evoked the Old West with dirt roads, dusty boots, and barbed wire.” Miller hung a sign over his typewriter: “Remember: Cowboys amble, businessmen stride, mariachis stroll.”
Montana-based Jim Harrison notes in “Geopiety,” “If the mountains were actually ennobling I would have noticed it by now.” In “On Language: A Short Meditation,” Kim Barnes misses the way she and her Idaho-by-way-of-Oklahoma family used to talk: “My people’s language was crick and ain’t and every g dropped from ing.” And Colorado novelist Laura Pritchett confesses, “I do not like to gut fish,” in “Cowboy up, Cupcake? No Thanks,” her rousing call for an expansion of the types of characters featured in the literature of the West.
Pritchett might enjoy Alyssa Knickerbocker’s tender and charming story, “Same As It Was When You Left” about a 13-year-old girl in Washington state who witnesses her family dissolve. It’s a fresh take on the age-old theme of losing a parent, with nary a Western stereotype to be found.
The strong new voices in Best of the West 2011, alongside perennial favorites such as Carlson, Antonya Nelson and Rick Bass, whose work appears in both collections, prove there’s no need to write an elegy for the literature of the region.
Jenny Shank was the Books Editor of New West and her first novel, The Ringer, was a finalist for this year’s Reading the West Award.
West of 98
Living and Writing the New American West
Edited by Lynn Stegner and Russell Rowland
(University of Texas Press, $21.95)
Best of the West 2011
New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri
Edited by James Thomas and D. Seth Horton, foreword by Ana Castillo
(University of Texas Press, $21.95)
Book review: West of 98 and Best of the West 2011
By JENNY SHANK Special Contributor, The Dallas Morning News
Published: 23 December 2011 07:01 PM
“Westerners have been reminded … that we are interesting in some of the same ways that cavemen or headhunters are interesting,” writes Montana novelist Russell Rowland in West of 98, one of two new anthologies published by the University of Texas Press. But what’s clear from these collections, one of fiction and the other of essays, is that Westerners are curiosities to ourselves as much as we are to outsiders.
The 20 stories in the fiction collection, Best of the West 2011, display a wide range of styles and structures, with a few common themes recurring — the primacy of characters’ interaction with gorgeous, yet treacherous, Western landscapes; their penchant for road trips; and their frequent bouts of criminal behavior.
K.L. Cook vividly imagines a boy’s encounter with legendary outlaws in Depression-era Texas in the moving “Bonnie and Clyde in the Backyard.” Meth addicts steal the identities of unsuspecting Nebraskans in Judy Doenges’ “Melinda.” A bereaved couple unknowingly enjoys a moment of respite amid the ongoing drug war in Nuevo Laredo in Peter LaSalle’s elegant “Lunch Across the Bridge,” while an Oklahoma couple reignites old sparks when they play chicken with oncoming traffic in Aaron Gwyn’s startling “Drive.”
In Ron Carlson’s “Escape from Prison,” an embezzling banker retreats to his Colorado cabin after his malfeasance is discovered. The narrator of Claire Vaye Watkins’ clever, epistolary “The Last Thing We Need” reveals a shooting that has haunted him his entire life. In Shawn Vestal’s innovative “Opposition In All Things,” Rulon Warren returns from World War I to the Idaho Mormon community where he grew up and is possessed by the spirit of a gun-toting pioneer forebear, who urges him to go down with his gun blasting.
The essayists featured in West of 98, which the novelist Rowland edited with Lynn Stegner, are of a more law-abiding sort than the characters in Best of the West. Fans of contemporary Western American literature will recognize most of the authors — the editors gathered contributions from many of the most eloquent writers in the region.
They approach the question of what it means to be a Westerner from a variety of angles — geological, environmental, personal and political, to name a few. Some essayists pick an unexpected aspect of the topic to approach, such as in Louise Erdrich’s lyrical tribute to prairie grass (“Big Grass”) and Walter Kirn’s cranky fist shake toward cruel Montana winds (“Livingston Blows”).
West of 98 contains several fist-shaking essays, most of them lamenting environmental degradation. It’s the same as it ever was, writes Patricia Nelson Limerick: “Mourning the devastation of ecosystems, the loss of free-flowing rivers, the homogenization of once distinctive communities, and the constriction of a legendary freedom, Westerners have established themselves as the master practitioners of eulogy and elegy.”
But there are just as many funny essays, particularly those that confront Western stereotypes. Tom Miller moved from the East Coast to Tucson in his 20s and made a living out of selling colorful stories to The New York Times. What “editors valued most was stories [that] evoked the Old West with dirt roads, dusty boots, and barbed wire.” Miller hung a sign over his typewriter: “Remember: Cowboys amble, businessmen stride, mariachis stroll.”
Montana-based Jim Harrison notes in “Geopiety,” “If the mountains were actually ennobling I would have noticed it by now.” In “On Language: A Short Meditation,” Kim Barnes misses the way she and her Idaho-by-way-of-Oklahoma family used to talk: “My people’s language was crick and ain’t and every g dropped from ing.” And Colorado novelist Laura Pritchett confesses, “I do not like to gut fish,” in “Cowboy up, Cupcake? No Thanks,” her rousing call for an expansion of the types of characters featured in the literature of the West.
Pritchett might enjoy Alyssa Knickerbocker’s tender and charming story, “Same As It Was When You Left” about a 13-year-old girl in Washington state who witnesses her family dissolve. It’s a fresh take on the age-old theme of losing a parent, with nary a Western stereotype to be found.
The strong new voices in Best of the West 2011, alongside perennial favorites such as Carlson, Antonya Nelson and Rick Bass, whose work appears in both collections, prove there’s no need to write an elegy for the literature of the region.
Jenny Shank was the Books Editor of New West and her first novel, The Ringer, was a finalist for this year’s Reading the West Award.
West of 98
Living and Writing the New American West
Edited by Lynn Stegner and Russell Rowland
(University of Texas Press, $21.95)
Best of the West 2011
New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri
Edited by James Thomas and D. Seth Horton, foreword by Ana Castillo
(University of Texas Press, $21.95)
January 3, 2018
This anthology has a wide-ranging and marvelous selection of essays about the West. I have thoroughly enjoyed it.
October 24, 2013
The book is good, but it doesn't say much that already hasn't already been said. Not much new in this volume on the new west.
July 27, 2016
Diverse collection of short essays, poems, and reflections from Western writers on the American West - some are great, some are not so great.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews