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Western Writers Write The West

University of Texas Press

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: Living and Writing the New American West, 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.

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Lynn Stegner

Lynn Stegner is the author of five works of fiction, an extended critical introduction to her father-in-law’s short fiction, the Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner, as well as editing and writing the foreword to a Penguin edition entitled Wallace Stegner: On Teaching and Writing Fiction. She has taught writing at the University of California, the University of Vermont, the National University of Ireland-Galway, the Santa Fe Writers’ Workshop, and Stanford University where she currently teaches for the Continuing Studies Program. She divides her time between San Francisco, California and Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.

Russell Rowland

Russell Rowland is the author of three novels and one nonfiction book, Fifty-Six Counties: A Montana Journey. His second and third novels, The Watershed Years (Riverbend 2007) and High and Inside (Bangtail Press, 2012) were both finalists for the High Plains Book Award. He lives in Billings, Montana, where he teaches writing workshops and does private consultation with other writers.

Chérie Newman is a former arts and humanities producer and on-air host for Montana Public Radio, and a freelance writer. She founded and previously hosted a weekly literary program, The Write Question, which continues to air on several public radio stations; it is also available online at PRX.org and MTPR.org.
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