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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- Big Grass -- Wealth of the West -- Whose West? Which West? West of What? -- Viewed from Ground Level -- Naked Time -- Why the West? -- The Fence -- Two or Three Places -- The Light at the Bottom of the Mind -- Points -- Between the Sans Bois and the Kiamichi -- Excerpt from Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen -- Slurry, Drainage, Frontage Road -- Geopiety -- River Sequence I–VII -- Wolf and Coyote and Kumbaya -- What We Leave -- Reading Montana -- Ranching in Suburbia -- Chasing the Lamb -- The Summer of Now -- The Native Home of Governors on Horseback -- The Way Home -- The Imaginary Book of Cave Paintings -- Livingston Blows -- Where Should We Be? -- Self-Portrait as the Strong and Silent Type -- Blood West -- Motherlands and Mother Tongues: Five Reflections on Language and Landscape -- Blame It on Rancho Deluxe -- The Conceit of Girls -- Pinus Contorta -- Where the Burn Meets the Dead -- Two Illustrations of the West, the first being second- hand, the second first -- Cowboy Up, Cupcake? No Thanks -- The Fatal West -- A Shape- Shifting Land -- Moving West, Writing East -- Tasting a Sense of Place in the Arid West -- Entre Mundos/Between Worlds -- Matins in the Cathedral of Wind -- On Language: A Short Meditation -- Utah Cabin Under Heaven, July 3 -- Plucked from the Grave -- Two Poems: -- Tumbling Toward the Sea -- Friendship -- Red -- Growing Up Western -- No Direction Home -- Beyond This Place There Be Dragons -- City of Nomads, City of Second Chances -- Places Names -- East to the West -- Three Poems: -- Celilo Falls -- Dark Light in the West: Racism and Reconciliation -- Dirty Stories -- Two Poems: -- “It’s Like They Tilted the Whole Country East- to- West. And Everything that Wasn’t Tied- Down Slid” -- Star Struck -- Días de los Muertos -- The San Francisco Psyche -- Three Poems: -- Maria Evangeliste -- Headed -- The Sense of No Place -- Biographies 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
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