Editor’s note: This is the winning essay from our annual student essay contest. This year’s theme was “How I Became a Westerner.” Learn more about student subscription offers here. It took going East for me to understand my home in the West. Like the narrator of Steinbeck’s East of Eden, my thoughts were always drawn […]
Communities
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
The soul in Suite 100: A ghost story
I am from, as they say, an “old” New Mexico Anglo family. I did not grow up in New Mexico, but have always thought myself from there — tied to the place by blood and property and predilection, and by the way the smell of sagebrush and cast of light remind me that I am […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Existential nomad: A profile of author Ruben Martinez
In Rubén Martinez’s new memoir, Desert America: Boom and Bust in the New Old West, the author examines the fertility kit that he and his wife had ordered, taking particular interest in its clean hypodermic syringes and needles. It is 2007, and the couple is living beneath northern New Mexico’s famed Black Mesa, in Velarde, […]
Posted inWotr
Singing about a land where free rivers flow on
Woody Guthrie is 100 years old this year, and alive as you or me. Music has a way of cutting the corner on mortality. What do you hear in his songs about America? I’m swept into a tangle of love, gratitude, unease, anger, respect, heartbreak, awe, curiosity and joy. His songs contain that jumble of […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
The West in my blood: A profile of Eddie Chuculate
Two years ago, on a cool October evening at Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts, Native author Eddie Chuculate read his story “Dear Shorty” aloud. He spoke with a rolling rhythm, peppered by alliteration. With his head cocked, glasses in one hand and the book almost touching his nose, Chuculate held his listeners entranced. […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
The fossil record: How my family found a home in the West
When I was a kid, I sometimes wished that my family went on normal vacations. Normal was what my elementary and middle-school classmates did over spring and summer break, flying to wave-kissed beaches or hitting flashy amusement parks. Not my family: My parents would load my two half-sisters, my brother and me into a big […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
A tribute to solitude and community: A review of Tributary
Clair Martin is marked, not only by the “purple-red stain” that spreads across her left cheek and on down her neck, but by being an orphan with a preference for solitude — inconceivable to the Mormons of Brigham City in 19th-century Utah Territory, where she’s deposited at just 6 years old. Valued only as a […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
The wild without and within: A review of Wilderness
Wilderness pulls no punches. The novel’s descriptions are so visceral, the main character’s struggles so gut wrenching, that it demands an equally full-bodied response from its reader. Within the book’s pages are violence, yes, and death, sickness and guilt –– all the hard things. But the most powerfully moving moments are those in which dark […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
An epic tale of true crime in the West: A review of Hard Twisted
In 1994, during a hiking trip in southeast Utah, a Pasadena trial lawyer named C. Joseph Greaves and his wife stumbled on two human skulls in a remote red-rock canyon. Each skull had what looked like a bullet hole through the back. Greaves became obsessed with untangling the story behind those skulls, spending more than […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Vagabond writer Craig Childs on 20,000 years of wanderlust
Savoonga is the place to be on the Fourth of July. The village is a cluster of roofs on the north side of St. Lawrence Island, a treeless hump of capes and dormant volcanoes rising out of the Bering Sea, battered by Arctic weather. The Native Yup’iks here celebrate the holiday with more gusto than […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Best of the West: Our favorite books
Western authors and HCN staffers share their most-loved writing about the region in this list of favorites. Isabella Bird and Katie Lee: two of my favorite Western women, tough, brave and eloquent. Bird, an Englishwoman, traveled from California to Colorado in the 1870s, often alone on horseback. Her richly descriptive letters became A Lady’s Life […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Western literary journals give voice to story and place
“We are out loud and proud as a regional journal,” says poet Maria Melendez, publisher of Pilgrimage, a literary magazine based in the former steel-mill city of Pueblo, Colo. “Our mission is to nurture the voices of the Southwest — and beyond.” Literary journals like Pilgrimage are devoted to publishing inspiring and innovative fiction, nonfiction […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Celebrating what remains: A review of The Dog Stars
Award-winning adventure writer Peter Heller sets his debut novel, The Dog Stars, in an apocalypse-stricken Colorado, where Hig, one of the planet’s few survivors, flies around in an antique plane with a dog as his copilot. To this compelling frame, Heller adds adrenaline-pumping adventure, deep philosophical undercurrents … and a bit of love. In the […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Suffering and freedom in a microcosm: A review of San Miguel
California writer T.C. Boyle’s 14th novel, San Miguel, continues his exploration of the Channel Islands, off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif., which began with last year’s When The Killing’s Done. This time, Boyle focuses on windswept San Miguel Island and the histories of two very different families who inhabit it between 1888 and 1945. […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Fall books offer journeys of the mind
Here in western Colorado, most days unfold under azure skies and stubbornly brilliant sunshine. When rains do visit, they’re usually brief — an hour, or maybe two. So when autumn unexpectedly shrouds our valleys under thick gray clouds that dribble for days on end, our world feels utterly transformed — the pillowy, unfamiliar heavens almost […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Finding funk in Western Colorado, sadistic races, corrections
The mornings are getting chilly; local harvests are at their peak. Up in the mountains, the aspens have changed color early and winter is tapping at the door. As the color moved down the mountains, many visitors came with it, taking advantage of this lovely time of year to drop by Paonia. Susan Nunn visited […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Student essay: How I became a Westerner and why it doesn’t matter
Editor’s note: This is a runner-up essay from our annual student essay contest. This year’s theme was “How I Became a Westerner.” Learn more about student subscription offers here. I grew up in Fircrest, Wash., population 6,497, a small suburb of Tacoma. There’s a house on our street with an unkempt front yard; the neighbors despise […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Student essay: Lost and found in the sagebrush
Editor’s note: This is a runner-up essay from our annual student essay contest. This year’s theme was “How I Became a Westerner.” Learn more about student subscription offers here. Artemisia tridentata. Commonly known as sagebrush, it’s seen as ugly, a terribly widespread eyesore — a dead-looking, twisted piece of scraggly shrubbery that fills the landscape […]
Posted inWotr
Living with autism
School is back in session, and once again I’m grateful. As the parent of an autistic son, I’ve become comfortable with the notion of school as not just a learning opportunity for Harrison, but also as respite care as well. When Harrison is back in school, I have a block of time to work. It’s […]
Posted inHeard Around the West
Bobcat kittens fall in love with firefighters
OREGON Every town needs something to be proud of. Portland not only has its own television show, Portlandia, but also a toilet. A very special toilet: Portland, if the L.A. Times is to be believed, has revolutionized the public loo, creating a minimalist, solar-powered bathroom that boasts its own Facebook page. It supposedly solves the age-old […]