Writing Westward Podcast

A conversation with Sarah Deutsch about her book, Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and its Borders, 1898-1940 (University of Nebraska Press, 2022).

Sarah Deutsch is a professor of history at Duke University. Her book, Making a Modern U.S. West: The Contested Terrain of a Region and its Borders, 1898-1940, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2022 in the "History of the American West Series." Deutsch is also the author of Women and the City: Gender, Space and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 (Oxford University Press, 2000), From Ballots to Breadlines: American Women, 1920-1940 (Oxford University Press, 1994), and No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880-1940 (Oxford University Press, 1987).  

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A conversation with Sara Humphreys about her book, Manifest Destiny 2.0: Genre Trouble in Game Worlds (University of Nebraska Press, 2021).

Dr. Sara Humphreys is an assistant teaching professor of English at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. She holds a BA at Nipissing University in English, my MA at the University of Toronto in English, and my PhD at the University of Waterloo in English Language and Literature. Her most recent book, Manifest Destiny 2.0: Genre Trouble in Game Worlds was published by the University of Nebraska Press in the Postwestern Horizons Series in 2021.

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A conversation with James McGrath Morris about his new biography, Tony Hillerman: A Life (University of Oklahoma Press, 2021).

James McGrath Morris is a biographer and writer of narrative non-fiction. His biographies have been more than well-received, boasting a New York Times best-seller, winner of the Benjamin Hooks National Book Prize, and titles that the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post listed among the best books and biographies of the year. Today we talk about his most recent biography, Tony Hillerman: A Life, published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2021.

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A conversation with Ryanne Pilgeram about her new book, Pushed Out: Contested Development and Rural Gentrification in the US West, published by the University of Washington Press in 2021.

Ryanne Pilgeram is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Idaho.

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A conversation with Andrea Ross about her new book, Unnatural Selection: A Memoir of Adoption and Wilderness (CavanKerry Press, 2021).

Andrea Ross is a writer who currently teaches in the University Writing Program at the University of California at Davis. Her writing has appeared in various popular outlets and has been supported by fellowships and awards from the California Arts Council, the Mesa Refuge, and other organization. In earlier years she worked as a National Parks Service ranger and a wilderness guide. In 2021 CavanKerry Press published her book, Unnatural Selection: A Memoir of Adoption and Wilderness, which we are speaking about today. In this memoir Ross relates formative experiences in the outdoors and wilderness of the American West. With the perspective of hindsight, she weaves these together with the concurrent life events she had as an adoptee searching for her biological family. She sees how outdoor Western spaces provided her with a sense of belonging, identity, and family as she searched for her biological roots. It is an intimate and vulnerable exhibition that invites all of us to pause and reevaluate our relationship with the outdoors and explore what unexpected roles it has played in our own life journeys.

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A conversation with Erika Wolters and Brent Steel about their edited collection The Environmental Politics & Policy of Western Public Lands (Oregon State University Press, 2020).

Erika Allen Wolters (PhD, Oregon State University) is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of the Public Policy Undergraduate Program in the School of Public Policy at Oregon State University. Her research focuses on environmental behavior, adaptation and policy in response to resource use and conservation in an era of rapid climate change. Focusing primarily on the Western United States, Dr. Wolters examines the interface of science and policy, public lands issues, community resilience, contested natural resources, sustainable behavior, adaptive capacity, and policy regarding food, energy, and water.

Brent S. Steel (PhD, Washington State University) is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Public Policy Graduate Program at Oregon State University, which offers the Master of Public Policy, Executive Master of Public Policy, and the PhD in Public Policy. He teaches courses in science policy, public policy theory, rural policy, climate change politics, and energy policy. Professor Steel is also on the founding and executive boards for Vote Smart (https://votesmart.org), a nonpartisan and nonprofit voter education organization. 

Their collection of essays, The Environmental Politics & Policy of Western Public Lands was published by Oregon State University Press in 2020 but is also available digitally for free (and will be as they update it in the future) via OSU Open Educational Resources. This collection features writers from the fields of political science, public policy, environmental science, the law, and others. It is an excellent primer on a variety of intersecting topics that is powerful as a collection. Together, they demonstrate how interconnected our Western environmental problems (and solutions) are. The individual chapters are also valuable as stand-alone pieces.

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A conversation with historian Benjamin Hoy about his book A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands (Oxford University Press, 2021).

Benjamin Hoy is an Associate Professor of History and the director of the Historical GIS Lab at the University of Saskatchewan. He has published on a wide range of topic including Indigenous history, borderlands, game-based learning, Indigenous representations in board games, and extradition policy. Today we discuss his first book, A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border across Indigenous Lands (Oxford University Press, 2021). In it, Hoy examines the creation and enforcement of the Canadian-United States border between 1775 and 1939 and its impacts on the Indigenous residents whose land the border was created across. Rather than a dry administrative history of the border's creation, Hoy's text is driven by a focus on the lived experiences of the people at the border. The cast of characters is diverse and some of the stories are wild.   

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A conversation with Steven L. Peck about his novel The Tragedy of King Leere, the Goatherd of the La Sals (By Common Consent Press, 2019).

Steven L. Peck is an evolutionary biologist and associate professor in the College of Life Sciences at Brigham Young University. In addition to being a widely-published scholar in genomics, entomology, mathematical modeling, and other associated fields, Peck moonlights as a writer of creative fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and essays. These writings range from religion to the environment, and from magic realism to science fiction. Many are set in the American West, especially around his hometown landscapes of Moab, Utah. His novels and shorter works have won numerous awards. Most recently, the Association for Mormon Letters recognized his body of work with the 2021 Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters.

Peck's most recent novel, The Tragedy of King Leere, the Goatherd of the La Sals (By Common Consent Press, 2019) is an adaption of Shakespeare's King Leare. On the one hand, the outlines of the adaption are quite faithful to the original, but the futuristic setting in a post-apocalyptic American West are wildly inventive. Shakespeare couldn't have imagined the mega-droughts, military-grade sentient murder robots, transgenic goats with human skin, or post-war geopolitically fractured American West that Peck uses to retell the story of Leere's descent into madness. In Peck's adaption, Leere is a goat rancher of global significance, based in the La Sal Mountains outside of Moab, Utah. In spinning Leere's tale in this wild setting, Peck points us to dangers apparent in our present American West - greed, climate change, indifference to human impact on environment and ecology, and our desperate dependence on the same. Casting our eyes to a future West - however fantastical and bizarre - Peck offers a warning voice of tragedies we should and CAN avoid.

Other works of note by Peck include:

Find more about Peck's work at http://www.stevepeckniche.com.

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A conversation with author Tiffany Midge about her book, Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese's (University of Nebraska Press, 2019)

 Tiffany Midge is a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and was raised in the Pacific Northwest. She is a former columnist for Indian Country Today, has written for McSweeney's, Lit Hub, World Literature Today, and other publications, and taught writing and composition at Northwest Indian College. She is the author of the award-winning books The Woman who Married a Bear: Poems and Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-Up Halfbreed, and contributor many others.

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A conversation with Prof. Susan Lee Johnson about her new book, Writing Kit Carson: Fallen Heroes in a Changing West (University of North Carolina Press. 2020).

Dr. Susan Lee Johnson is the inaugural Harry Reid Endowed Chair for the History of the Intermountain West in the Department of History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas with faculty affiliations in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Latinx and Latin American Studies. In 2021 Johnson serves as the President of the Western History Association. Johnson is a historian of the North American West and its borderlands, specializing in the studies of gender, race, ethnicity, and indigeneity. In addition to producing edited volumes and articles, her book Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (Norton, 2000) won the W. Turrentine Jackson Prize from the Western History Association and Bancroft Prize. Johnson’s scholarship has been recognized by various organizations with other awards, fellowships, and grants. Her recent book, Writing Kit Carson: Fallen Heroes in a Changing West was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2020.

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