Actually, the Wayne Hage “taking” case is far from over (HCN, 9/17/2012, “One Sagebrush Rebellion flickers out — or does it?“). First, there are a number of significant findings by Judge Smith that were not overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Second, the Hages have filed a petition for rehearing […]
Communities
Posted inOctober 29, 2012: Red State Rising
Collectivists for Christ!
Orderville, Utah, is a smattering of modest homes in a narrow valley on the banks of southern Utah’s Virgin River. It feels both overgrown and empty: Thousands of people pass through here daily on their way between Bryce Canyon and Zion National Parks, yet few ever stop. On a perfect September day in the thick […]
Posted inOctober 29, 2012: Red State Rising
Visitors from around the West
You may have noticed that the last two issues of HCN didn’t contain Dear Friends; we moved it online to get some extra space. You can catch up on our visitors, recent journalism awards and other announcements by visiting http://hcne.ws/PXudbz and http://hcne.ws/OTI73V. VISITORS As the weather cools and the leaves fall, we feel lucky to […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Inside the orchard: A conversation with novelist Amanda Coplin
Amanda Coplin spent the first years of her life in Wenatchee, Wash., the self-proclaimed “Apple Capital of the World,” and was indelibly shaped by its rolling acres of fruit trees, and by her frequent visits to the apple and apricot orchard owned by her grandparents. Those sights and smells are powerfully evoked in her debut […]
Posted inWotr
Heading out of fall’s impending darkness
One day in October every year, I leave my home valley and make a pilgrimage up into Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. I am not seeking enlightenment, exactly. I am seeking simply light. My birthday falls on Oct. 10, long enough past the fall equinox that the ever-growing darkness of autumn can no longer be denied. Every […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Already gone: a profile of Muscogee (Creek) poet Joy Harjo
The author of She Had Some Horses and In Mad Love and War discusses her new memoir, Crazy Brave.
Posted inHeard Around the West
Snakes and guns
WYOMING AND UTAH Gun advocates keep turning up pesky impediments to their right to use guns any way they want, and when they do, they usually contact their state legislators and demand action. So recently, a Wyoming legislative panel endorsed a proposed bill that would permit silencers to be used while hunting any wildlife in […]
Posted inGoat
This rich Republican Mormon spreads the wealth
He’s a rich, conservative Republican businessman, and the scion of a powerful Mormon family. And four years into a devastating economic crisis, he has come to Washington, D.C., amid cries to balance the budget, to offer a solution. Mitt Romney? Nope. It’s Marriner S. Eccles. The year was 1933, and the U.S. Senate Finance Committee […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Three Nevada fiction writers make their debut
This year, three accomplished and innovative fiction debuts by young Nevada-raised writers will hit the bookstores, including two novels –– Tupelo Hassman’s Girlchild and Ben Rogers’ The Flamer (reviewed in HCN on Aug. 6) –– and a short story collection, Claire Vaye Watkins’ Battleborn. Girlchild tells the story of Rory Dawn Hendrix, who at the […]
Posted inOctober 15, 2012: Are you a local?
Student essay: The view from the East
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 […]
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?
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 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 […]