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Western Book Festivals & Conferences

From Native American Poetry to Zane Grey: The 2010 Western Literature Association Conference

By Alex Young, Guest Writer, 11-17-10

Photo from the conference's field trip to architect Paolo Soleri’s experimental urban habitat, Arcosanti, by Michael K. Johnson, courtesy of westlit.wordpress.com, the official blog of the Western Literature Association.

The 2010 Western Literature Association Conference
Where: The Prescott Resort, Prescott, Arizona
When: Oct. 20-23, 2010
What: This annual conference is a forum for academics and independent scholars working on the literature of the American West, as well as a showcase for Western creative writers.
Cost: $110-$200, depending on events attended.

The Western Literature Association is a scholarly, not-for-profit organization that was founded in 1965.  Its annual conference is held in a different Western city every year.  While the WLA started as a small community of scholars, it has grown into an organization of hundreds of members, and its 2010 annual conference featured 230 scholars and creative writers presenting on over sixty panels covering all aspects of Western literature and culture.  This year’s conference was hosted by Gioia Woods of Northern Arizona University, and the theme was “Western Performances.” Registrants were encouraged to present material that spoke to the performative nature of Western identity.  Each year the WLA honors a Western Writer with its Distinguished Achievement Award: in keeping with this year’s theme of performance, the 2010 winner was writer, director, and Chicano activist Luis Valdez. 

The conference attracts everything from Wyoming cowboy poets in boots and hats to New England professors in tweed and ties, and the professional and social scene is correspondingly eclectic.  The WLA prides itself, however, on its welcoming community, and the 2010 conference was certainly a demonstration of that inclusiveness--as a first time graduate student attending the conference, I felt welcomed by my younger peers and senior scholars and writers alike.  In addition to the many readings and panels, the conference features a banquet and grad student luncheon that gave ample opportunity for meeting new colleagues from around the West.  Downtown Prescott, just minutes from the conference hotel, offered a fun getaway.  Well known as one of the West’s great mining boom towns (and one-time home of the Earp Brothers and Doc Holliday of “The Shootout at the O.K. Corral” fame), Prescott’s well-preserved historic downtown (especially “Whiskey Row” where several bars and restaurants sport restored frontier era interiors) was a welcome escape from the hustle and bustle of the conference hotel.  The last day of the conference also featured two organized getaways--a trip to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon for sightseeing and a sunset dinner at El Tovar, and a tour of Arcosante, an experimental green community in the Northern Arizona desert designed by Italian architect Paolo Soleri.

Academic Panels

First and foremost a scholarly conference, the WLA was dominated by academic panels featuring scholars addressing various aspects of Western Literature and culture in 15-20 minute presentations.  With scholars from all over the world sitting on panels addressing issues ranging from the novels of Zane Grey to new developments in Japanese-American literature, the panels demonstrated the breadth of cultural objects studied and critical methods employed by contemporary scholars of the American West today.  This range of scholarship exemplified just how far the study of “the literature of the American West” has come from the nostalgic Western boosterism with which it was once associated. 

One panel that I felt demonstrated how the conference as a whole engaged a specifically Western American tradition of scholarship while also breaking new critical ground was one of the plenary panels entitled “The Problem of The West.” This panel featured three of the country’s most prominent scholars of Western Literature—Nathaniel Lewis of St. Michael’s College, William Handley of The University of Southern California, and Stephen Tatum of the University of Utah—using historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1896 essay, “The Problem of The West” to explore issues in contemporary Western culture.  Lewis’s paper meditated upon the city of Las Vegas, imagined as the cultural product of the West par excellence, using both Turner’s essay and the thinking of French theorist Paul Virilio.  Handley addressed competing visions of Los Angeles in the murals of James Doolin and in Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel, A Single Man, using Turner’s essay to think through the relationship of these artistic works to America’s myth of Westward expansion.  Tatum took Turner’s thinking about the frontier to the dystopian vision of the U.S.-Mexican frontera in Roberto Bolano’s 2666, exploring issues of sovereignty and violence in this troubling and prescient novel.  All three papers pointed to exciting new possibilities for scholarship while reaffirming the value of cultural criticism that closely attends to the specific questions posed by the Western American context.

Creative Writing Panels & Address by Distinguished Achievement Award Winner Luis Valdez

Like the scholarly panels, the creative writing panels exemplified the eclectic scope of Western American writing in the 21st century.  My colleague at the University of Southern California, fiction writer Lisa Locascio, noted that the creative writing panels were dominated by creative non-fiction writers, a reflection the vogue for this genre in American publishing generally.  She also observed that the creative panels she attended were more sparsely attended than the academic panels that shared their time slots, perhaps reflecting the conference’s scholarly focus. 

For me, the highlight of the creative writing events was a plenary panel on Diné (Navajo) poetry featuring four of the most exciting Western writers now working, all affiliated with the Navajo nation.  At this event, sponsored by the Arizona Humanities Council, and chaired by scholar Jeff Berglund, the poets Esther Berlin, Sherwin Bitsui, Hershman John, and Orlando White shared examples of their work and discussed their craft and its relation to their Diné identity.  The range of styles and subject matters on display was a forceful example of a lesson that the academy has been slow in learning: Native American literature, or even the poetry of a single tribe, cannot be adequately represented on a syllabus by a single style of writing that deals matter-of-factly with patently political subject matter: like other literatures of the West, contemporary Native American poetry demonstrates a remarkable diversity of form and theme that resists reductivist readings.

Distinguished Writer Luis Valdez gave a talk on Thursday evening which addressed his own remarkable career trajectory—from organizing in the fruit fields of the Central Valley to writing and directing at the highest levels of American theatre and film—while weaving in a consideration of the immigration crisis and the legal backlash against it that is now troubling the Southwest.  In telling his own story, and relating it to the community of Western writers he was addressing, Valdez drove home the point that we need not see the West’s narrative of South to North immigration as contrary to the story of East to West immigration more familiar to students of the American West, and this new perspective must inform the politics of our readings.  As conference president Gioia Woods stated in summing up the message of the conference as a whole, “it’s necessary to consider our literature within a broad political context, in this case, standing against the absurdity of anti-immigration legislation. The story of the West we love and study is a story of immigration!” Valdez’s activist presence mirrored the mood of the conference generally: the WLA’s executive council, in response to the passage of Arizona Senate Bill 1070, issued its first ever resolution (http://westlit.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/wla-resolution-on-arizona-hb-1070/) in advance of the conference.  This statement defined the association’s group identity and declared the WLA’s solidarity with efforts to repeal the bill.

Graduate Student Professionalization Events

In addition to providing an encouraging environment in which graduate students can present their research, the conference also offers professionalization workshops in which graduate students preparing to go on the job market could work with senior scholars to review their CV’s and other job materials, as well as perform mock job talks and interviews.  The yearly grad student luncheon gave the next generation of Western scholars and writers the opportunity to network with their peers, as well as to meet Luis Valdez, who spoke to the group about how he launched his career as a writer and activist.

Banquet and Awards Ceremony

The annual WLA banquet and awards ceremony provided another opportunity to meet fellow scholars. Held in the Prescott Resort’s banquet room, the banquet was emceed by Executive Secretary William Handley who, along with several other WLA executive committee members, handed out prizes in a variety of categories recognizing exceptional scholarship and writing in the field of Western American Literature.  Two of the most prominent prizes were awarded to British Americanist John Beck, and Western literature scholar and ecocritic Cheryl Glotfelty of University of Nevada, Reno.  Beck won the Thomas J. Lyon award for best scholarly book on a Western Literary topic published in 2010 for his Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature, a study of how the Western literary imaginary has contended with the presence of the military industrial complex within Western landscapes.  Glotfelty was awarded the Susan J. Rosowski award for excellence in teaching and mentoring for her work at the University of Nevada, Reno.  On the creative side, Liz Stephens won the Frederick Manfred Prize (awarded for the best creative writing submission to the conference) for her creative non-fiction piece, “Ten Years I’ll Never Get Back.” A complete list of winners is available on the conference website.  After the awards and a great dinner served by the resort restaurant, conference goers were entertained on the dance floor by local country/rock band, Remedy. 

2011 WLA Conference in Missoula, MT

The 2011 WLA Conference will be hosted on in Missoula, Montana on October 5-8th by Nancy Cook of University of Montana Missoula, and Bonney Macdonald, of West Texas A&M University.  The distinguished achievement award winner is novelist Thomas McGuane, who has tentatively committed to offer an acceptance address.  The theme of the conference will be “Bodies, Rest, Motion: Stasis and Mobility in the American West,” and the call for papers is already available.  Proposals are due on June 15th, 2011.  Professors Cook and MacDonald are expecting a high turnout, especially from creative writers from the Northern Rocky Mountain region—we hope to see you there!

Alex Young is a writer who is pursuing a PhD at the University of Southern California where he holds a Provost’s Fellowship in English, and is currently working as a research assistant for the Huntington Library-USC Institute for the Study of California and The West.

Also in this series:

• Aspen Summer Words Fest: Southern Lit, Secret Hopes and a Surprise Stand-In by Jennifer Lee Sullivan

• The Tin House Summer Writers Workshop in Portland, Oregon by Bonnie ZoBell

• Summer Fishtrap in Oregon by Naomi Gibbs

• Booksellers Tell Writers Like It Is At New Conference by Jenny Shank

• Equality State Book Fair Celebrates Regional Writers in Wyoming by Nina McConigley

• Missoula Teemed with Back-Slapping Writers and Enthusiastic Readers Last Weekend by David Abrams

Plus: The Map!

• Check out NewWest’s comprehensive map and rundown of regional events, Book Festivals of the West.

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