Election '08

The sweeping Democratic victory across much of the West has state Republican Parties in Colorado, Washington, Oregon and even Idaho questioning their leadership and direction. In Colorado, some predictable sniping at the tactics of the party leadership is accompanied by a deeper argument over whether the party should turn to the right, as Tom Tancredo is urging, or move to the center, reports the Denver Post. Meanwhile, in the Pacific Northwest, Republicans are facing population trends (i.e. in-migration and urbanization) that look grim indeed, reports Floyd McKay at Crosscut. Oregon now has no statewide officeholders from the GOP for the first time ever. In Idaho, Republicans remain in firm control and the state party considers Tuesday to have been a fine day.giving some pause on both sides of the aisles.  

FIRST AND ONLY ON NEWWEST.NET

If you've been following the Cooper Firearms story (202 comments so far), you might be wondering who was telling the truth. Did Cabela's and Sportsman's Warehouse cancel orders following the controversy, as I originally reported--or not, as the representatives of the mega-retailers claim.

Well, I finally tracked down Dan Cooper this morning, and we had a little chat--and the answer is: Everybody is telling the truth. 

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New West Poetry Book Review

A Woman's Guide to Mountain Climbing
By Jane Augustine
Marsh Hawk Press,118 pages, $15

It's hard to think of poetry and mountain climbing in the American West without thinking of the Beat poet and the mountain-climbing hero of Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums, Gary Snyder. All of us who see mountain climbing as a bit more spiritual than the average weekend recreation owe a little something to Snyder and the Beat generation’s vision. In a certain sense, poet Jane Augustine also owes a lot to Snyder: like him, she is an enthusiastic mountain climber, a devoted student of Buddhism, an erudite reader of world literature, and a poet who, despite traveling the world, has maintained her roots in the West where she was born. In her poetry, likewise, she shares Snyder's penchant for the short free-verse lyric.

Augustine's latest book of poetry, A Woman's Guide to Mountain Climbing, however, is not one of the awkward homages to the Beats that are still being published. As its playful title suggests, it is an assertive testament of one woman's life in the West that should be read as both a tribute to, and a gentle poke at, the spirit of Snyder and the (often exclusively male) literary counterculture that claimed the landscapes of the mountain West for their own. In these lyrics, which manage to embody both the elegiac and the celebratory, the confessional and the mystical, Augustine confronts traditional myths of Western life by defying our expectations about what poetry that celebrates the West should be. 

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NO CANCELED ORDERS

My special Wild Bill column on Monday covered the statements and campaign contributions made Dan Cooper, president and co-founder of Cooper Firearms in support of President-elect Barack Obama. As his statements caused a firestorm of criticism from his customers on gun websites and blogs, Cooper resigned from the company and said he was worried about the future of his company because two of his biggest retail accounts, Cabela's and Sportsman's Warehouse, had canceled their orders.

Which turned out to not be true. 

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Obama-Mania Hits Boulder

Ohio was the turning point. When Barack Obama won the crucial Midwest state last night it popped the release valve on eight years of pent-up outrage, frustration, and shame for millions of Democrats and independents across the U.S.

Up to that point the several hundred Obama supporters gathered at the Boulder Theater had reacted with a mixture of anticipation and anxiety as early returns were reported by MSNBC and CNN on the big screen.  

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Western Book Roundup

Last week the 2008 Whiting Writers Award for emerging writers was announced, and among the ten winners of $50,000 each were a couple of Western writers, Oregon native fiction writer Benjamin Percy (whom we featured here), and fiction writer Manuel Muñoz, who currently lives in Tucson and teaches at the University of Arizona. (There were also two California-based honorees, fiction writer Lysley Tenorio and poet Douglas Kearney.)

Oregon's Barry Lopez presented the awards, and Galleycat shared this video interview with him, shot at the event. Lopez said of the honorees, "The world's problems are not theirs to solve—they're the ones who will provide us the structure in which to think about how to address these things."

Also in the Roundup: The Center of the American West features immigration as the topic of this year's "Words to Stir the Soul," and the Wasatch Journal extends its story contest deadline. 

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