It is the confluence of differences, in its lands and peoples, that forms the American West. The book series Voice in the American West seeks the headwaters from which the West arises, its stories in first person and in every iteration of voice, in images as well as words, in line and color as well as sound and speech.
Amy Hale Auker's first book of essays, Rightful Place, was the story of a woman finding beauty in her place, the Llano Estacado. Her new collection of creative non-fiction, Ordinary Skin, explores her mid-life transition with prose poems and essays that illustrate a new terrain as well as new ways of being in the world.
Touching on faith and body image and belonging, these essays explore our role in deciding what is favorable or unfavorable, as well as where we some day want to dwell, and who came before us. In that touching, they feel their way with observations about current affairs, drought, mystery, and the hard decisions that face us all as we continue to move toward more questions with fewer answers. This exploration is informed and softened by hummingbirds, Gila monsters, bats, foxes, bears, wildflowers, and hidden seep springs where life goes on whether we are there to see...
Michael Ventura owned only one car his entire life: a green ’69 Chevy Malibu. Its wheels have crisscrossed the American landscape over more miles than a round trip to the moon. From Times Square...
A memoir of home, nature, and change in the American West, Light in the Trees makes cultural and environmental topics personal through a narrator’s travels between past and present, rural and urban....
From the Texas panhandle to the mountains of Arizona, Amy Auker has lived the cowboy life—as wife, as mother, as cook, as ranch hand, as writer. In fine-grained detail she captures the prairie light,...
Glenn Ohrlin (1926-2015) was a cowboy singer, working cowboy, rodeo rider, storyteller, and illustrator. In The Hell-Bound Train he has gathered dozens of his favorite songs, which chronicle the range and rodeo life he lived. Ohrlin was known for singing in an unornamented Western style, accompanying himself on the guitar and harmonica. Most of his repertoire comes from the period of 1875 to 1925. The book includes music and lyrics for songs such as "My Home's in Montana," "The Texas Rangers," and "Bull Riders in the Sky," along with Ohrlin's commentary on each work's provenance and meaning. This collection is a must-have for any fan of cowboy and folk music.
Before Big Love, before Eldorado, a groundbreaking memoir explored polygamy, not with outrage but with honesty and grace. In 1984, when polygamous groups knew little but the fear and pain of secrecy and hiding, Dorothy Allred Solomon, the twenty-eighth of forty-eight children, went public with her family’s story. Descended from five generations of Mormon polygamy, Solomon evokes the fervor and dedication that bound the Allreds to “living the Principle.” She vividly renders the persecution and poverty she knew as a child, the joyous awe of a father’s too-rare presence, and an abiding hunger for autonomy. Confronting the paradox of a faith that seals loved ones as families for eternity but casts them as outlaws in the here and now, she traces the events that culminated in her father’s 1977 assassination, a tragedy that rocked all Utah. Now, more than a quarter century later, Solomon revisits her story in a new...
The Llano Estacado, Coronado’s legendary “staked plains,” comprises all or part of thirty-three counties in Texas and four in New Mexico. This enormous island of grass covers approximately 32,000 square miles of arid prairie used primarily today for ranching and farming. It lies atop the vast Ogalalla Aquifer—its primary source of water—and partially covers the oil-bearing Permian Basin. Its population, outside of four mid-sized cities, is sparse. The Llano has always required and appealed to discerning eyes. The artists and writers gathered here are hardly the first to have felt the pull of this place or the urgency to capture its essence. Yet the idiosyncrasies and ideals, the successes and failures, the strangeness and beauty and power of the land and its people beckon fresh discovery. Look at the Llano with eyes open to possibility, and you will encounter the unexpected, a keener understanding of the ways in which landscape...
In 1870, sixteen-year-old Frank Maynard left his home in Iowa and took a job helping to trail a small herd of cattle from Missouri to Colorado. Thus began his adventures as an open-range cowboy, a ten-year career that coincided with the peak of the great trail-drive era. Among the highlights of Maynard’s time on the range were brushes with outlaws and encounters with famous lawmen. But his most enduring contribution sprang from overhearing a version of an old Irish ballad in 1876 and reworking it as “The Cowboy’s Lament,” the standard most recognize today as “The Streets of Laredo.” His role in adapting the song and his other colorful experiences on the trail have come to light with the recent discovery of his unpublished memoir. Now, alongside the frontier recollections of Charlie Siringo and Charles Colchord, Maynard’s personal account offers a rare and revealing glimpse of the true Old West.
