What is the West?

HDJ contributors take a stab at answering this most vexing question

In this series we’ve invited our past authors and artists to take their crack at answering this very basic and complicated question: What is the West? What does it mean to them? Thought-provoking, humorous, heartfelt, poetic, and always impassioned, their answers may well surprise you.

​Select an author below to see what they have to say. And come back often—we'll be adding more in the months to come. 

Bruce Holbert • CMarie Fuhrman • Lisa Laughlin • Annie Lampman • Barbara Richardson • Robert Wrigley • Barbara Michelman • Laura Pritchett • Sean Prentiss • Debra Magpie Earling • Kim Stafford • Buddy Levy • Tasha LeClair • David Allan Cates • Shann Ray • Cheryl Diane Kidder • Steve Coughlin • Rachel Toor • Chris Dombrowski • Kate Lebo • Allen Morris Jones • Russell Rowland • Jeff P. Jones

Bruce Holbert

"My father often hauled me into the woods for elk hunts. Other instances, we scoured the coulees and scablands for deer or birds or fishing holes. The vistas astonished me, glacial lake blues I’d never contemplated and so clear the gravel bottoms glistened and light that seemed liquid itself. I chewed grasses in my initial forays into philosophy and felt kin to the animals. Nights, my father and I would gaze at the sky, neither of us speaking, except to cuss the satellites and space stations and occasional airliners that interrupted starlight thousands of years old and the darkness even more ancient. I once described a scene as perfect, but my father said no. It could only be perfect if no one was here.

The west is a knot of myth and country worthy of Jung and we’ve tugged at both ends until it can’t be undone.  

Self-annihilation is our single dream."

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Bruce Holbert grew up in the Grand Coulee near the Columbia River. His family was among the first settlers of this country. He is the author of Lonesome Animals, and, The Hour of Lead, which won the Washington State Book Award 2015, and Whiskey, released this spring.

CMarie Fuhrman

The West is Hells Canyon, Oregon. 

From atop this ridge I behold a vast, unpeopled landscape that runs from the once free waters of the Snake River below me, all the way up the rugged peaks of the Seven Devils. Wilderness. Elk pause and watch me, snort, and then run. Their bodies no longer animal bodies but a hundred brown bodies running into a stand of old pine missed by the loggers' saws. Disappearing. On the way up to here, after passing the cache of a mountain lion kill, I stood before the opening of a cave.  Steel bars covered the entrance.  Painted on the wall, barely visible in the twilight, the last remaining salmon to exist above Hells Canyon Dam. The offering I leave will parole only the salmon in my dreams. 

Below me is the dam itself.  A result of human ingenuity and brilliant design.  Progress. It covers thousands of years of history all the while transmuting once wild water into electricity that brings light to back porches and refrigerates milk as far away as Boise.  I want to cover one eye and imagine the pre-colonial West, a land before the gas-powered engine, before cores bored from the skin of the canyon. Minerals wrested. Or to close the other eye and ignore the pain of the past, focusing only on the dam, harboring hope for its future removal.  But I must always keep both eyes open.

The West is Moab, Utah.

It is New Year’s Eve.  My partner and I have hiked up Amasa Back to watch the sunset. These rims are lined with 4wd trails, mountain bike trails, foot trails. An ancient owl painted high on the canyon wall looks over the narrow valley and to the East. Sees the lights of the city.  All the new hotels.  We perch ourselves high atop a boulder. Lean into one another.  Beneath us, a pair of young mountain bikers pass.  They are talking loud about their ride. They are full of words like, "conquered,” “slayed."  Phrases like "killed it."  The sun begins its drop.  Bright orange bleeds into the cerulean sky.  The mountains are a pyre or a beacon.  The riders have stopped at the west edge of the rims.  There is silence.  And when nothing else of the sun remains, we hear a whispered, "Oh my God," and "That was amazing." Then laughter, cheering.  Applause.

We walk out in the dark, the eyes of the owl adapted.  The moon with just enough light to make the snowy tops of the La Salles illume.

The West is Idaho County, Idaho.

It is an unseasonably warm day in January. I climb up the steep slopes that hold the undammed Salmon River. I look to the water and my heart skips like a stone, landing somewhere upstream.  I can see where the road ends.  I have walked beyond there. Hiked these hills a hundred times. Swam this water.  Shared in a traditional salmon ceremony. On top, I spook a small herd of cow elk.  Hold the bones of winter kill.  Across a narrow drainage, three Big Horn Sheep make their way over impossible crevices, up steep granite. I lie in the warm buckskin grass and watch them. I cannot feel where I end and the soil begins. I pull this scene over me and drift into sleep.

On my way home I stop at the C Store for gas.  The sheriff is there in his leather coat. Cowboy hat.  For no apparent reason, he starts questioning me. Wants to know where I am from, where I am going, what I was doing in his county.  Why hasn't he seen me before, he wonders. I know all the Indians in my county, he purports.  He wants to know what I do for work. I tell him. He has allies in the store, I feel their eyes tossing stones at my back. They laugh when he says, "You have fucking Indians in college?" And,"I'll know to look for you now."  I am outnumbered.  I back out. As I walk away, he taps on the window, says, "I hope I don’t have to fish you out of the river."

All the way home I am checking my rearview mirror. I am watching the horizon.  Reestablishing my borders.  At the University the next day I warn my Native students. Tell them the story.  Of course, they already knew.  This is their story as well. This is the West.

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An Indigenous daughter of the West, CMarie Fuhrman was born in Southern Colorado and has lived in various rural towns all along the Rocky Mountains. She has earned degrees in Exercise Physiology, English, and American Indian Studies and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Idaho where she is Program Coordinator for IKEEP (Indigenous Knowledge for Effective Education Program). CMarie’s writing, both poetry, and nonfiction can be found in Broadsided Press’s NoDapl compilation, two anthologies, and several literary journals including Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Whitefish Review, Yellow Medicine Review, High Desert Journal and Sustainable Play, among others.  CMarie is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Native Voices for Tupelo Press. She divides her time between Moscow and McCall, Idaho.

Lisa Laughlin

The West I know has a speckled hawk on a telephone pole every quarter mile. It’s spotted with dust devils after plowing, flushed red when the cheatgrass is up, smeared with the haze of wildfire smoke—dependably now—every mid-summer. It’s the west-of-the-Rockies West. The not-Seattle West. The in-between. The scabland.

The West I know is rich hay farmers and poor migrant workers picking in apple orchards and vineyards. It’s lacquered nails and small-town gossip. It’s a local pizza place boarding up because Pizza Hut came to town. It’s people being glad to see Walmart and Starbucks, because it feels like catching up to the rest of the world. It’s watching hours of the Travel Channel, the Food Network, the Discovery Channel: an easy transport to places that feel more important. It’s fast-food deserts and hard drugs. It’s a place where recycling is a liberal agenda.

The West I know is scraped knuckles and the smell of diesel. It’s wrapping duct tape over broken duct tape over 40-year-old truck pedals, because people are independent to a fault. It’s where farmers leave keys above the sun visor, because if a fellow made it to that cab in the middle of nowhere, he’d deserve a drive. 

It’s a place where “middle of nowhere” is said with both pride and disdain. 

In the middle of nowhere, I plucked small horned toads from the wheat rows and tried to calm them. My father taught me to stroke the horned toad’s head, between the eyes, with the pad of one finger. If you are patient, the toad will let you flip it to its back in your palm. It will close its eyes and let you pet its delicate white belly. I understood this as a kindness, until I was older and read that the toad freezes from fear: one last-ditch effort at escape, because no matter how fondly you feel about the toad, you’re the predator.

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Lisa Laughlin grew up on a dryland wheat farm in central Washington state. Her work has appeared in Flyway, High Desert Journal, Sweet, and Orion's 'Place Where You Live' section. Her chapbook of flash essays, titled 'Kindling,' was recently published by Sweet Publications. Its title essay was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She works as a freelance writer in Spokane, WA.

Annie Lampman

The West is a complicated beast with so many contradictory identities it is hard to pin down, and while this is true of all places, the West seems to more fully possess a type of multiple-personality disorder than other places—perhaps because it is where people come to re-create themselves however they see fit, granted a certain freedom of identity that the landscape seems to encourage, if not demand. There is no one West. It is as multitudinous as the hats and boots that outfit it; however, if it is one thing, that thing is tough.

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Annie Lampman is a creative writing professor at Washington State University Honors College and fiction editor of Blood Orange Review. She has a MFA in fiction from the University of Idaho and lives in Moscow, Idaho with her husband, three sons, and a bevy of pets. Her essays, poetry, and fiction have been published or are forthcoming in journals such as The Massachusetts Review, Orion Magazine, Cascadia Review, and High Desert Journal, as well as numerous others. She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize Special Mention, first place in the Everybody-Writes contest, an Idaho Commission on the Arts writing grant, and a national wilderness artist’s residency through the Bureau of Land Management. Her first novel is under consideration in New York.

Barbara Richardson

"The West is burning. Its wrath is an expression of our own." 

The West is magpies and locusts, softly mentholated pine duff and the hot clove scent of woods rose. Home to thunderstorms rare and large, tribes vast and hidden, ant colonies, trickling streams, alpine ponds, blizzards, aspen shake, cottonwood snags, sagebrush galaxies under a three-quarter moon. Beavers in tandem going with the flow. Breezes uncounted. Meadowlark song. Snowberry, chokecherry, twinberry, elderberry—would that we had elders in power wise enough to preserve them.

The West does not need us. Tagged with human impact, the real West goes on.

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Robert Wrigley

It is a vast speck on a small planet that revolves around a star in the infinite. Except where it is wet, even rain forest, it is arid. Except where it is populated by the planet's dominant species, it harbors a substantial sliver within its speckdom, a sliver that maintains some resemblance to the planet's, and possibly the infinite's, primordial condition, which is to say, something like wilderness. And in that something-like-wilderness, within the sliver of the speck, is what Wallace Stegner called 'the native home of hope.

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Barbara Michelman

Something happens when you cross the Mississippi driving west. The clean lines of corn and sunflowers out of Kansas dissolve into Nebraska badlands, morphing again into sagebrush, red clay buttes and mesas. Carved rivers cut hard through the deserts and plains of Colorado and Wyoming, rolling west, until the wall of mountain from New Mexico to the northern border rises up.  And rocky peaks, still scattered with shells from a time when the ocean floor heaved up, etch the starry heavens in midnight blue.

What is the West? It’s the endless open space in the mind where all hope and possibility still live. Or the long ribbon of highway with nothing to stop the wind for a thousand miles. It’s the boneyard of failed lives, mines and mills that played out, boarded up motels on the edge of a town built before the interstate cut around it, passing it by. It’s the residue of bitterness when the market closes because the megastore in some town 40 miles down the road undersells you and you just can’t make it anymore, or the rich Angelino or New Yorker buying up ranches, who flies in and flies out, never touching down on the poverty in the nearby town where you live. Still, you cling to the place because it’s yours and it’s the last bit of hope in a vanquished life and “Dammit my family’s been here for six generations. And nobody’s gonna tell me what to do.” The angry certainty of your rightful place. No matter that the land was taken from the Indians in the call to “manifest destiny”. No matter the brutishness in staking that claim, planting that flag.

What is the West? The kitsch romanticism of Indians, teepees, and the iconic Bison once 30-million strong that we’ve managed to slaughter nearly out of existence, or the town in Eastern Oregon where the broken sawmill languishes while the preacher on the radio bellows out fire against homo-sexu-als, the modern scourge, as if the advancing hordes of Gay Visigoths are about to invade this broke-dick town in the middle of nowhere. Still, the preacher goes on smearing his shit-stained lies all over the poverty, the abandoned buildings, because Georgia–Pacific or Boise Cascade paid good money to cut down the trees and then moved on to cut down the rest of the West.

So, there you are, a snag holding onto the earth because it’s all you know and you’ve got no place to go, clinging in the middle of nowhere watching your life slip through your fingers, carrying your anger and defeat into the bar, drinking your life into oblivion.

What is the West?  The remains of a past where Elk and Bear exist only as names on the streets of some Roundup sprayed suburb killing everything wild.  The place where forests are wood products, wildlife is game waiting to be harvested, and the good rich earth underfoot is mineral resources ready to be upturned. The place where copper once bought a state and the rush to gold a century and a half ago condemned rivers and creeks to an eternity of arsenic and mercury. It’s the place where acquisition is the password, unlocking the secret to the Golden Calf. It’s Google and Apple, Microsoft and Uber, Hollywood and Biotech. It’s sustainable, pastured, and artisanal, all for a price­ — a price you can’t afford if you’re living in a tent under the freeway in the most expensive town in the richest nation in the world.

What is the West? It’s the Yin and the Yang, the Dark and the Light. It’s the vortex of new ideas and the graveyard of a failed myth unwilling to be buried because here in the Bootstrap West that myth must be protected, no matter the price.

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Photographer Barbara Michelman began her career working in Hollywood in film lighting. One of the first women in the field she worked in all the major studios. Her work ranges from traditional photography, to the more experimental fine art digital imaging and alternative process printing. She has exhibited in the United States and Europe and is in corporate and private collections on both continents.

Laura Pritchett

Usually, I’m on the ground in the West, but recently I was flying above portions of Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona in an old Cessna and it provided me with a reminder of what the West is: high alpine, high desert, waves of blue mountains, the shocking red rocks, the undulations of landscape as it bore out its transformation from range to basin and back again. When I peered closer, the details revealed themselves too: the way snow had blown itself into watersheds, the glint on the curves of cutthroat trout streams. I also saw the unbeautiful: the spiderwebs of fracking roads, missing mountainsides, uranium mines, orange tailings ponds, clearcuts, the yellow haze from coal-fired power plants. Death by a thousand cuts, made more visible by air. It was a gentle and graceful reminder that the landscape is not what we make it out to be. We speak in the West of state lines, designations, management agencies, political jurisdictions, reservations, and water and mineral rights. We put up a lot of fences, literal and metaphorical. We do not often speak of—or see—the land as a continuous living thing. But it is, it is.

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Laura Pritchett is an American author whose work is rooted in the natural world. Her four novels have garnered numerous national literary awards, including PEN USA Award for Fiction, the High Plains Book Award, the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, and the WILLA Award. She’s published over 200 essays and short stories in magazines (including The New York Times, The Sun, O Magazine, Salon, High Country News, Orion, and others), mostly about environmental issues in the American West. She holds a PhD from Purdue University and teaches around the country. She is also known for her environmental stewardship, particularly in regard to land preservation and river health. She has two books forthcoming—a novel The Blue Hour (Counterpoint, 2017) and Making Friends with Death, Kind Of (Viva Editions, 2017). More at www.laurapritchett.com.

Sean Prentiss

I consider much of the West to be self-willed lands. The West is a place where how we use/manage/exploit/destroy/protect is still up for debate. We can create more cities that suck rivers dry or we can consider new ways to live with the land. But we are still arguing on how we will shape the land. That's the idea of the West to me.

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Sean Prentiss is the 2015 winner of the National Outdoor Book Award for History/Biography and 2016 finalist for the Vermont Book Award and the Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. He is the author of Finding Abbey: A Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave, the co-editor of an anthology The Far Edges of the Fourth Genre, and the co-author of Environmental and Nature Writer: A Craft Guide and Anthology. Sean is an associate professor of writing at Norwich University.

Debra Magpie Earling

A battle continues to rage over the idea of the West and its territorial boundaries. What is the West? I'm afraid I have no clear answers but if pressed I would say the West is haunted by ideas of Encroachment and Displacement. The Malheur standoff was the current manifestation of that historical idea. 'Who owns the West' is the question in the current senate and gubernatorial races in Montana. Encroachment on someone's rights is messy business--the stuff of pulp fiction and literature. Encroachment is gritty and ugly and tough and it drives our imagination and determination and calls the stranger into town to clean up the mess or gun it up all over again. Displacement is the human toll of encroachment, the suffering, the loss. Displacement offers the hopeless and the hopeful a lockstep with tragedy and comedy and either self-serving sanctimony or true indignation and moral righteousness. We love and hate the never-ending question of the West but we cannot resist the call to define it.

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Debra Magpie Earling is the author of Perma Red and The Lost Journals of Sacajawea. She is the current director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana.

Kim Stafford

The West is a realm where incomplete manifest destiny left sufficient pockets of indigenous wisdom to begin a re-education process for naive and headstrong immigrants to the land. The still-vibrant cultures of First People, and the Wilderness remnants and processes of the land itself, work together to lure all inhabitants toward a respectful and sustainable way of life. Writers, singers, artists, and other progressive citizens witness for this process, and testify to old and future ways of being.

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Kim Stafford directs the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, and is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including Having Everything Right and 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared. His poetry chapbook How to Sleep Cold is forthcoming in fall 2016 from Limberlost Press. He has taught writing in Scotland, Italy, and Bhutan.

Buddy Levy

—for Harlan Taney

The west is a yearning, the dream of gold, white men crossing a continent to wade into the Pacific, believing all the land and water, 

everything before them and behind them, is theirs.

The west is the delusion of ownership.

The west I know is Jackalopes and cactus and sagebrush. 

Bison and geysers. 

Barbed wire and the nasal burn of branded cattle. 

The sweet smell of cheatgrass, the sting of yellow star thistle 

and the thrumming wingflush of chukars in rimrocks.

The west is canyon walls carved by ice and water, wind and time.

It’s the end of Route 66, the beginning of Hollywood Stars. 

Here, the sun sears a mirage over Death Valley 

and glows in spiraling color-bands of fuchsia and prosciutto 

across the Yosemite, that granite shrine of monoliths and spires. 

It’s standing knee-deep in runoff spill with the pulse-quickening hope 

of rising rainbows

and cutthroats and browns. 

A river cuts through the heart of the west like longing, 

and sometimes, sitting on the shore late at night 

in the white-yellow burn-glow of the full moon, 

I want to rise and wade in and let the current wash me away—

         downstream …

         into the riffling, pooling, swirling unknown.

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Buddy Levy is the author of, most recently, No Barriers: A Blind Man’s Journey to Kayak the Grand Canyon [with Erik Weihenmayer] (Thomas Dunne Books, 2017). Levy lives in Idaho.

Tasha LeClair

Living in the West means living in the unhome that it is. It means, often, calling things by the wrong names. It means where there is an empty house, something has come along and swept the people out of it. It means nothing so different from the rest of this place. Uranium in the Water; Police Search Six Native American Students at the University Bookstore; Her Remains. That doesn't mean you don't keep looking for a place for your love to go. That doesn't mean Grandpa and I pushing the cows up the ridge where there was no trail at all, and the baby owls hopping around the corral, and that eerie valley where the cliff-face glares down over the tops of aspens shivering in their shadows—that doesn't mean those things never existed. It doesn't mean Grandpa, Eastern Shoshone, wasn't called to fight a war for this country at a time when white business owners freely displayed “No Indians or Dogs” signs in their store windows. Maybe you disassociate. Maybe you split. How can you not. How can I not question my claim. The dirt slips right through your thirsty, seeking parts.

Good.

•

So why don't I tell you what I see out my window.

Mountains pushing up, fog pushing down. That old tension. And the power-lines cutting the sky, the mountains, the houses and trees into sections, into something I can almost understand. Brown leaves clotted in hard snow. At half past five, the fog rolls down, the mountains roll back.

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Tasha LeClair grew up in the Crowheart community of the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming. Her work has appeared in such places as The Gettysburg Review, Bodega, and Hobart . She's a graduate of the University of Wyoming's MFA program in creative writing and lives in Montana, where she's writing a horror novel. She keeps a blog at prairietown.wordpress.com

David Allan Cates

What’s The West? How about a swath of the North American continent that in the second half of the 19th century was cleared, mostly, of indigenous people and animal life by Europeans and Americans. And onto this vast, post-apocalyptic landscape—so visibly big and empty—wandered more Europeans and Americans, minds aflame with the hallucination of innocence and enough distance from ancestors to think they could invent who they were and what they might become. The land was given out for free to the new arrivals to build railroads on, to mine, to log, to plow—land they could stand on or drive across and ask themselves ad nauseam: Who am I? And how did I get here? Good questions. But the incompressible bounty, the beauty, the history—the horror, the horror—still blow our minds and hearts past words. "The West" is about as good we can do.

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David Allan Cates’ collection of poetry, The Mysterious Location of Kyrgyzstan, was published by Satellite Press in April 2016. He is the author of five novels, most recently Tom Connor's Gift, winner of the 2015 Independent Book Publishers Books Award for best fiction in the Rocky Mountain west region. He is the executive director of Missoula Medical Aid, a non-profit that does health care and health improvement projects in Honduras, and is a part-time teacher in the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.

Shann Ray

I understand the West to be an essence, the spirit of God moving over the waters, a place of mountains, rivers, sky, and plains, a home of soul, the embodiment of ultimate expansion in people, a place robust with violence, a vessel of unconditional forgiveness and atonement, a humbling landscape, a land where mercy and justice meet one another, a place where truth and beauty kiss each other. Sacredness exists in the wilderness of landscape, animals, forests, wildlife, and in the wilderness of the human heart. The West summons this sacredness.

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Shann Ray grew up in Montana and spent part of his childhood on the Northern Cheyenne reservation. His work has been featured in Poetry, Esquire, Narrative, McSweeney’s, Poetry International, Montana Quarterly and Salon. A National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, he is the winner of the American Book Award, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Prize, the High Plains Book Award in both poetry and fiction, the Western Writers of America Spur Award, the Foreword Book of the Year Readers’ Choice Award, the Subterrain Poetry Prize, and the Poetry Quarterly Poetry Prize. Named a finalist with Ted Kooser’s Splitting an Order and Erin Belieu’s Slant Six, Ray’s Balefire won the High Plains Book Award in poetry. He is the author of American Masculine: Stories (Graywolf), American Copper: A Novel (Unbridled), Balefire: Poems (Lost Horse), and a book of political theory, Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity (Rowman & Littlefield). Shann has served as a research psychologist for the Centers for Disease Control, a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities, and as a visiting scholar in Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America. A systems psychologist focusing on the psychology of men, he teaches leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University. Because of his wife and three daughters he believes in love. www.shannray.com

Cheryl Diane Kidder

I grew up on westerns, watched them every weeknight before bed: Wild Wild West, The Virginian, Shane, The Searchers, The Rifleman, Have Gun - Will Travel. The Virginian and Paladin both wore all black, one handsome, one not so much. Clearly western heroes came in all forms and I never crossed myself off that list. I never saw myself as the femme fatale, the woman in danger, or the unappreciated farmer’s wife. I was James West, Ethan Edwards, Shane, Lucas McCain, The Virginian. I was Paladin.

I learned about cattle drives, shootouts and riding out into the middle of nowhere, hell bent for leather. In westerns, there was no closing of the frontier. Westerns were forever, no matter the crowd of homesteaders hovering in the background during a shootout, no matter that wagon train headed for points west was bound to arrive at its destination—after the closing credits—and those souls who survived the trip most likely would put down roots, build cabins that turned into towns, into cities, into laws imported from the east. Cabins that did their best to mimic the Victorian styles of their inhabitant’s place of origin.

I watched westerns and understood that the best place to be was out in the middle of it, despite rattlesnakes, swollen rivers, or waterless deserts. That was freedom—riding the range with no fences, no boundaries, no law. Law itself was an ever-changing, dynamic notion. The west had its own law.

In my dreams I rode horses that could fly over the landscape—a landscape never without water, never crowded, a landscape I defined with my own ideas of right and wrong. In my westerns Matt Dillon and Miss Kitty were my parents with too many rules, spent too much time indoors, were tied down to one place, one life. Always impeding my burgeoning attempts to create my own life, my own west.

I was Shane slowly walking my cream Palomino out past the creek to the foothills, bound for the glorious snow-capped mountains just within view. I knew what that boy’s voice calling my name was all about: he was the child I would never have if I followed that trail, if I didn’t put down roots, take on the trappings of the Starrett family—cabin, garden, corral and endless miles of fences.

I was Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter, taking that slow ride out of town on a gray horse, the town I’d just laid waste to in the background.

I was John Wayne walking away from the Jorgensen’s cabin, framed by the dark of the door in The Searchers.

I knew where I belonged and where I didn’t. I knew who my heroes were and would always be. I knew I was born in the west. I know I’ll never live anywhere else.

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Cheryl Diane Kidder's work, nominated eight times for the Pushcart Prize, has appeared in numerous journals, including  Potomac Review,  Weber--The Contemporary West, Brevity, The Manifest-Station, Boaat Press, Front Porch, High Desert Journal, CutThroat Journal of the Arts,  Pembroke Magazine, Brain,Child, Identity Theory, In Posse Review, and elsewhere. She is the Assistant Fiction Editor at Able Muse and she reads non-fiction for Hippocampus Magazine. She lives in Tucson.

Steve Coughlin

For a sixth-grader living in Massachusetts in 1991, the West was a map of the United Sates spread between pages five and six in a social science textbook. It was each minute before lunch-- before grilled cheese sandwiches and cups of lime Jell-O--as I stared at the thin black lines separating each American state. The West was the exact opposite of Mrs. Brown leaning against the chalkboard, her right hand covered in chalk dust, making even ancient Mesopotamia sound boring. It was the mystery of northern Idaho pressed against the Canadian border, the ragged edge of Washington's coastline, and the pointing panhandle of Oklahoma. I became lost in the small gold stars designating Pierre and Carson City as capitals, in the blue streak of the Missouri River drifting past Bismarck. My finger traced the compact drabness of each Northeastern state, the terrible smallness of Massachusetts, my hometown of Rockland in the cramped southeastern corner. The West was more than another field trip to Plimoth Plantation, 45 minutes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. It was not the indifference of factory smoke or me riding my bike through grey streets to deliver newspapers. It was my father sleeping on the living room couch between jobs and me switching channels to watch High Plains Drifter. It was the idea, however cliché, of empty prairie. I stared at the sprawling possibilities of Montana and Wyoming, the allure of the Mojave and Sonoran Deserts, mountain ranges with names like Sawtooth and Bitterroot. The West was a world in my mind, safe and adventurous as any map, shaped by the perfect angles of Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. It was the truth of my own imaginings that still offer more than the West I now live in. I wondered for entire minutes at Hawaii and Alaska hovering in their own little squares at the bottom of page five. I did not count the seconds before the bell rang; I did not pass a crudely drawn picture to Tom Carter; I did not stare at the girl whose red hair I noticed in September. I was lost, again, in the long, bending arm of California.

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Steve Coughlin teaches writing and literature at Chadron State College in northwest Nebraska. He is the author of Another City (FurtureCycle Press), a collection of poetry.

Rachel Toor

The West stands at the end of the bar, hunched over a beer, cap pulled low, ignoring women with glittering ears. The West has dirt under his fingernails and wears jeans snagged from replacing barbed wire with flat, more friendly to critters; his feet are Xed with tan lines from river sandals. He worries about fire danger and erosion and river flow and pushes his body hard in the summer so he can go after elk in the fall, where he’ll read Wallace Stegner or Ed Abbey curled up under a tree. The mountains and the rivers sing to him, and he can resist only if he’s lashed to an office. Even so, he needs to get out, to go far, by himself. It’s still too new to take for granted, even if he’s lived here for five generations. He’s always got a lot to do, places to go.

The West wears jeans that hang from her tall, strong body. A hat protects her face from the sun, but her hands show age: big as a man’s, and rough. She can chop, saw, hammer, and nail wood to create buildings. Her shots leave the backstrap clean. She drinks whiskey neat and bakes cakes she’s seen on the cover of Gourmet. Her language is rife with allusions to poetry and images from the violence of winter ranching. She calls the women who seek her out for mentoring “Half Pint” and “Lil Bit.” She knows they’ll never quite get it, but that doesn’t stop her from trying to explain—to explicate—her place. She knows they’ll get what they think they need and will leave. She stays. It’s her place.

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Rachel Toor teaches creative nonfiction at Eastern Washington University in Spokane. Her sixth book, Write Your Way In: Crafting an Unforgettable College Admissions Essay will be published by the University of Chicago Press in August.

Chris Dombrowski

I don't understand it at all; I don't reckon we ever understand home. The West, though? A week or so ago, July 4, lying on a warm sandbar with my young daughters surrounded by a moving body of water making its long way to the Pacific. Nearby my son and his friends jump off a house-sized boulder into the river's cold thalweg and float awhile before circling into the eddy. An osprey falls from the evening sky, plunges hard and comes up empty. Above us a mountain resembling a very large version of the boulder the boys leap from appears to stand still. Wind, thin light from the first star. Look, my daughter says, and hands me a pebble, seed of the mountain. How we go on, or so said Snyder, a far better channeler of Dogen than I.

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Chris Dombrowski is the author of Body of Water (Milkweed Editions, 2016). His most recent book of poems, Earth Again, was runner-up for ForeWord Magazine's Poetry Book of the Year. He lives with his family in Missoula, MT where he works as a river-guide.

Kate Lebo

My grandmother gives me her favorite bracelet and says, “I bought this from a Navajo Indian at the bottom of Pike’s Peak. He was drunk, I’m sure.” 

She doesn’t wear jewelry anymore. Some of it hurts her, the rings especially. The piece she’s giving me now is too heavy—three ounces of tiger’s eye shaped like a shield and set in a sterling cuff that claws her wrist when she takes it off. It is stamped with arrows and feathers, and might be merely Indian-like, calculated to attract a tourist’s eye. When I was a child, I loved it. When I grew up, I coveted it.

“He was drunk, I’m sure,” she said because he was an Indian, and she gave me her bracelet, my inheritance, bought with money she should’ve sent to Nebraska for the baby, she said, leaving out what I already knew from snooping around—that she’d had her first son at 17 and left him behind for a short time, after her husband killed himself, when she escaped to the West.

After she gives me her tiger’s eye, she fixes us vodka tonics and makes a pile of plastic baubles from the gift shop she used to run. She gives me those too. “You’re going to think your grandma wore a bunch of junk,” she says.

I want it all, the pure gold and plastic, the diamond chips and rhinestones. I’ll box most of it away, but I’ll wear the Indian bracelet—her Western glamour, real silver from an ersatz trove.

This is what I think if you ask me what the West is: the man who unrolled a blanket on the road to Pike’s Peak and sold jewelry to a woman running from her family. The woman who accessorized her pride and shame with a slur as she passed them all down. My grandmother felt gorgeous when she wore this bracelet. Now it is my turn to wear it, the beautiful, heavy thing.

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Kate Lebo is the author of two cookbooks, Pie School (Sasquatch Books) and A Commonplace Book of Pie (Chin Music Press). Her essays and poems have appeared in Best American Essays, Best New Poets, New England Review, Willow Springs, High Desert Journal, The Rumpus, and Gastronomica. In 2017, Sasquatch Books will release Pie & Whiskey, an anthology co-edited with Sam Ligon and based on their popular Pie & Whiskey reading series. She lives in Spokane, Washington.

Allen Morris Jones

There must be as many different Wests as there are people to experience it. For my part? I know it when I see it. It’s in Clyde Park, Montana, more than Moab, Utah. More in Moab than Jackson Hole. More in Jackson than Salt Lake or Boise or Denver, where air travel, the Internet, and mass entertainment have melted regional differences (like all the Crayons in the box) into a featureless, turd-brown blob. Elsewhere, the West is largely defined by elbow room and, as has often been said, by aridity. We’ve always found a measure of our identity by reacting to the crowded, soggy East. And don’t forget that reassuring chestnut about riding off into the sunset toward a fresh start—white hats, black hats, and a good horse between your knees. When you’ve run out of other options, you can still head West. I don’t believe it but I don’t dismiss it, either. I’ve known too many cowboys who read Louis L’Amour. If the fiction is big enough, it starts trailing its own soiled kind of truth. The modern version of this narrative necessarily includes the aftermath, the stories of Native displacement and decimation. The West, for my money, is thus absence and aridity married to a narrative of possibility, and all of it resting on a queasy firmament of genocide. Given enough room and water, maybe the West is where we can still live out our best possible lives. I’m not sure I believe but I don’t dismiss it, either.

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Allen Morris Jones is the author, most recently, of the novel A Bloom of Bones. He’s publisher of Bangtail Press and editor of the magazine Big Sky Journal. He lives in Bozeman with his wife and young son.

Russell Rowland

This is such a hard question, especially for someone who edited a whole anthology on the subject, but I would have to say that it has become more a state of mind than an actual place. And it's a state of mind that is based mostly on misconceptions, that this place we call the West produces a certain kind of person, and provides certain opportunities, particularly in terms of redefining yourself. Some of these myths have been powerfully effective, but they've also provided some negative consequences, like an incredibly high suicide rate.

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Russell Rowland's latest book is Fifty-Six Counties: A Montana Journey. He has published three novels, In Open Spaces, The Watershed Years, and High and Inside, the last two of which were finalists for the High Plains Book Award for fiction. He also co-edited, with Lynn Stegner, the anthology West of 98: Living and Writing the New American West. Rowland has an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University, and he teaches writing workshops and does private consultation with other writers. He lives in Billings, Montana. 

Jeff P. Jones

The disease caused the growth of large red and black pustules over the entire body, particularly on the chest. Those developing red pustules died within a few days, but those who were plagued by the black pustules died almost instantly. During this same period the epidemic destroyed another entire nation of savages who spoke a different tongue and dwelt about five days' journey from the Flatheads. Of them remained not even the name.

—Jesuit Missionary Gregory Mengarini, 1847

Who’s closer to the land, the one who owns it or the one who longs for it? I hike the nearby ridge and look down into town. Cars and trucks flash like minnows as they swim through the dark patches of trees and shadows of buildings. Motors hum inside the aquarium. Smallpox did its work along the Columbia River drainage; broken treaties and California miners and American soldiers did the rest. The point is that the first white settlers found the place wide open. I’m speaking of the place where I live, the Palouse prairie. 

Blind nostalgia covers an array of sins and comforts the sinner’s children. This is by design. We attempt to honor what’s been destroyed by naming it—Indian Hills, Ridgeview, Mountain Meadows, Creekside. It’s like saying a man’s name before executing him. Then there’s Hawthorne Hills, Quail Run, the Orchards—places so confused in their nostalgia that they’re named after the invasive thing that destroyed the first thing. Nowadays, the neighborhoods flush oil and antifreeze into the creek, where they mix with pesticides and fertilizers during spring runoff, etcetera. 

What persists are the hills. It’s what a visitor notices first: a rolling carpet, they’ll sometimes say. Beautiful, isn’t it? The soil on the hills is what tempted those first farmers, who bumbled in on the heels of the genocide. Europeans go where the resources are. It’s no use pretending any longer: our ancestors practiced the art of plunder. For the perfection of the practice, for its last act, it requires a forgetting from those who inherit the plunder.

You ask me, What is the West? The west is plunder. 

In a geological blink, the Palouse prairie has been tilted and emptied. Emptied of the prairie junegrass and bluebunch wheatgrass and the snowberry and wild rose—plowed up and replaced with monoculture crops so that less than one percent of the native prairie remains. Those pink-skinned ancestors couldn’t even save a tithe portion of the land. I say again, it has been tilted and emptied of streamlets brimming with larvae and fry and dace and chubs and northern pikeminnows. Emptied, too, of the gray wolf and the red fox who made their dens in the lee side hills, emptied of the lynx, the cougar, the bobcat, of the black bear and the grizzly, the black-tailed jackrabbit. Emptied of the golden eagle and the Brewer’s sparrow and the sharp-tailed grouse, the turkey vulture and the American kestrel—each and every last one shotgunned and poisoned and trapped and stomped and run over and squeezed out. 

And in the great tilting, the first people—that renegade tribe who lived along the Palouse River and dug camas roots in low-lying meadows—they were exterminated as well. Like vermin. Like pests. The hills will tell you as much if you listen. These hills, sole survivors of the great dying, speak a language. Newcomers can’t hear it because they have no ears for it. Even people born here can’t recognize it if they refuse to attend. You ask me, What is the West? I have no idea. But if you listen, this is what the Palouse hills say in answer to every question: empty…empty…empty…

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Jeff P. Jones lives on the Palouse in northern Idaho. Love Give Us One Death, winner of the George Garrett Fiction Prize, is his debut novel, and Bloodshot Stories, longlisted for PEN America’s Robert W. Bingham Debut Fiction Award, is his debut story collection. www.jeffpjones.com.