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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Frank Bergon, Gregory L. Morris
Frank Bergon, Gregory L. Morris
Western Writers Series Digital Editions
The story of Frank Bergon and of his fiction might well be said to begin with his grandparents. Bergon’s maternal grandparents—Esteban and Petra Mendive—both came to America, around the turn of the century, from the Basque region of Spain. His grandfather, born in Guernica, arrived first and eventually met his wife-to-be—a mail-order bride—at the train station in Salt Lake City. The two moved to Battle Mountain, Nevada, and there started a grocery and the Basque hotel; Bergon remembers, in fact, his grandmother operating the hotel until well into her eighties and well after her husband’s death. Esteban and Petra Mendive …
Bernard Devoto, Russell Burrows
Bernard Devoto, Russell Burrows
Western Writers Series Digital Editions
Bernard DeVoto spent the years of the Second World War hard at work on two books. Although very different from one another, both books happened to have Western settings, far from the home DeVoto had been making for himself and his family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of these books seemed to pour itself from him, mounting to 100,000 words, then swelling to 150,000, and rounding out at about 170,000. Its subject was the mountain fur trade, the larger-than-life stories of Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, Tom Fitzpatrick, Joe Meek, Chief Joseph, Black Hawk, and many other trappers and natives. Making the …
Laura Jensen, Dina Ben-Lev
Laura Jensen, Dina Ben-Lev
Western Writers Series Digital Editions
Poet and critic Tess Gallagher has described Laura Jensen as “the Einstein of the ordinary.” Just as Einstein's theories disrupted the then common-sense understanding of a universe governed by immutable laws, Jensen’s poems transform our view of the everyday things we take for granted, the ordinary birds and flowers we no longer notice. “Behind a poem is a bad intention / to make the reader worry deeply,” Jensen writes in “What Is Poetry?”, a poem from her first chapbook (After 16). Her poems “worry” us because they force us to confront our fear of the unpredictability of the world. …
Garrett Hongo, Laurie Filipelli
Garrett Hongo, Laurie Filipelli
Western Writers Series Digital Editions
Garrett Kongo’s poetic voice rises from cultural, historical, and personal memories. As a Yonsei (a fourth-generation Japanese American) born in Hawai i and raised largely in Los Angeles, his concerns span time and place, and his style links Asian and European traditions. He writes from the crowded trains and serene temples of his ancestral homeland, the lush jungles and active volcanoes of his birthplace, and the racial tension and dispossession of life in urban America, fitting the pieces together in a mosaic of self, family, and culture.