The Wide Open

by Smith, Annick

• ISBN13: 9780803217515
• ISBN10: 080321751X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-09-01
• Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr

Summary

It is hard to love the high, cold plains of the American West. They are vast and harsh and demanding. And perhaps because they are so hard to love, prairies challenge the imaginative mind and the adventurous heart.The Wide Openreveals how some of the most interesting and accomplished writers and photographers in the country have met that challenge and given the genius of the prairie a vision and a voice. Their stories are as diverse as the tellers, ranging from fiction by Barry Lopez, Richard Ford, and William Kittredge, to the childhood histories of Mary Clearman Blew and Judy Blunt and the nonfiction narratives of Jim Harrison, Gretel Ehrlich, and Rick Bass. There are works by Native American prairie dwellers such as M. L. Smoker and James Welch and the photographic interpretations of Lee Friedlander, Lois Conner, and Geoffrey James. Personal or poetic, journalistic or scientific, these works eloquently attest to the prairie's abundance in all its human and natural variety, offering pictures as wide open and rich as the land they depict.

Author Biography

Annick Smith is the author of several books, most recently In This We Are Native: On Going Away and Coming Home and Homestead. She is coeditor of the Montana anthology The Last Best Place and an award-winning story writer.

 

Susan O’Connor, a philanthropist and arts advocate, is the president of the board of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and a board member of the Orion Society.

 

Contributors: Rick Bass, Mary Clearman Blew, Judy Blunt, Lois Conner, David James Duncan, Gretel Ehrlich, Dan Flores, Richard Ford, Lee Friedlander, James Galvin, Ian Glennie, Jim Harrison, Richard Hugo, Fredericka Hunter, Geoffrey James, William Kittredge, Barry Lopez, Richard Manning, Peter Matthiessen, Thomas McGuane, Susan O’Connor, Annick Smith, M. L. Smoker, Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs, and James Welch.

Table of Contents

Frontispiece-Panorama

Dedication

Introduction

Preface

American Prairie Foundation

Notes on the Photographs

Photo Editors

Home on the Range

Blew / Becoming

Evolution

Excerpt from

The Death of Jim Loney

No Bastion (poem)

A Foal

(poems) / Birthright - Letter to Richard Hugo - Grandfather Poem - Crosscurrent

To a Meadowlark (poem)

Portfolio #1 / Lee Friedlander

Hunting and Gathering

The Bear in the Road

Bird Hunter

What the Prairie Has To Say About Fly Fishing

Far Point [novel excerpt]

A Summer Journal

Portfolio #2

Travels Across The Plains

Don't Fence Me In

Crossing the Plains with Bruno [excerpt]

Empire

Portfolio #3

Natural History

An Entire Heaven and An Entire Earth

Plains, Prairies, and the Shining Mountains

Instructions from a Misanthrope's Paradise

Driving Montana - Distances - High Grass Prairie - Bear Paw

Author, photographer, and editor bios

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