Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Next Rodeo New and Selected Essays by William Kittredge Rounding the Human Corners. In her first book of poetry since 1993’s groundbreaking T he Book of Medicines, Linda Hogan locates the intimate connections between all living things. With soaring imagery, clear lyrics, and entrancing rhythm, her poetry becomes a visionary instrument singing to and for humanity. From the microscopic creatures of the sea to the powerful beauty of horses, and from the beating heart of her unborn grandson to the vast, uncovered expanses of the universe, Hogan reminds us that, “Between the human and all the rest / lies only an eyelid.” About the Author. A Chickasaw writer, teacher, and activist, Linda Hogan has spent most of her life in Oklahoma and Colorado. A volunteer and consultant for wildlife rehabilitation and endangered species programs, Hogan has published essays for the Nature Conservancy and Sierra Club. Her fiction and poetry have received numerous awards including nominations from the Pulitzer Prize Board and National Book Critics Circle. An acclaimed essayist and fiction writer of the American West, William Kittredge is the author of, most recently, The Next Rodeo: New and Selected Essays and the novel The Willow Field. He was the co-producer of the movie “A River Runs Through It” and has received numerous awards including two Pacific Northwest Bookseller’s Awards. Reviews. “Linda Hogan’s vision is breathtaking.” —Barbara Kingsolver. “I have long been a fan of Linda Hogan’s work. In Rounding the Human Corners I quickly found the lines ‘the green floor of the world that so / makes us want to live.’ She is a significant figure in our literature.” —Jim Harrison. “Light. Love. Life. Linda Hogan’s gentle and clear poetry in Rounding the Human Corners reminds me that, too often, I long and ask for more than I need. In fact when I read the final poem in the book, I go back and read her poems from the beginning, so I can marvel again at the knowledge made obvious to me.” —Simon J. Ortiz. Owning It All. Graywolf Press is a leading independent publisher committed to the discovery and energetic publication of twenty-first century American and international literature. We champion outstanding writers at all stages of their careers to ensure that adventurous readers can find underrepresented and diverse voices in a crowded marketplace. More about us » Connect With Us. Photo credit for book/Instagram images: Caroline Nitz, Karen Gu. Latest Graywolf News. © Graywolf Press, 250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600, Minneapolis, MN 55401. “The Next Rodeo: New and Selected Essays” by William Kittredge. These essays, a form of human sacrifice, an apologia pro vita sua, possess an honesty so terrible, so awkward at times that the reader wants to look away. Born in 1932, William Kittredge grew up rich, the scion of a ranching family with 8,000 acres in the Warner Valley of southeastern Oregon. It’s not that his family didn’t love the land; it did. It’s just that the family thought it owned the land and all the animals that lived on it and the people who worked on it as well. Kittredge is very clear; he loved his father, a man tragically, mistakenly, “concerned about dignity, however fragile, as an ultimate value.” That was as far as he got. His son, these essays prove, gets a little bit further, even if it doesn’t feel like much. When Kittredge came back to the ranch in 1958, after many years away, to take the place of a family that had been tending those acres, he was privy to all the terrible trade-offs, half of which he didn’t know he was making -- the pesticides that killed songbirds, the harsh managerial style that sent broken men packing -- and regretted this only decades later. You hear King Lear screaming nothing, nothing in the wilderness of these essays -- old and blind and full of regret for his own stupidity: “Once we believed work done well would see us through. But it was not true. Once it seemed the rewards of labor would be naturally rationed out with at least a rough kind of justice, but we were unlettered and uninstructed in the true nature of our ultimate values. Our deep willingness to trust in our native goodness was not enough. . . . But we tried. This is a set of stories about that trying, called an apology because it is also a cautionary tale about learning to practice hardening of the heart.” Why us? Why lay all this at our feet? How could we possibly be the target audience? Kittredge is well loved across the country; but here, in the West, we readers regard him as our philosopher-king, scion of a different legacy: Thomas Savage, Wallace Stegner, Ivan Doig, John Nichols. His nonfiction books (“Hole in the Sky,” “Who Owns the West?,” “Owning It All” and “The Nature of Generosity”), his story collections (“We Are Not in This Together” and “The Van Gogh Field”) and his novel, “The Willow Field,” all contain similar truths told from different perspectives. But here, forgive me, it’s as if he’s stopped drawing himself up to tell the kinds of stories that keep an audience rapt and impressed; stopped using his considerable storytelling skills, which have been honed by many walks in isolated places, many days actually listening to the world to make something nice. As a matter of fact, every time he catches himself on a riff, making a nice story out of something dark, he comes out and says so. Very disconcerting for a reader. “As I tell the story I mean to say, See, I am not like that anymore,” he says, describing the time he fired old Louie Hanson, who went on a binge, ended up fetal in the bunkhouse, then dead on the way to the hospital. “See. But we know that is only another strategy.” What do you mean, “we,” paleface? You think: My father wasn’t a rich rancher. I don’t have half the wild memories you have, and I ain’t never fired nobody. If the writer was on the next bar stool, catching himself in lifelong lies, you’d say, “Get along, go home, be grateful for what you have.” Here’s where the cautionary tale part comes in. (By way of a hint, the writer starts using the second person from time to time. “You have drifted into another mythology,” he writes of the drinking life, “called lonesome traveling and lost highways, a place where you really don’t want to be on such a fine spring day.” Here’s where the author wants to tell us not to let our hearts harden, not to ignore or deafen the instincts that tell us when we are doing the wrong thing. And here’s where the raw art comes in. “Stories hold us together,” Kittredge writes, “in ourselves, and with one another. We use them to reimagine ourselves, the most necessary art.” But this is not exactly what the author of these astonishing essays is doing here. These essays are far more intimate. Sure, taking yourself apart, deconstructing yourself, your life, your stories on paper may be a necessary step on the path to reconstruction. That young self was the product of other values, other cultures, someone else’s sources of dignity. Richard Hugo, a poet whom Kittredge admires, taught the young writer something about the value of stories and home, “an instruction about storytelling as the art of constructing road maps, ways home to that ultimate shelter which is the coherent self.” In these essays, we get Kittredge at our doorstep, his heart broken, willing like a good cowboy to blame only himself for the strange and beautiful mythology he helped create -- the one that painted a romantic picture of life in the West and drew so much money, so many developers, so much, well, you know the rest. The lessons on storytelling that William Kittredge taught. Katharine E. Schimel, Topics editor, Colorado Public Radio and managing editor at Searchlight New Mexico. She also writes about how people relate to the places they live. I am also an avid backcountry skier and backpacker, as well as the holder of a B.A. in Biology from Reed College. I use it more often than you’d think.” @kateschimel. By Katharine E. Schimel / High Country News / January 18, 2021. This story excerpt is published with permission. Join High Country News for a view of the west and its unique perspective on the last best places. There’s one passage in William Kittredge’s The Next Rodeo that has sneaked into my brain and my way of thinking. It’s from the essay “Home”: “Looking backward is one of our main hobbies here in the American West, as we age. And we are aging, which could mean growing up. Or not. It’s a difficult process for a culture that has always been so insistently boyish.” When Kittredge died, I went back and reread The Next Rodeo , his last book of essays. Once again that passage struck me with the same note of caution it has before: Aging is unavoidable. Growing up, though, takes work. Through his writing, Kittredge offered a path for doing this: He waded through his own ancestors’ complex relationships with the land. Through writing rooted in place — and in a detailed understanding of human nature — Kittredge modeled a way to tell more clear-eyed stories about the West. William Kittredge died on Dec. 4, 2020, at 88. He was a giant of the literary world of Montana, “the king of the Missoula literati,” as one writer called him. He taught at the University of Montana for three decades and was a beloved teacher to many. He told his students not to write like anyone else: “Find your obsessions and follow them,” he said in a 1997 interview with Cutbank , as he was retiring . Kittredge also edited an anthology, The Last Best Place , with his wife, Annick Smith, giving it the name that is now a stand-in for Montana. That book — a touchstone for Montana literature — argued that this community of writers did not need the blessing of the coasts to have worth. But his obsession was southeastern Oregon. Kittredge was raised in and around the Warner Valley, in Lake County, Oregon, butt-up against Nevada and the sagebrush sea to the east. His family ranched and hunted in the area, and he helped with both. He wrote beautifully about the entire stretch of land, from the Alvord Desert and Steens Mountain to the bird-filled lakes of Malheur to the forests of the Klamath Mountains. Kittredge’s most famous work about that time, his memoir Hole in the Sky , is the work of someone deeply in love with stories — preoccupied with the way they can bring a place and its people to life. Kittredge mourned the way his father and grandfather had discarded the stories of how they came to be in southeastern Oregon, the deaths, losses, joys of their lives. “In a family as unchurched as ours there was only one sacred story, and that was the one we told ourselves every day, the one about work and property and ownership, which is sad,” he wrote. “We had lost track of stories like the one which tells us the world is to be cherished as if it exists inside our own skin.” William Kittredge, a western writer in the class with Stegner. He witnessed, over many decades, the depletion of the West’s natural resources due to overuse. In The Next Rodeo, the author’s luminous essays move effortlessly from the personal to the political. With grace and integrity, Kittredge directly confronts the myths that lie at the heart of the Western experience. August 14, 1932 – December 4, 2020. Kittredge used the stories of his family and his ranching community to tie himself to the places he lived, to document his responsibilities to them. He traced the way his community’s farming practices and lifestyle decimated the rich bird life of the area; the lakes of southern Oregon are major waypoints for migrating birds . He scorned glowy and aspirational tales about the brutal colonization and settlement of the area he grew up in, the boyish myths of white settlement that made heroes out of ordinary people. Still, he was just one voice in what should be a chorus describing the places Westerners live in and come from. I was reminded of this when I called him during the 2016 Malheur occupation, when armed “Sagebrush Rebels” invaded Oregon’s Malheur Wildlife Refuge. The extremists threatened federal agents in a standoff that lasted nearly two weeks and dug up archaeological remains around the refuge’s headquarters, which includes tribal lands not ceded under ratified treatie s. A bit perplexed by my questions about the occupiers, Kittredge eventually demurred: Others understood the occupiers better. What he knew was already in his books. It was my job, and that of other Westerners, to make sense of things for ourselves. It wasn’t his, not anymore, and certainly not his alone. “We yearn to sense we are in absolute touch with things; and we are of course.” Kittredge loved the particular, but sought a universal. “We yearn to escape the demons of our subjectivity,” he wrote in Hole in the Sky . “We yearn to sense we are in absolute touch with things; and we are of course.” This yearning is where he stepped into dangerous waters. In trying to understand his ancestors, “trying to loop myself into lines of significance,” as he called it, Kittredge often skipped over the other people he shared the world with, particularly the Paiute and Bannock nations violently removed from and kept off the land his community farmed. He noted the women of his family, but in his writing they still remain at a distance, as do the laborers and farmhands with whom he shared space, but not class, racial or ethnic ties. His stories, fully realized and painful, still flirt with the perils of myth, a form he alternately dismissed and embraced. Mythical stories make things less real, less bloody, less painful or known. The Next Rodeo : New and Selected Essays. William Kittredge's relationship to the spare, often unforgiving Western landscape is fraught with contradictions. Having grown up on a cattle ranch in Oregon, he has an intimate connection to the vast landscape that was once vital to his family's trade. He has also witnessed, over many decades, the depletion of the West's natural resources due to overuse. In The Next Rodeo, the author's luminous essays move effortlessly from the personal to the political. With grace and integrity, Kittredge directly confronts the myths that lie at the heart of the Western experience: male freedom and female domesticity, the wild and the tame, self-interest and the love of the land. On the heels of Kittredge's first novel, The Willow Field , published to wide critical acclaim in 2006, we are pleased to offer the best of his nonfiction writings. Результаты поиска по книге. Отзывы - Написать отзыв. The Next Rodeo: New and Selected Essays. The American West writing of author Kittredge (The Willow Field), who grew up on a cattle ranch in Oregon and has lived and worked for three decades in Montana, is known for its honesty and reverence . Читать весь отзыв. Содержание. Часто встречающиеся слова и выражения. Об авторе (2007) William Kittredge grew up on a cattle ranch in southeastern Oregon. He taught creative writing at the University of Montana for twenty-nine years and retired as Regents Professor of English. He now lives in Missoula, Montana.