The Next Rodeo: New and Selected Essays - Softcover

Kittredge, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555974791 ISBN 13: 9781555974794

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2007

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Reviews

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. In this collection of essays, many of which appeared in 2002's Owning It All, Kittredge examines the region's character and contradictions. Describing his personal history with the land, Kittredge considers the area's draw for himself and those who arrived before him, 19th century travelers lured by promises of "free land, crystalline water, great herds of game... and gold, all in unfettered abundance." A former creative writing professor, Kittredge has a knack for the poetic, and isn't above putting a mythical sheen on an otherwise skillful and sincere assessment of the alternately challenging and comforting place he calls home. In pieces such as "How to Love This World," "Lost Cowboys" and "The Next Rodeo," for example, he speaks of the joys of wandering slow and easy; elsewhere, he worries over a present in which the "devastation of the interwoven system of life" is already under way. The reclamation of hope, responsibility and wisdom-the ongoing process of "redefining what we take to be sacred"-is the driving force behind these effective, at times profound reflections.
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All but the title piece in this collection of Kittredge’s essays have appeared previously, several of them in his earlier nonfiction books, including A Hole in the Sky (1994) and Who Owns the West? (1996); but the volume should still be an automatic purchase for all public libraries. Kittredge’s work, both fiction and nonfiction, is so vital to our understanding of the American West that every scrap of it needs to be collected. Throughout his oeuvre, personal and political concerns vie for center stage, though the selections here lean a bit toward the political. In the title essay, though, personal and political come together, as Kittredge offers a restatement of one of his recurring themes—the need to reimagine a future in which the West’s central conflict, conquering the landscape versus preserving it, is resolved. But here he goes further, finding a tangible symbol of that reimagining in a wedding he attends in Montana, a “new rodeo” in which the celebrants share a sense of generosity absent in Kittredge’s land-baron ancestors. Meditative, eloquent prose from a modern master. --Bill Ott

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Next Rodeo

New and Selected EssaysBy Kittredge, William

Graywolf Press

Copyright © 2007 Kittredge, William
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781555974794

I’ve learned to think of myself as having had the luck to grow up at the tail end of a way of existing in which people lived in everyday proximity to animals on territory they knew more precisely than the patterns in the palms of their hands.
—from “Owning It All”

Continues...

Excerpted from The Next Rodeo by Kittredge, William Copyright © 2007 by Kittredge, William. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1555974791
• ISBN 13: 9781555974794
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256