Editor & Fiction Editor – Michael Mejia
Poetry Editors – Craig Dworkin, Katharine Coles, Thomas Stillinger
Nonfiction Editors – Stuart Culver, Jeremy Rosen
Managing Editor – Tessa Fontaine
Consulting Editors – Barry Weller, Mindy Wilson
Print Design – Hailey Rabdau
Web Design – Adam Halstrom
Editorial Assistants – Jessica Alexander, Aaron Beasley, Laura Bylenok, Michelle Donahue, Noam Dorr, Brock Jones, Bobby Kennedy, Michelle Macfarlane, Joe Sacksteder, Ilaheva Tuaone, Bradford Windley, Cori Winrock
Editorial Board – Scott Black, Vincent Cheng, Norman Council, Karen Lawrence, Michael Martone, Stephen Tatum
Editor’s Note
One of this journal’s primary goals at this moment is to investigate the potentials of its name. What, we wonder, might it mean to be “Western” beyond the term’s signification of our physical location? How does western-ness shape the work we receive and publish, both in its making and in its representation by or as us, Western Humanities Review? How can we help to define the West, the multiplicity of wests, their pasts, presents, and futures—with all their attendant prejudices and desires—as well as the non-western? How might we articulate west and not-west not as oppositions, but as mutually defining entities, aesthetics, spaces, concepts? And how might the humanities, through creative and scholarly inquiry, through criticism and performance, through engagement with a full spectrum of intellectual and affective methods, through writing and image, sound, object, and event, help us begin to address these broad questions, lead us down interesting tracks, across derelict fencelines?
This issue began to coalesce around two projects that demonstrate the kind of thought and methods we’re particularly interested in because they interweave various modes of expression and inquiry and because they also work across media. Cassandra in the Temples, by Gretchen E. Henderson, is a libretto, a series of poems “written to be sung” that nevertheless maximize their presence as text, performing the changing figure and conditions of Cassandra on a page haunted by ghosts and ruins. The work, typical of Henderson in its informed and thoughtful curiosity, is, she writes, “indebted to scholarly studies on ancient art and archeology, modal music and acoustics, poetic and dramatic traditions, mourning and lamentation, ancient warfare and slavery, heroic cults and healing practices, serpent worship and pilgrimages, memory palaces and prophecy, and classical biography.” Poet Mary Pinard, meanwhile, gives us five poems from On the Wing, a “collaborative performance piece” celebrating birds through “music, song, poetry, imagery, and expert commentary.” In addition to Pinard reading her own work, the project includes additional poems of hers set to music by composer Andrew List and performed by pianist George Lopez and mezzo-soprano Krista River, as well as commentary on bird behavior by Wayne Petersen, Director of Mass Audubon’s Important Bird Areas (IBA) Program. Excerpts from performances of both of these projects can be found on our website, westernhumanitiesreview.com, which we hope you will visit often and where we will continue to develop our collection of intermedia work.
Fortuitously, as more writing came into our offices, a larger narrative of the west, empire, violence, and consequence began to weave itself around Henderson and Pinard’s works, beginning with Charles Hood’s “Basin and Range,” which establishes us in our geographic territory but also sets us on the road of memory and menace, evoking the legacy of tensions between people and the land that have their roots in the ideologies and methods of western expansion. The once seemingly innocent and utilitarian epistemological and institutional results of these methods bind Pinard’s birds to Alba Tomasula y Garcia’s devastating essay on the mechanization of animals, and to our art feature, Austrian photographer Klaus Pichler’s project Skeletons in the Closet, a tour of the depots, cellars, and storage spaces beneath the Natural History Museum Vienna, whose holdings are “shaped,” according to its website, “by the passion for collecting of renowned monarchs, the endless thirst for knowledge of famous scientists, and the spirit of adventure of travelling researchers.” Pichler’s sometimes humorous, sometimes grisly images reveal an astonishing hidden menagerie, reminiscent, he writes, of Noah’s Ark, a covert and idiosyncratic presentation of thousands of animals “shoulder to shoulder, frozen in their actions, dead, but alive nevertheless.” Fish and fowl, mammal and insect that, in accordance with Enlightenment praxis, Herbert Justnik writes, “had to be killed, taken out of their original context, and preserved in order to make them accessible to scientific examination, to allow their inherent connections to be revealed.”
Embedded within our narrative, and contributing actively to it, are the winners and runners up of the 2016 Mountain West Writers’ Contest, Iris Moulton and Lawrence Lenhart (fiction) and Claire Meuschke and Benjamin Blackhurst (poetry), respectively. We applaud them and extend our gratitude to this year’s judges, Lucy Corin and Oliver de la Paz. We also welcome an excerpt from Marc Anthony Richardson’s forthcoming novel Year of the Rat, which, in its own way, links Pichler’s preserved specimens to the European “spirit of adventure’s” social and cultural ruins, echoed also in our friend Felipe Cussen’s essay on aspects of conceptual writing in Latin America and in Rufo Quintavalle’s poem “the ruins of the ruins of palmyra,” a response to “a 21st Century where the conservation departments of Western museums are spending millions trying to stop the passing of time and where Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Boko Haram and ISIS are spending millions trying to return society to an ahistorical ground zero…. If gazing on ruins gave us Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey,’” he notes, “and reading about ruins gave us Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias,’ then what is not gazing on ruins or reading about their destruction going to produce?”
Thank you, reader, viewer listener, for joining us on this journey. We hope you find it productive, provocative, and wounding, and we hope that you’ll come back, that you’ll spread the word about WHR, and that you’ll reach out to us with your own thoughts and work.
Charles Hood
Basin and Range
Claire Meuschke
an iridescent stone I don’t recall the name of
Mountain West Writers’ Contest Poetry Winner
Karen Brennan
Down with Guns
Craig Blais
Two Poems
Iris Moulton
Adsila, Wyoming
Mountain West Writers’ Contest Prose Winner
Benjamin Blackhurst
Self-Portrait as a Detail in Some Landscape
Mountain West Writers’ Contest Poetry Runner-Up
Chelsea Dingman
Prayer for Landfall and Light
Lawrence Lenhart
From Of No Ground: Apocryphal Biographies of the Small Island States
Mountain West Writers’ Contest Prose Runner-Up
Charles Hood
The Perfect Theology of Palm Trees
Mary Pinard
Five Poems
Watch
Alba Tomasula y Garcia
Between Possessions and Persons: The Mechanization of
Animals, the Animalization of Machines
Klaus Pichler
Art Feature: Skeletons in the Closet
Marc Anthony Richardson
From Year of the Rat
Delia Rainey
Two Poems
Josh Russell
Two Suburban Folktales
Kathleen Rooney
Two Poems
Felipe Cussen
Conceptual Trends in Latin American Literature
John Rufo
Two Poems
Gretchen E. Henderson
Cassandra in the Temples
Listen
Rufo Quintavalle
the ruins of the ruins of palmyra
Maja Lukic
Instrumental
Vincent Poturica
Ronnie
Charles Hood
Counting All the Moons in the Solar System