From the Editor

Abstract

From t h e Editor MELODY GRAULICH This winter’s issue of Western American Literature marks some changes. We have moved the annual bibliography and “Research in Western American Literature” from the pages of the journal to our web site, which allows us to expand the bibliography in new and excit­ ing ways. For the why’s and how’s, be sure to read Angela AshurstMcGee ’s “From the Bibliographic Editor,” which is packed with useful information. Some of you may notice another change: no new W LA membership directory. Because the directory is costly and time con­ suming, we have decided to print a new one every other year. So make sure to hold on to the 1998 directory. We have plenty left to send to new members. We now have room for three wide-ranging essays in this winter issue. Two began as lectures and have wonderful conversational tones, which will be familiar to many W LA members. A t the 1998 Banff conference many folks requested that we print Gary Schamhorst’s witty past president’s address, “In Defense of Literary Biography.” Ann Ronald originally presented “Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order: Twentieth-Century American Nature Writer” as the Rembert Kingsley Lecture in Women and Conservation Biology in March of 1997 at the University of Nevada, Reno. Because of its origins, we planned to accompany Ronald’s essay with the work of some of the many women artists who made a living by cataloguing the botanical West for government publications. As Vera Norwood has argued, these women “supported the national effort to define Americans through their relationship with a land containing their history in flora and fauna” (87). But we eventually expanded our illustrations to include the work of Frederick A. Walpole because he actually did his drawings on field trips to the Northwest. We are also lucky to publish a revised excerpt from Krista Comer’s forthcoming book, Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Womens Writing. When we first accepted Comer’s essay on the African American poet Wanda Coleman, I knew I wanted to include artwork by one of the artists I most admire, Elizabeth Catlett, whose Separation is our cover piece. Defining herself as one of the “fortunate” rather than the “exceptional,” arguing that we should not “feel superior nor removed from our brothers and sisters of other 3 4 0 W A L 3 3 ( 4 ) WINTER 1 9 9 9 races or other classes” but should “learn from them and deepen our concepts of what are basic life necessities,” Catlett is an exemplary figure of multiculturalism (Catlett, “Excerpts” 340). Her view of art challenges preconceptions about class and privilege. I began to realize that uneducated people have the same cul­ tural needs that we fortunate university people do. . . . True art has always come from cultural necessity. Since prehistoric times, since the earliest cave paintings, people have had this compulsive necessity to express themselves through painting, sculpture, and engraving. We imagine that [is true of] music and dance as well. There exists a funda­ mental need to create, to form an aesthetic something from raw materials. When this creative urge is denied fulfillment, repression and frustration occur. (Catlett, “Excerpts” 340-41) From the 1940s until today, Catlett has been a pioneer in represent­ ing African American women and directing her work to a working class popular audience. Catlett was bom and raised in the East, but she became a wester­ ner when she moved to Mexico City in 1946 with her then-husband, the printmaker Charles White. White returned to New York, but Catlett stayed in Mexico. Inspired by the socially conscious art of the great Mexican muralists, she associated with a populist graphics col­ lective. She became increasingly committed to socially relevant rep­ resentational art, accessible to “ordinary” people, dedicated to “liber­ ation,” and “based on the needs of the people.” As she later wrote, In 1946 on my first visit to the Fine Arts Palace in Mexico City to see an exhibition of the work ofJosé Clemente Orozco, for many the greatest of the Mexican muralists, I was amazed to see lines of people in overalls or aprons, sandals...