From the Editor

F r o m th e E d it o r As a twenty-eight-year-old assistant professor, I attended my first WLA meeting in 1980 in St. Louis. Helen Stauffer organized the con­ ference, and anyone who knows Helen can well imagine how warmly she welcomed me. The next year Helen and Sue Rosowski accepted for their collection on western women writers my first WLA essay (on Eudora Welty as western writer—what can I say?— I’d just spent five years at the University of Virginia). It was only my second published essay, and they were overgenerous in their praise. They were the first of a host of strong-voiced, warm-hearted, and successful scholarly women WLA offered me—Ann Ronald, who has inspired and sup­ ported me in innumerable ways; Diane Quantic; Lou Rodenberger; Barbara Meldrum; and Dorys Grover— women who gave me a sense of my professional possibilities. But it wasn’t just the women. When I mentioned that my library didn’t have his book, Art Huseboe gave me a copy. When I arrived at the Boise airport for my second WLA conference, Jim Maguire, that year’s president, was there to meet me and drive me to my hotel! The next year Tom Lyon, WAL’s editor, accepted my essay on Mari Sandoz and violence against women, the most outspoken feminist essay I had yet written. John Milton and Mark Busby published later work, while Steve Tatum, Bill Bloodworth, and Forrest Robinson wrote me many letters of recommendation. WLA members stimulated my writing. Sitting in my study in New Hampshire, I imagined faces at WLA meetings. Sometimes I heard laughter. In 1987, I was awarded my greatest honor, the “Willa Pilla Award,” which, old-timers will remember, we used to give annually for the “funniest essay” presented at the conference. (The Executive Council voted at the 1997 meeting to resurrect this award— and the 196 Western American Literature pilla has been found!) My talk was called “Something Offensive for Everyone,” and the title is revealing. Like my tall-tale-telling western grandfather, who wanted to name me “Rebel,” WLA encouraged me to take risks, to try on different voices, to be rambunctious, to be loud rather than ladylike. I’m grateful to WLA for reminding me not to take myself or my work too seriously, for providing a place where I have always felt I could say anything I wanted. While WLA programs occa­ sionally seem to espouse a “separate but equal” gender doctrine, with “male writers,” “female writers,” “cowboys,” and “Willa Cather” pan­ els, there has been considerable support for feminist approaches and, perhaps more importantly, for outspokenness. I’m not saying there haven’t been squirmishes. I well remember talking through tears in front of one hundred people in an after-film discussion of “High Plains Drifter” when someone had responded to my objections to the opening rape scene with a “Jeez, it’s only a film!” But I also remem­ ber three WLA men going out of their way to tell me immediately afterward that they were glad I was there to say such things. I embody WLA’s long tradition of acceptance of and support for younger scholars. (Now I hope I can reap the benefits of WLA’s equally long tradition of respecting the contributions of old-timers.) The amazing growth of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment certainly stems from the energy of its founders, but WLA provided a sustaining seedbed and the support of estab­ lished WLA eco-scholars like Glen Love, Tom Lyon, Michael Cohen, Ann Ronald, and SueEllen Campbell. More graduate students attend the WLA conference every year; they find it a welcoming and un­ pretentious place, a place where they can unite their private voices and public lives—to borrow a phrase from Nancy Owens Nelson— where they can blend scholarship and politics. They bring vitality, diversity, and sophistication to the field of western studies, and I wel­ come their voices. Burdened with the pressures of job markets and tenure and trying to make sense of the latest hegemonic theory, grad students and the rest of us need support...