2019 Western Literature Association Conference

Not Cloudy All Day: Climates of Change in the American West

Estes Park, Colorado

September 18–21, 2019

The 2019 annual conference of the Western Literature Association will take place September 18–21 at the YMCA of the Rockies in Estes Park, Colorado. Please note the earlier-than-usual dates: our timing for everything will be similarly earlier.*

Our location in the high Colorado mountains at the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park is a majestic landscape claimed by Arapaho and Ute tribes, US expansionists, British nobility, millions of visitors (44.4 million in 2017), and the federal government, notably the National Park Service. It is a fitting place to think about changes sweeping the West, especially the material and cultural effects of climate change (and the often unrecognized importance of weather and climate) and changing attitudes and policies concerning public lands.

Our Distinguished Achievement Award winner is Leslie Marmon Silko. We will be joined by a number of excellent western writers, including Paolo Bacigalupi, Kathleen Dean Moore, Dan Flores, Aaron Abeyta, and Laura Pritchett (and others who happen to live and write nearby).

As always, we welcome creative as well as academic work on any aspect of the literatures (broadly conceived) of the North American West. We especially encourage papers (15 minutes each), panels, and "structured conversations"** that explore the following topics:

• • The likely effects of a changing climate (and weather) on the lands, peoples, and cultures of the American West

• • Anxiety, resilience, denial, unrealistic and realistic hope, and other emotional literary and cultural responses to changes in climate (e.g., in Dust Bowl literatures)—or to other basic shifts in material and emotional realities

• • Public lands, especially those maintained by the National Park System

• • Environmental history and its relations to literature and other cultural expressions

• • The varying abilities of different genres to deal with such topics: YA fiction, speculative vs. realistic fiction, experimental eco-poetics/poetry vs. traditional poetic forms, film, social media, visual arts, feature journalism, personal nonfiction literature, and so on

• • YA literature and pedagogy

• • The work of Distinguished Achievement Award Winner Leslie Marmon Silko and other Native American writers of the West

Proposals for panels and roundtable discussions should include an abstract for each paper or presentation.

*Our venue: The YMCA of the Rockies is not a standard conference hotel. Instead, it is a complex, including meeting rooms, lodging (with two buildings of motel-like rooms for up to four people each reserved for us, each also containing meeting rooms and expansive gathering spaces), all meals (buffet, including vegetarian options), and access to other family-oriented activities. It offers spectacular views of meadows, peaks, and aspen that will be turning color, excellent walking and outdoor sitting, and most likely nearby herds of elk in their rutting season. It is not close enough to walk to the town of Estes Park (narrow road, no shoulder, traffic), and at this time of year restaurants there are quite crowded. Deadlines for booking and for registration will be early: we really must fill our reserved rooms by the beginning of August. Thus: The deadline for submissions is May 20, 2019.

**For the experimental "structured conversations," which we envision as collaborative discussions driven by one-page "prompts" from 3-4 participants on a focused topic directly related to the conference theme, please submit a short description of your topic and the primary questions/ideas to be posed/proposed by your leading participants.

Please submit questions to Alex Hunt or SueEllen Campbell at <wlaconference2019@westernlit.org>.

For more information, see <http://www.westernlit.org/wla-conference-2019/>.