University of Nebraska Press

Seldom Seen author Patrick Dobson in Kansas City Star

atrick Dobson, author of Seldom Seen, which is new this fall from the University of Nebraska Press, was interviewed in the Kansas City Star earlier this week. The book, for blog readers who are unfamiliar, recounts a trip that Dobson took 15 years ago, on foot, across the Great Plains. The article, a Q&A with the author, deals with how (and why) Dobson came to quit his job at a Kansas City hotel, say goodbye to his beloved young daughter, pack a backpack and set out for Helena, Montana. That trip changed Dobson, and he said he views the Patrick Dobson who walked across the Great Plains more as a character in a book than a version of himself. Another nice detail: Since the trip, Dobson has taken his daughter, now 18, on several vacations to the parts of the country he became acquainted with as he walked from Kansas City to Montana. The full interview is on the Kansas City Star Web site.

On Montana and Montana writers

Montana is a wonderful backdrop for a story – it’s beautiful, sparse, romantic, and wild – or at least is perceived as such. The University of Nebraska Press has published many books set in Montana or by Montana authors and in one of the more recent ones, All Our Stories Are Here, a number of Montana authors examine both the way Montana is portrayed in fiction, as well as contributions Montanans have made to the literary community. Among topics covered: representations of the state in popular romances, and the importance of the University of Montana’s creative writing program in fostering the state’s literary corpus. The contributors also explore the work of writers who have not yet received their critical due, take new looks at old friends, and offer some of the first explorations of recent works by well-established artists. 

Brady Harrison, who edited this collection, spoke about All Our Stories Are Here on Montana’s NPR affiliate recently. You can listen to the interview here.

The National Parks and the University of Nebraska Press

The latest Ken Burns Documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea is on PBS stations everywhere this fall. Critics have praised the beautiful camera work and the thorough history this series tells (of the National Parks' founding fathers, of course, but also of the Native groups displaced, of mysterious deaths, of interesting visitors and more).

Some of the stories told in this series are also stories told in books published by the University of Nebraska Press. And many of these stories are on sale, through the month of November. The National Parks co-producer Dayton Duncan is the author of several of these books, including the one pictured above.  

A random tidbit (this gleaned from a review of the series in the L.A. Times): The man who called the National Parks “America’s best idea” was none other than Wallace Stegner, the subject of a recent UNP biography, and also the author of several books available in Bison paperback editions.

Have a great weekend!

Two seven-mile treks, 150 years apart

For a few weeks now, I’ve been meaning to write about Gabrielle Burton and something she and her family did that I think is pretty cool.

First, some background: Gabrielle is the author of Searching for Tamsen Donner, which the University of Nebraska Press published earlier this year, and which I’ve written about before. For Gabrielle, writing a book about the wife of the leader of the ill-fated and famous Donner Party was as much a labor of love as it was a labor of scholarship. Gabrielle became obsessed with Tamsen Donner more than 30 years ago, when she was a stay-at-home mom trying to become a writer and was searching for both writing material and inspiration. In Tamsen, she found both.

Thirty years ago, Gabrielle, along with her husband and five daughters, retraced the Donner Party journey in their family station wagon, a journey that provides much of the material in Searching for Tamsen Donner. Earlier this month, they retraced another route of Tamsen’s.

When the Donner Party became trapped in the Sierra Nevadas, Tamsen, her husband, George, and their children set up camp near Alder Creek. The rest of the party set up camp in a small cabin, about seven miles away. Tamsen Donner walked between the two camps several times during the moths they were trapped, and Gabrielle thought it was important that she walk those seven miles, too.

Subdivisions, an Interstate and other obstacles have altered the terrain of Tamsen’s path. Even so, Gabrielle said, the walk was a moving experience. Journalist Frances Dinkelspiel talked to Gabrielle just before her walk, and you can read what she had to say about it on her blog.

And that’s it for this week. Have a great weekend!

On Memory and Little House on the Prairie

A review of In Rooms of Memory by Hilary Masters appeared in this weekend's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. In Rooms of Memory is one of the UNP’s newest titles, and is a collection of essays by novelist, short story writer and memoirist Hilary Masters. In his essays, Hilary recalls a summer he spent in New York in his youth when he contemplated running away to Cuba to write with a woman he barely knew, conjuring vivid images of cosmopolitan life in another era. He remembers his father, the famous poet Edgar Lee Masters, and describes growing up with his grandparents in Kansas City while his mother and father rubbed elbows with artists and writers in New York. He thinks about his memories and they way they’ve bent and evolved over the years. This is a thought-provoking book, one that made me think closely about the accuracy of my own memories.

In other news, New Yorker writer Judith Thurman recently delved into the lives of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House books, and her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. In the article, Thurman explains how the Little House books came to be (Laura wrote a column for a publication called the The Ruralist first, and then set out of write her memoirs), and also stresses the significant role that Lane – who had a tumultuous relationship with her mother -- had in the editing of the book (warning to Little House lovers: Laura's idyllic childhood may not have been quite so idyllic as we were led to believe). Lane is an author of two books available from the University of Nebraska Press, Old Home Town and Free Land.(Interesting aside: She was also one of the early leaders of the Libertarian movement). The New Yorker article is available here, and you can listen to an NPR interview with Judith Thurman here.

Mark Twain and the University of Nebraska Press

On this day in history in 1862, Samuel Clemens began working as a reporter for a newspaper in Virginia City, Nevada. This is notable for two reasons: It allowed him to hone his writing skills, and it’s also where he began using his pen name, Mark Twain.

The University of Nebraska Press is the publisher of two books by Mark Twain: How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson and Other Tales of Rebellious Girls and Daring Young Women, and Tales of Wonder.

Neither of these are exactly typical Twain books: How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson and Other Tales of Rebellious Girls and Daring Young Women paints a fictional world where rather than polishing their domestic arts and waiting for marriage proposals, girls are fighting battles, riding stallions, rescuing boys from rivers, cross-dressing, debating religion, hunting, squaring off against angry bulls, or, in what may be the most flagrant flouting of Victorian convention, marrying other women.  Tales of Wonder is a collection of early science fiction, in which, Twain embarks on an epic journey into a drop of water, catches a glimpse of an invisible man, reveals a generation-starship-type world in the heart of a drifting iceberg, and imagines futuristic devices of instantaneous communication such as the "phrenophone" and "telelectroscope." Both are groundbreaking, and both contain plenty of Twain’s characteristic wit.

Off the Shelf: Under the Big Sky: A Biography of A. B. Guthrie Jr. by Jackson J. Benson

Read from the first chapter of Under the Big Sky: A Biography of A. B. Guthrie Jr. by Jackson J. Benson:

"Alfred Bertram Guthrie Jr. was a hell of a writer, but he could be an ornery cuss. Bud, as he was called, could be dogmatic, insistent, opinionated, and contrary. At the same time, however, he was a gentleman in the old-fashioned sense of the word—gallant, fair-minded, generous, and kind. Some people hated him for his unabashed political and environmentalist opinions, while others loved him for the man he was. He had a firm social conscience and was determined in his writing to reflect what he saw as the historical truth. But he was not a stern man—he could be funny, a prankster, and a person who loved a good time, drinking, socializing, and telling stories. People liked to be around him.

Linking in Lincoln: February 26, 2009

New from the University of Nebraska Press: Yellowstone Autumn: A Season of Discovery in a Wondrous Land by W.D. Wetherell.

Wetherell describes Yellowstone as “America’s least-known best-known place.” The author, arriving at the park on the eve of his fifty-fifth birthday, feels the need to examine where life’s mileage has brought him. In the encounter that follows, a writer entering late middle age confronts not only a magnificent corner of the vast American landscape but also the American experience itself.

Detailed in the wise, humorous, and lyrical language that has long distinguished W. D. Wetherell’s award-winning fiction, this introspective journey merges the fascinating story of Yellowstone’s history and geography with the author’s own story—of marriage and aging, of fatherhood, and of the solace to be found in the beauty of the natural world. Most of all it’s a loving tribute to Yellowstone in autumn, the season when the park and its glories are absolutely at their peak.

This edition of Linking in Lincoln is devoted to – what else – Yellowstone. Here we go.

1. Yellowstone park was named after the river bearing the same name, which is named after the French translation of the Minnetaree tribe’s word for the river: Rock Yellow River. Rock Yellow, Yellow Stone, Yellowstone….it’s all the same thing, right? Read a brief history of how the park came to be (and more details about where it got its name) on this page on the National Park Service web site.

2. Yellowstone is home of the largest volcanic caldera in the United States, Mexico and Canada. Violent volcanic eruptions occurred thousands of years ago; could they happen again? The U.S. Geological Survey has dedicated this page to answering all of your questions about the possibility of future volcanic activity at Yellowstone.

3. Yellowstone is a geographically volatile place. In addition to volcanoes, it’s also a hotbed for earthquakes, with thousands of small quakes occurring each year. In 1959, an earthquake clocking in at 7.3 on the Richter Scale rocked the park, killed 28 people, and has since gone down in history as the largest earthquake in Montana history. The USGS has information on that, too.

4. Enough about natural disasters. Yellowstone is well-known for its fly fishing – that’s part of what drew W.D. Wetherell there in the first place. As a result, there are entire web sites devoted to fly fishing at Yellowstone, like this one.

5. Of course, Yellowstone might be best known for its most famous geyser, Old Faithful, which, if you like, you can watch live via this webcam.

Curious about Yellowstone? Be sure to read Yellowstone Autumn by W.D. Wetherell. And see you back on the UNP blog tomorrow!

Off the Shelf: Yellowstone Autumn by W. D. Wetherell

Read from Chapter One of Yellowstone Autumn: A Season of Discovery in a Wondrous Land by W. D. Wetherell:

"Yellowstone is purest America, Wonderland, the country's least-known best-known place. Millions go there, but very few see it; the normal park stay is less than twenty-four hours, and only 2 percent of visitors ever leave the park roads. People know about the geysers, remember their parents' stories about feeding the bears, have heard horror stories about the crowds, and most seem content to leave it at that; in the contemporary American imagination it's become a place that was long since tamed, Jellystone National Park, with photogenic bison, adorable rangers, and Old Faithful.

Tuesday Trivia: February 10, 2009

New from the University of Nebraska Press: Searching for Tamsen Donner, by Gabrielle Burton.

One summer in the 1970s, Burton, her husband, and their five daughters piled into the family station wagon and meticulously traced the path of the Donner Party, stopping at places the ill-fated pioneers stopped, visiting their graves and trying to understand that long-ago journey. Burton, a fledgling writer, intended to write a novel about Tamsen Donner, the wife of party leader George Donner. Decades later, Burton wrote instead about her summer searching for Tamsen, and what that journey meant for her family, and for her development as a writer.

This week’s Tuesday Trivia is about the California Trail (which the Donner Party followed), as well as the Oregon and Mormon trails.

1. Parts of the Oregon/California/Mormon Trail route were discovered and first used in the late 1820s by which group of people?

2. The first settlers to make the journey to Oregon did so in the 1830s. During that decade, about how many total settlers followed the trail to Oregon?

3. Use of the trails remained relatively low through the 1840s. What event in the late 1840s cased traffic along the trail to spike?

4.  What natural geographic features did the Oregon, California and Mormon trails follow?

5. What Nebraska landmark is among the most famous of those along the trail?

6. Which spot in Nebraska was a California Trail hub, where several branches met?

7. About how many settlers are estimated to have traveled one of the three trails?

8. It is estimated that between 8,000 and 16,000 (and possibly far more) of those who attempted to cross the Oregon, California and Mormon trails died during the journey. What was the most common cause of death?

9. What 1869 occurrence caused traffic on the trails to all but disappear?

10. The trails were so well-used, and the wagons that traveled them so heavy, that ruts remain in several states, including Nebraska, Kansas, Wyoming, Utah, California, Idaho and Nevada. About how many miles of trail are still visible?

How did you do? Check back tomorrow for the answers. And for more information on this facet of American history, be sure to check out Searching for Tamsen Donner.