A Bold Reboot

One cannot be pessimistic about the West, right?

I find myself increasingly struck by the optimism of the West.

By that I mean that there are all these great writers doing all this great work. Claire Vaye Watkins and Alan Heathcock and Ben Percy and Jen Percy and so many more.

Not only that but there is a vital literary culture that incorporates many inheritances.  We might have to drive or fly a bit to get there, but it’s all brainstorming time, right? Or listening to a book on tape.

So I just haven’t been able to let Native Home of Hope go.

Another thing happened.  I became a Wikipedian and had a set-to with gatekeepers about the legitimacy of the literary West.  Apparently we aren’t a legitimate group ~ and I suspect they don’t believe we’re legit in other ways. Go here to read more about it as it relates to gender, though region is mentioned toward the end, and go here to see the Wiki Talk about my entry on Contemporary Writers of the American West.

See, the problem is that there is no place to go online to get a list of all the great writers of the West who are doing great work now.  If you search for western writers or writers of the West, almost all entries are for the genre of Westerns. Westerns are great, but they by no means encompass what we’re trying to accomplish, the great questions we’re exploring. And they leave a lot of people out.

So I had created a list for Wikipedia that they rejected, and I wanted some place to put it. Why not Native Home of Hope? It’s perfect.  And along with that, I’ll reboot the site, making it less time-intensive for editors by creating evergreen content and not posting as often. 

My vision for Native Home of Hope has always been to be a gathering place and clearinghouse for writers of the America West. Please join me. If you have something you’d like to have posted here, send it our way. If you have a new book out or a book tour coming up, let’s post about it here. We're taking fiction and poetry too.

This is your site. Submit! Email us at NativeHomeOfHope at gmail dot com.

We Apologize ...

We just wanted to put up a note here.

We very much still believe in this blog, and if we were able to we would continue it.  We all believe strongly in the purpose of the Native Home of Hope.

Unfortunately, however, it was just too much and we too few.

Rest assured, however, if we can find a way in the future to pull it off, we'll be back!

~ The Editors

The Purpose of the Native Home of Hope

Via

Starting a new blog is an exercise in hope, above all.  You hope people will come.  You hope you’ll be able to provide useful entertaining content.  And so it is with this blog.

The purpose of the Native Home of Hope is to foster the literary endeavors of writers of the American West.  We’re loosely defining the West as Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, California, Texas, and Alaska.  And so our content will be by and about writers who are from there or who write about the West.  It can be westerns, but there are many great writers who write about the West who don’t write the genre of westerns.

Above all, it should be literary.  The term has a long and complicated history and we won’t go into a definition here, but by literary we mean in the genre of literary or that aspires to good writing.  (It can be genre as long as it aspires to be literary.)

We want to be a clearinghouse for writers of the West.  We want to be the place where people come to find out what’s happening and listen in or contribute to the conversations around writing.

We won’t be taking fiction or poetry submissions, but we will take the following:

• your book tour and blog tour dates for Happenings
• author interviews and profiles
• book reviews
• books coming out
• reviews of conferences or MFAs or retreats
• literary magazines
• essays
• personal essays about the West or writing
• why I write
• literary weather reports

Bottom Line:  If you need to promote your book, let us know.  If you want to add to the conversation, let us know.

We are actively seeking people to be contributors, and if you are particularly interested, we would love to have you on board as an editor and someone who gathers others’ material.  We do accept previously published material.  And, unfortunately (and you knew this was coming), this isn’t a paying gig.  We do it for the love.

Email us at NativeHomeOfHope@gmail.com. Don’t be shy.

And like us on Facebook to follow us every day!