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August 10, 2012

Announcing the Native Home of Hope


Am I crazy?

Lately, I’ve been looking for a place that showcases contemporary writers, a site where I can find book tour dates and release dates and reviews and lots of smart commentary.  I couldn’t find that exactly, so what did I do?  With the help of generous and whip-smart friends, we created one.

It’s called the Native Home of Hope, after a Wallace Stegner quote: “One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.”

We want it to be a clearinghouse for contemporary literary writers of and about the American West. (We had to limit it somehow!)  There will be information on which books are coming out, book and blog tour events, book reviews, author interviews, conferences, MFAs, literary magazines, personal essays, why I write, and literary weather reports.  We’ll also talk about the West and all that that means. There won’t be any assholes who flame, anti-intellectualism, or criticism that glorifies the critic and demeans the writer, however.

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 will accept previously published material.

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:
  • 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. 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. And like us on Facebook to follow us every day!

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