Text and Community Forum for AFS 2009 in Boise, Idaho:
Proposed by Margaret Yocom and Polly Stewart

Teresa Jordan, Riding the White Horse Home: A Western Family Album
Forum co-sponsored by the Folklore and Creative Writing Section of AFS

Order  Riding the White Horse Home at amazon.com, $10.40.
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Introduction to Riding the White Horse Home and Teresa Jordan

In 1887, Teresa Jordan's great grandfather bought a ranch in the Iron Mountain country of southeast Wyoming. Four generations later, her father sold it, under the economic pressure that have made ranching a dying way of life. Telling the stories of generations of women and men who coped with physical hardship and killing loneliness in a landscape at once beautiful and inhospitable, this superbly evocative book is both a family chronicle and a eulogy for family agriculture.

"Spellbinding. The emotional scope of Jordan's prose is as vast as the ranch she grew up on -- succoring one moment, shattering the next."
-- Seattle Times

"Riding the White Horse Home is really a story of people beautifully written in evocative prose and without literary cliche. Jordan's clear voice, as fresh as the endless Wyoming wind, carries the rich scent of life lived to the fullest despite all the hardships. [It] is a joy to read and reread. Full of humor and compassion, sorrow and pain, anecdotes, diary entries and descriptions, it glows like the gilded edge of a cloud at sunset."
-- Bloomsbury Review

Teresa Jordan was raised as part of the fourth generation on a cattle ranch in the Iron Mountain country of southeast Wyoming and has written or edited seven books about Western rural life, culture, and the environment, including the memoir Riding the White Horse Home and the classic study of women on ranches and in the rodeo, Cowgirls: Women of the American West. The recipient of the Western Heritage Award from the Cowboy Hall of Fame for scriptwriting and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts as well as many other literary awards, her most recent book is Fieldnotes from Yosemite, the second volume in her series of Sketchbook Expeditions.  [From www.teresajordan.com]

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From the Long Abstract proposal for Text and Community Forum at AFS 2009:
We propose to continue the annual AText and Community@ Forum that has occurred at ten previous American Folklore Society conferences.

We will offer conference attendees the opportunity to gather with folklore colleagues and discuss one main text, under the guidance of the author of the text, a discussant, and two co-moderators. Some of us in the Society, years away from graduate school, would like the chance again to sit with colleagues who share our vocational calling. Others of us who work as the only folklorist at an institution hunger for scholarly discussions of texts with folklore colleagues. And folklore graduate students would like the chance to discuss a text with folklorists from many different institutions. We want to restage this space where all these activities happen, a place where we have the chance to speak in detail about ideas that engage us.

Our primary aim is to encourage an intellectual discussion among a wide range of Society members (professionals at art commissions and museums, independent folklorists, university professors, etc.), and we have set up guidelines for choosing the text accordingly. Above all, we want a text with broad appeal. The main text could be from an area outside of folklore; if so, it will offer folklorists new perspectives on our scholarly endeavors. Or, the text could be a folklore text, either a new publication or an older text that we could talk about in new ways. Our text could be a book, an exhibit catalogue, a film, a CD, or another medium that the organizers choose. We may supplement the main text with a companion text and/or a contrastive reading. We invite scholars and, when possible, the author(s) of the book to be forum discussants.

This year, because of the “Examining the Ethics of Place” theme of the AFS Conference in Boise, Idaho, we have chosen a work of creative non-fiction by a western writer who examines the ranching folklife of southeastern Wyoming as well as the challenges to maintaining a life anchored in place, family, occupational tradition, and the West: Teresa Jordan’s  Riding the White Horse Home: A Western Family Album (Vintage 1994).  Our secondary text will be Jordan’s Graining the Mare: The Poetry of Ranch Women (Gibbs and Smith 1994). Teresa Jordan will be present; discussants will be David Stanley of Westminster College and co-editor of Cowboy Poets and Cowboy Poetry, and Darcy Holtgrave, a Ph.D folklore student with an MFA in Creative Writing.

Before summer, one of our co-moderators will publish a page on her website that summarizes the reading and presents study questions. The co-moderators will tell Society members about our forum through electronic mail lists and the AFS Newsletter. We encourage those planning to attend to read as much of the text as they can; people who have not read the book, however, are also welcome.

At the Forum, we co-moderators will lay out our plans for the session, introduce our discussant and facilitate the conversation. Our discussants will speak for five to seven minutes; thus, most of the Forum will be group discussion. At the session’s end, we’ll discuss ideas for next year’s Forum. We have consistently chosen as our Forum text(s) materials that either develop the AFS Conference theme, or are written by one of the plenary speakers, or that address issues of interest to the region where the Conference is being held, or that are written by folklorists in the area where the Conference is being held.

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Past Text and Community Forums

– 2007.Quebec City, QC, Canada. Julie Cruikshank's Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, And Social Imagination (University of Washington Press, 2005). Discussants: Julie Cruikshank, Cristina Bacchilega, and Tom Mould. Conference theme: "Politics and Practices of Intangible Cultural Heritage."

– 2006. Milwaukee, WI. Henry Glassie’s The Stars of Ballymenone (Indiana University Press, March 2006). Henry Glassie will be present, and Ray Cashman will introduce him. Discussants: Margaret Mills, Jo Radner, and Jack Santino. Conference theme: "Homelands and Diasporas."

– 2005. Atlanta, GA. Once Upon A Virus: AIDS Legends and Vernacular Risk Perception (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2004) by Diane Goldstein. Panelists: Diane Goldstein, Charles Briggs, and Cory Thorne. Co-sponsored by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered Section of AFS. Conference theme: "Folklore, Equal Access, and Social Justice."

– 2004. Salt Lake City, UT. Folklore and the Cultural Landscape. WILSON, William and HUFFORD, Mary (University of Pennsylvania). Reading Wallace Stegner,  Mormon Country [1942], with an introduction by Richard W. Etulain (Nebraska 2003) and Yi-Fu Tuan, Escapism (Johns Hopkins, 1998).

– 2003. Albuquerque, NM. Chicana Traditions. CANTÚ, Norma E. (University of Texas, San Antonio); NÁJERA-RAMÍREZ, Olga (University of California, Santa Cruz); LUCERO, Helen (National Hispanic Cultural Center); ROMERO, Brenda M. (University of Colorado) Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002)

– 2002. Rochester, NY. Vernacular Photography. KIRSHENBLATT-GIMBLETT, Barbara (New York University); BATCHEN, GEOFFREY. TEXT AND COMMUNITY. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett will present “Kodak Moments, Flashbulb Memories: Reflections on 9/11." Participants are asked to read Chapter 3 "Vernacular Photographies" of plenary speaker Geoffrey Batchen's Each Wild Idea and visit Lorie Novak’s website Collected Visions (http://cvisions.cat.nyu.edu) that explores how photographs shape memories.

– 2001. Anchorage, AK. Collaborations among Native and non-Native scholars. DAUENHAUER, Nora (Independent Scholar); DAUENHAUER, Richard (Independent Scholar); MATHER, Elsie (Independent Scholar); MORROW, Phyllis (University of Alaska); TOELKEN, Barre (Utah State University). Discussion of Native American Oral Traditions: Collaboration and Interpretation, edited by
Larry Evers and Barre Toelken (USU, 2001) and Haa Tuwunaagu Yis, For Healing Our Spirits: Tlingit Oratory by Nora and Richard Dauenhauer (U WA, 1990).

– 1999. Nashville, TN. Heritage. KIRSHENBLATT-GIMBLETT, Barbara (New York University). Discussion of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s 1998 Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage as well as a companion text (Karal Ann Marling, Graceland: Going Home With Elvis)

– 1998. Place. KIRSHENBLATT-GIMBLETT, Barbara (New York University). Discussion of Lucy Lippard’s 1997 study The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society.

(Photo credit for the cover of "The Stars of Ballymenone": Chris Meyer )