West has always been more than mere direction, a setting sun, \u00a0evening. In lands now known by many as the United States of America, \u00a0West invokes a fraught mythology of wilderness and conquest, of destiny and riches, of jackrabbit homesteads and romantic distances, of cowboys \u00a0and bears. For so long these symbols have dominated our histories of \u00a0these lands, centering whiteness and masculinity in a rugged, difficult \u00a0terrain. But the West and its frontier have always been strange, full of contradictions, queer even. As Josh Garrett-Davis, a curator, scholar \u00a0at the Gene Autry Museum of the American West, posits of the regional \u00a0West, \u201c[It is] a borderland\u2014or two-or-more-sided frontier\u2014where old and \u00a0new coexist, collaborate, fight, innovate, [holding] ample grounds for \u00a0new stories.\u201d<\/p>\n
The West as we understand it has never been uninhabited. People have \u00a0thrived in communion with these lands for thousands of years. Flora and fauna, too. Where some see vacant desert, or land to be occupied for the next housing development, we cast our eyes upon resilient life, those who understand the importance of water and resource conservation. In South Dakota, Indigenous water advocates protest pipeline routes, while Chicano artists muralize the scar of a border wall with the painting of \u00a0roses.<\/p>\n
We call contributors to conceive of the West beyond its conventional and colonialized framework. What happens when the dam breaks, when waters flow along their pre-colonial course and stewardship is returned to the original caretakers of the land? There are many ways to deconstruct a dam, an archetype, to unearth histories long-buried in sand or alpine forest. The West is multiple and many.<\/p>\n
In the next issue of\u00a0About Place Journal<\/em>, we invite you to consider and reimagine all things West. Send us your visual poems and performances, your experimental stories and essays, your art classified \u00a0by no other name than art<\/em>. As we decenter traditional subjects and propagandized histories of this ambiguous region, share with us your witness and protests, your lineages who have lived here longer than the word itself and this country. We are particularly interested in work from young, emerging artists (17 and younger), as well as work by BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ artists, especially those whose stories have been excluded \u00a0by a mythology of the west centered on whiteness, masculinity, and \u00a0extraction.https:\/\/aboutplacejournal.submittable.com\/submit\/282282\/strange-wests<\/p>\n Each submission must be accompanied by a bio in doc, docx or rtf format. Bios should be in the third person and not exceed 150 words. Please include your website, Twitter and Instagram links if desired.<\/p>\n By submitting, you guarantee you hold the rights to the work, and you grant About Place Journal the rights to publish the submitted work with first\u00a0serial\u00a0rights (FNASR). After publication, rights revert to the author. Original, previously unpublished work only. All pieces must be submitted through Submittable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We call contributors to conceive of the West beyond its conventional and colonialized framework. What happens when the dam breaks, when waters flow along their pre-colonial course and stewardship is returned to the original caretakers of the land? There are many ways to deconstruct a dam, an archetype, to unearth histories long-buried in sand or alpine forest. The West is multiple and many.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"_tribe_events_status":"","_tribe_events_status_reason":"","footnotes":"","_tec_slr_enabled":"","_tec_slr_layout":""},"tags":[],"tribe_events_cat":[2],"class_list":["post-4135","tribe_events","type-tribe_events","status-publish","hentry","tribe_events_cat-call-for-submission","cat_call-for-submission"],"ticketed":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/anovelapproach.ca\/submission_calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/4135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/anovelapproach.ca\/submission_calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/anovelapproach.ca\/submission_calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/tribe_events"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anovelapproach.ca\/submission_calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/anovelapproach.ca\/submission_calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/4135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4136,"href":"https:\/\/anovelapproach.ca\/submission_calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/4135\/revisions\/4136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/anovelapproach.ca\/submission_calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anovelapproach.ca\/submission_calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4135"},{"taxonomy":"tribe_events_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/anovelapproach.ca\/submission_calendar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events_cat?post=4135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}About Place Journal Submission Guidelines<\/h3>\n
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