READING ROOM  

Students, faculty, and general readers will find the following works, selected from the Weber archives, of special interest.  These readings may be supplemented by using our search program to look for works by the same authors or works that deal with the same themes and ideas.

Personal Narrative  

"Is language, in fact, a medium in which we exist as human beings and function as social beings? Is language tantamount to our experience of life and culture, or is it simply used to keep a conversation going?"

 - Harold Gaski, "A Language to Catch Birds," Weber Studies, Fall 1999.

Karen Babine, "Deadwood"
Simmons B. Buntin, "Calendars of the Sun and Moon"
Russell Burrows, "The Mormon Samson: Porter Rockwell"
Christopher Camuto, "In a Landscape"
Matthew Cooperman, "The Color of Dust," "A Raft of Blues"
Julia Corbett, "Fashion Stories"
John Daniel, "The Province of Personal Narrative"
David James Duncan, "My Advice on Writing Advice"
Ron Fischer, "The Language of Stone: Stories from Pictograph Caves"
Shaun T. Griffin, "Letter From the Blackstone River: Under Fog with the Porcupine Caribou"
Jessica Halliday, "A Mother's' Fairy Tale"
Robert King, "Lost at Home in the Bottomlands"
Waddie Mitchell, "Keynote Address: 2001 National Cowboy Poetry Gathering"
David Mogen, "Circle in the Snow"
Louis Owens, "Finding Gene"
Levi Peterson, "Growing Up in Snow Flake"
John Schwiebert, "News Flash: Walt Whitman Advises Teens to 'Skip' Poetry?"
Robert B. Smith, "Metamorphosis"
David Stevenson, "Untethered in Yosemite: A Report from Paradise in the Last Summer of the Millennium"
John H. Timmerman, "Bringing the Dead to Life: An Explanation of War and Memory"

Poetry

Conversations with Eminent Writers (including examples of their creative work published in Weber)

Short Stories

"Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are."

- Tim O'Brien, quoted by Joseph Cox, Weber Studies, Spring/Summer 1996.

James Barbour, "Mondegreen"
Martin R. Dean "The Escape Artist" (Global Spotlight)
Joseph Ditta, "Hour Before the Dark", "Of Bondage and the Break", "Madison Blues"
Richard Dokey, "A Horse of a Different Color", "Something Happened", "Motel Man"
Gary Gildner, "The Romona Tomorrow Story"
Tom Hansen, "No Monsters Allowed"
David Kranes, "Burning the Leaves"
Will Michelet, "The Price of Preservas Prohibidas"
James Reed, "The Otherwise Dark"
Neila Seshachari, "It's Your Heart that Makes all the Difference"
Alicia Shank, "Hurts"

The Environment 

"The very meaning of the word environment ... has undergone metamorphosis from human environment to the environment, protean in its suggestiveness of survival as well as cyclical natural processes of regeneration."

- Neila Seshachari, "Editor's Note," Weber Studies, Winter 1992.

Michael Branch, "Ecocriticism:  The Nature of Nature in Literary Theory and Practice"
Brendon Cesmat, "Surviving Paradise"
Sally Charette, "It Ain't Las Vegas"
Michael Engelhard, "Closed Range"
Mike Freeman, "Interplay—The Need for Wilderness"
Tim Gilmer, "The Soil Inside Us"
Shaun T. Griffin, "Letter From the Blackstone River: Under Fog with the Porcupine Caribou"
Linda Hasselstrom, "Badger's Business"
Kevin Holdsworth, "High Plateau Blues"
Edward Lueders, "Dirt, Rock, Wind, Rain, Ice, Dust:  Notes on the Environment"
Waddie Mitchell, "Keynote Address: 2001 National Cowboy Poetry Gathering"
John Nizalowski, "Bridges"
Max Oelschlaeger, "The Way Ahead:  Building Grounded Communities"
Barry Lopez, "A Conversation With..."
Stan Tixier, "Welcome Rain" and other poems
Maximilian S. Werner, "The Dowsers of Perlite Pond"

Ideas

"In humanistic studies such as art, history, philosophy and literature there is a lack of immediacy, a lack of task-orientation, a lack of practicality and pay-off. When the press of immediacy is suspended, one has a chance to play around with ideas. This is the atmosphere conducive to developing critical intelligence."

- K. Danner Clouser, "Humanities in a Tech Education," Weber Studies, Spring 1986.

Appleby, Englehardt, Irish, Wilson, "The Value of Values:  A Conversation"
Wayne Booth, "The Last Amateurs ..."
Walter Cummins, "'They Fancied Themselves Free':  Exploration and Individualism"
Judy Elsley, "Dividing up the World"
Tamara Fritze, "Growing a Home: Gardens as Place"
Carolyn D. Holbert, "True West"
David Hutto, "The Southern Quandry of Being OK but Southern"
Robert Schnelle, "Over the Line: Robert Frost and Trespass"
Doug Smith, "Ten Years After: An Intimate Account of the Yellowstone Wolf Story"
Matthew J. Sullivan, "Outsiders"
Larry Tritten, "R. C. Gorman and J. D. Challenger: Two Hearts of the West"
Manfred Weidhorn, "Beyond Conservatism and Liberalism"
Jim Young, "Homesteading in Virginia: An Academic in Exile"

FilmFocus

"Filmmaking is very attractive to people, and there’s an apparent glamour to it. I would personally disabuse people of that. It’s very, very hard work. I remind people that it’s hard work. The hardest working people I know are filmmakers, in terms of how many hours they put in a day and how many days they work a week and how many weeks they work a year."

- Ken Burns, "Weber Studies, Fall 2006.

Samir Dayal, "Professing Spirituality: Bollywood Fantasies and the Return of Religion"
Greg Lewis, "Between Moscow and Hollywood: China's National Cinema at Weber State University"
Andreas Ströhl, "On the Threat to American Bodies: The View From Abroad Inside a Movie Theater"
Madonne Miner, "Not the Usual Suspects: Revising the Code of the Male Heist in Sugar & Spice"

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