A conversation with journalist, author, and poet Samuel Western about his book,

The Spirit of 1889: Restoring the Lost Promise of the High Plains and Northern Rockies

(University Press of Kansas, 2024)

Samuel Western is a prolific journalist and writer of the American West. In addition to having taught various courses on Wyoming history and culture at the University of Wyoming in past years, he was a correspondent for the Economist for over 30 years, published in the Wall Street Journal, LIFE, Sports Illustrated, High Country News, Montana: the Magazine of Western History, and other outlets. Western won two Wyoming Literary Fellowships, once for poetry and once for fiction, and is the author of the book Pushed Off The Mountain, Sold Down the River; Wyoming’s Search For Its Soul (Homestead Publishing, 2002), the prose poetry collection A Random Census of Souls (Daniel & Daniel Publishers, 2015), which was finalist for best poetry book 2010 by the High Plains Book Awards, the novel Canyons (Daniel & Daniel Publishers, 2015), which was also published in French in 2017, and most recently, the book The Spirit of 1889: Restoring the Lost Promise of the Great Plains and Northern Rockies (University Press of Kansas, 2024).

The Writing Westward Podcast is produced and hosted by Prof. Brenden W. Rensink (www.bwrensink.org) for the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University and hosted by. Subscribe to the Writing Westward Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, and other podcast distribution apps and platforms. Follow the BYU Redd Center and the Writing Westward Podcast on Facebook or Twitter or get more information @ https://www.writingwestward.org. Theme music by Micah Dahl Anderson @ www.micahdahlanderson.com