Western American Literature

Matter 13 offers a rich variety of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry evoking Edward Abbey’s life and work. The journal is handsomely laid out and highlighted with art and photography, all printed on a high quality, recycled paper. It’s the kind of book that feels good in the hands, the kind that Willa Cather would enjoy. [End Page 444] The striking photo of Abbey on the dust cover invites one to open the journal and enter Abbey country itself. And indeed this is the case. The selections feature topics, issues, and southwestern countryside central to Abbey.

The most valuable selections are the interviews of Abbey’s friends and colleagues. For example, interviewed by Todd Simmons, Jack Loeffler reflects on his friendship with Abbey while engaging Abbey’s environmental and philosophical thought. Along the way, Loeffler gives his ideas about the need for modern culture to replace its economic paradigm with one that fuses mythic, sacred, and scientific approaches to understand nature and people’s place in it (209). Loeffler also offers what he perceives to be Abbey’s greatest legacy: “meld[ing] anarchist thought with environmentalist thought” (214). Joshua Zavos’s interview with Doug Peacock will interest all Abbey enthusiasts. Charles Bowden, essayist and journalist who met Abbey in the 1980s, addresses differences between the myth and the man while also commenting on Abbey the writer in another interview with Todd Simmons. Bowden claims that Abbey considered the term “nature writer” to be “a ghetto,” asserting that Abbey “wanted to be known as a writer, and not as a Western writer” (250), but most of all he “wanted to be an American novelist” (251). Simmons’s revealing interview of Gary Burden and Ed Pressman covers their work to bring out the film version of Monkey Wrench Gang, recounting past efforts to produce the film, including one by Robert Redford, who, according to Burden, wined and dined Clarke, Abbey’s widow, at Sundance in an attempt to purchase the rights (295).

Some of the essays also illuminate Abbey, such as Steven Schwartz’s recollections of his being a student in Abbey’s first creative writing class at the University of Arizona and Paul Miller’s fictional essay “Scavenging Abbey” that, among other things, shows the side of Abbey that “was always looking for revelations in the desert” (82). Others, such as Laura Paskus’s “Blood from a Stone,” only gratuitously draw on Abbey. Matter’s essays, however, range from Paskus’s self-indulgence to those that significantly address Abbey, the West, and the environment. The journal features enough of the latter to make it compelling.

The poetry ranges from selections that tease the imagination to the almost inaccessible. Antler’s “Home Sweet Home” is a fine poem about the unity of all presented through images of death (life in skulls). It is simple, complex, arresting: a paradox that Abbey himself would appreciate. In reading it, one thinks of Abbey’s account in Desert Solitaire (1968) of ascending into the cosmos through the perspective of a vulture looking down at the earth. Dorothy Burk’s “After the Hunt” evokes a higher world through the death of a grouse, haunting the imagination much like the Highland Lass’s song haunts Wordsworth. Faith Walker’s “Incantation of the Vehicular Operator” offers a juvenalian look at cars destroying wildlife through a series of imperatives: “Let me insert my bumper into your lungs / Let my wheel scrape the ear from your head” (1–2).

The fiction also offers variety. Nedd Mudd’s “Another Goddamned Cowboy” draws on the western motif of the cowboy outsmarting the city slicker. In this vein, the journal’s offerings keep circling back to a common theme: confrontation with the modern industrial world. Maximilian Werner’s “Potter’s Field” is as dark and oppressive as the Billy Joe story in Desert Solitaire, although without the richness of Abbey’s layered allusions that evoke existential questions. Appropriately, the journal ends with The Last Four Boats on Lake Foul, Dylann [End Page 445] Quint’s comic, action-packed, rollicking novella about four burned-out “ecofreaks” launching a mission against Glen Canyon Dam.

Matter 13 offers much about Abbey the environmentalist, but less about Abbey the novelist and philosopher. Had the editors included an introduction beyond the one inside the dust cover, they might have explained why these elements are overshadowed. Nonetheless, Matter 13 makes a valuable contribution not to be missed; readers will enjoy this journal for the engaging text and fine photography.