Magazine Stand :: About Place Journal – June 2024

The June 2024 issue of About Place explores the concept of “west.” West has always been more than mere direction, a setting sun, evening. The term invokes a fraught mythology of wilderness and conquest, of destiny and riches, of jackrabbit homesteads and romantic distances, of cowboys and bears. These symbols have long dominated our histories of these lands, centering whiteness and masculinity in rugged, difficult terrain. But the West has always been strange, full of contradictions, queer. “Strange Wests” conceives of the West beyond its conventional, 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?

[Cover artwork Dreams Collage by Irina Tall Novikova.]