Ghostwest: Reflections Past and Present

Most of us enjoy ghost stories. We remember with nostalgia the ghost stories told to us in childhood. The seventeen ghost stories in Ann Ronald's latest book GhostWest: Reflections of Past and Present, however, harken back to an age when storytelling was an ancient art. Through an exploration of special regions of the western United States, Ronald's stories embody a multitude of cultural signifiers, traditions and values that are revealed through her critical examination of place and setting. These historical markers, some now only remnants of what they once were, like the American Bison, the Empire Builder railroad, ancient forests, or the family ranch are ghostlike reminders of the American past. Through the haze of history, Ronald's essays progress from the mid-19th century to the present using a multi-disciplined approach to scope out the particular elements that make each chosen landscape west of the Missouri unique. In addition to her careful scholarship, and perhaps what makes her encounters with various aspects of place most enjoyable, is her gift of metaphor and ability to imagine and project the reader into the multiple aspects of place and setting. Ronald is fascinated with the heroic struggles of Native Americans, early emigrants, the 49'ers, and others who braved the Great Basin desert and the Sierra Nevada range to seek a new life in the West. But she does not concentrate solely on European American or Native American settings or landscapes. GhostWest is an attempt to capture the multilayered history that creates western American culture, from its geologic and biologic wonders to the flora and fauna of each region. "The new settlers acknowledged few ghosts but, in truth, ghosts preceded them everywhere-ancestors of the American Indians, the dinosaurs that vanished, the glaciers that gave way to valleys filled with ancient trees. Ghosts pursued the pioneers too, for the miners and ranchers and shopkeepers and homemakers themselves were giving birth to their own ghosts with every footstep. I myself, in fact, am becoming my own ghost, even as I write this page." Ann Ronald is a westerner. She grew up in Seattle, Washington in the Pacific Northwest. The natural surroundings and a childhood of hiking and camping instilled in this writer a sense of place. Her father, an amateur photographer influenced by Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, taught Ann to visualize "scenery framed." Ronald thus credits her father with helping her develop an artist's eye for landscape. Her narratives of place reflect this ability to visualize and appreciate the multiple facets of the natural world. In addition, Ronald is both a scholar and professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her university curriculum includes courses on Western American writers, Creative Nature Writing, Literary Nonfiction, Western Women Writers, studies of Major Environmental Texts and graduate seminars on writers such as Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey. Ronald is al