The Western Home, Stories for Home on the Range
Pedlar Press, 2014
The word nostalgia comes from two Greek roots—nostos, meaning the return home, and algos, meaning pain or longing. The Western Home tells the story of the folk song "Home on the Range" through characters seeking to integrate their experiences of upheaval and alienation into meaning and identity—to transform their longing into belonging, their pain into understanding—by retreat to the safety of an ideal.
"Home on the Range" is the protagonist of The Western Home, and the supporting characters are the people who helped shape the song's destiny by writing, rewriting, singing, recording, claiming and disowning it. Each story in the collection takes place in a different decade following the year of the song's composition as a poem, in 1872.
Beginning with the lonely, alcoholic pioneer, Brewster Higley, who wrote the poem, and concluding with a disaffected teenager who works in a rural Kansas tourist kiosk near the original site of the poem's composition, this collection explores themes of collective memory, collective forgetting, and the loss that is implied in both. Whether they are seeking out ideal landscapes, or pursuing invincible beliefs, or trying to make meaning out of chaos, the characters in these stories are all trying find a way home.
Praise for The Western Home
"These moody, atmospheric stories are delectable, if richly dark and shadowy (as in 1940s Hollywood: think Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice). They’d nestle comfortably on a shelf of literary depictions of the West and hardscrabble rural existence laden with American heavyweights like Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (not to mention works by Guy Vanderhaeghe, early Alice Munro and Sinclair Ross)...The Western Home: Stories for Home on the Range is striking and clever, an enchanting and diverse collection of stories, yes, but also a fresh take on the possibilities inherent in the short story collection genre." -The Winnipeg Review
"Catherine Cooper’s The Western Home is a tour de force that evokes, re-invents and brings vividly to life the many stories of the song that came to be known as “Home on the Range.” Each story is an utterly engrossing revelation of character and of era, as well as of the American West. Cooper has performed a bit of magic here, choosing a simple song as point of entry into her fictional world and conjuring wonders from it." -Terence Byrnes
Review of The Western Home (The Winnipeg Review: May 2, 2014)
First Fiction Fridays The Western Home (All Lit Up: July 11, 2014)