Background
Gish, Robert Franklin was born on April 1, 1940 in Albuquerque. Son of Jesse Franklin and Lillian J. (Fields) Gish.
(One autumn night in Albuquerque's Rio Grande bosque, Coyo...)
One autumn night in Albuquerque's Rio Grande bosque, Coyote threw back his head and found that he could not howl. This story about Coyote's quest to find his lost voice speaks to the need to know our past and to keep it a vital part of our world. To recover his missing howl, Coyote must travel from the river valley west to the lava beds. He receives philosophical counsel and practical advice from the river, the desert, and his fellow creatures. Raven, Jackrabbit, and Roadrunner, Mesa, Cattails, and the Lavaland pictographs of an earlier day all speak to Coyote. Like all Coyote stories, this one uses earthy humor to teach important lessons. Coyote, the figure of wildness and fun, the trickster who has kept a place for himself in the modern West by adapting to life in the suburbs, has a story to tell all of us.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0826315283/?tag=2022091-20
(This lyrical account of growing up in a family of hunters...)
This lyrical account of growing up in a family of hunters in mid-twentieth-century Albuquerque expresses a deep empathy for man's place in nature. Originally published in 1992, Robert Gish's unpretentious evocation of the mysteries of the hunt and of his deep affection for his male relatives shows us the paradoxes of men and guns: the hunter's respect for his prey and the hunt as a gateway betweenthe sacred and the profane. This is also a matchless picture of life in Albuquerque's rural South Valley, where Bob Gish's father owned a gas station and his mother ran a cafe.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0826315240/?tag=2022091-20
(The Boise State University Western Writers Series provide...)
The Boise State University Western Writers Series provides brief, authoritative introductions to writers and classic texts of the American west. The purpose of all the booklets in the Western Writers Series is to deepen the understanding and appreciation for the literature of the American west, in all its range and complexity. Of more than one hundred sixty titles published since 1972, the majority focus on the life and work of individual writers who have made significant contributions to western American literature. These booklets provide biography, critical interpretation, and discussion of the full range of an author's work.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0884300234/?tag=2022091-20
(A healthy disrespect for cultural exclusiveness marks the...)
A healthy disrespect for cultural exclusiveness marks the essays collected here, a series of appreciations and explications of writers not ordinarily considered together. As the author notes in his introduction, his own biography and career are reflected in this assemblage. An Anglo of mixed Irish, German, and American Indian heritage who grew up in a Hispanic neighborhood in Albuquerque, Gish has always known that one's place on the academic, social, or cultural 'bus' (back, front, passenger, or driver) changes with the times, as does the bus itself. Here he shares with us not only his recent enthusiasmshe was among the first critics to consider such minority writers as Rudolfo Anaya, James Welch, Ray Young Bear, and Jimmy Santiago Baca, and his essays on them serve as excellent introductions to their work - but also his continuing appreciation for the Anglo writers he read as a young man. Today Charles Lummis, Erna and Harvey Fergusson, and Witter Bynner are often dismissed as paternalistic outsiders or colonialists. In disentangling their literary strengths from these stereotypes, Gish reminds us that we gain nothing from exclusivity. His openness to the varieties of American literature will make this book useful to a wide range of readers, especially students and teachers of college and high school literature classes.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0826317154/?tag=2022091-20
( The American Southwest has assumed the status of a cult...)
The American Southwest has assumed the status of a cultural icon over the last few decades, and one of the writers who helped it to do so was Erna Fergusson, named by the Hopis Beautiful Swift Fox. An Anglo American whose travel writing featured the multi-ethnicity of her region, she popularized the culture and landscapes of her native New Mexico and its surrounding states in a range of writing that prefigured the genre-defying art that has come to be called the New Journalism.Much has been written about New Mexico's remarkable Fergusson family, especially brother Harvey and his novels. But Erna Fergusson's literary career has been largely overlooked. An iconoclast at the forefront of the Southwest Renaissance movement, Erna gained a wide reputation beginning in the 1930s for her "written versions of the Southwest," which embraced the complexities of regional culture and sympathetically and intelligently portrayed the Indian and Mexican influences.Distinguished Southwestern writer Robert Franklin Gish assesses Fergussons's literary contributions and unlocks the inner workings of the prose stylist who operated at the interstices of genres. With his postmodern reappraisal of the creative nonfiction forms she used, Gish prompts readers to reconsider how they view the art of nonfiction writing. Gish argues persuasively that Fergusson's identity as a native New Mexican and the region's singular landscape informed the attitudes and values present in her art. He explores the ways her entrepreneurial stint as a New Mexico tour guide during the 1920s and 1930s shaped the organizational strategies for her writing. He considers thoughtfully her various forms of writing and how she used travelogue, journalistic report, popular history, and persuasive essay to elevate the Southwest to prominence. Gish shows her writing as highly evocative, descriptive, and metaphorical, defying the conventions of the nonfiction forms she used and paving the way for America's school of New Journalism.Beautiful Swift Fox is not strictly biography; nor does it, in a traditional sense, seek to explicate a body of work. Rather, like its subject, it bridges genres, offering a meditation on one Southwestern writer's sense of place.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0890967199/?tag=2022091-20
( These interlocking stories begin with foundation tales ...)
These interlocking stories begin with foundation tales of the migration of JJ, his wife Naomi, and their son Otis from their chaotic family beginnings in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to their settlement in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the 1920s. Stories in the second section treat Otis's coming of age amid the shifting fortunes of his family and friends. The third section considers events ranging from whimsical to tragic that occur in other peoples' lives in the same place and time. Gish recalls a world where although the workings of Providence are hard to fathom and their outcome is often hard to bear, we must accept them because our very lives are built upon them. From the Tulsa race riots of 1921 to Buck's last coon hunt, the reader is never left in a completely comfortable place, though one may see "after the fact" a rough justice at work.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0975348647/?tag=2022091-20
("There are whole lifetimes in these magical stories, lace...)
"There are whole lifetimes in these magical stories, laced with secrets and surprises and dreams and disappointments and humor. Like Gish's characters, most of us seek our salvation mostly in the wrong places, sometimes stumbling upon truth where we should have looked for it first -- in our hearts and in the search itself. Read these stories. They will help you find your way". (Tom Auer, Publisher, The Bloomsbury Review) "Dreams of Quivira is written with honesty and a load of talent. There is a depth of characters here that we seldom find in short stories. Each story rings with haunting truth, some pain, and a redeeming message. A welcome addition of Gish's work". (Review: Rudolfo Anaya) Robert Gish's eight stories of the old and new West speak of the search for a region of the mind and heart, as much as for the places in which his characters act out their personal dramas. For some the West remains a place of renewal and hope, like Coronado's Quivira, promising escape from wrong starts and thwarted desires and offering the possibility of transformation. For others it is the graveyard of expectations, where harsh truths and unwelcome realities must be faced. Two stories deal with the transformations and disappointments of young men caught between their own needs for adventure and the demands of their families and communities. "The Quick and the Dead" tells of a first close encounter with death and spiritual transcendence. "Seeing the Elephant" is an exuberant coming-of-age story that explores the interplay between Hispanic and Anglo culture, between the masculine and the feminine, between innocence and experience. Other stories look into darker regions of the human heart. Writtenin a lyrical yet earthy style that reflects the dreams and ideals of his characters, Gish's stories probe the mysteries at the heart of human relationships.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0940666987/?tag=2022091-20
( In a delicate balance between old and new, Nueva Granad...)
In a delicate balance between old and new, Nueva Granada presents a long personal interview that has never before been published to complement a fresh, updated selection of Robert Franklin Gish's many essays and articles about Paul Horgan and his Southwestern writings. In a career that spans seven decades, Paul Horgan's fiction and non-fiction have provided readers with an ardent regard for the lives and landscapes, history and lore of the land the Spanish explorers called Nueva Granada. As Gish revisits Horgan's work, he discovers an evolving Southwest, a land filled with diversity and new perspectives. In No Quarter Given, A Distant Trumpet, The Peach Stone, Far from Cibola, Whitewater, Josiah Gregg and His Early West, The Thin Mountain Air, Conquistadors in North American History, Lamy of Santa Fe, Mexico Bay, and many other works, Horgan provides readers with a classic image of the West, but Gish shows us that Horgan transcends regions and touches on universal qualities. In fact, Gish stresses Horgan's recognition of a new West, a place that is not only dense with geographic diversity, but ethnic and cultural diversity as well. Both Horgan's work and Gish's critical essays and his interview with the author reveal the "heroic triad" of cultures. Nueva Granada explicitly explores Horgan's reactions to and portrayals of American Indian, Spanish/Mexican, and Anglo interrelationships in the old West that has now become new. Gish is a sensitive explorer as he travels the boundaries and borders of Horgan's fiction and history.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0890966400/?tag=2022091-20
writer English language educator
Gish, Robert Franklin was born on April 1, 1940 in Albuquerque. Son of Jesse Franklin and Lillian J. (Fields) Gish.
Bachelor, University New Mexico, Albuquerque, 1962. Master of Arts, University New Mexico, Albuquerque, 1967. Doctor of Philosophy, University New Mexico, Albuquerque, 1972.
Teacher Albuquerque Public Schools, 1962-1967. Professor University Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, 1968-1991. Director ethnic studies, professor English California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, 1991-2000, professor, 1992-2000, professor emeritus, since 2000.
Visiting professor University New Mexico, since 2001.
( In a delicate balance between old and new, Nueva Granad...)
( These interlocking stories begin with foundation tales ...)
( The American Southwest has assumed the status of a cult...)
(A healthy disrespect for cultural exclusiveness marks the...)
(This lyrical account of growing up in a family of hunters...)
(The Boise State University Western Writers Series provide...)
("There are whole lifetimes in these magical stories, lace...)
(One autumn night in Albuquerque's Rio Grande bosque, Coyo...)
(Book by Gish, Robert Franklin)
(Book by Gish, Robert)
Married Judith Kay Stephenson, June 20, 1961. Children: Robin Elaine Butzier, Timothy Stephen, Annabeth.