• From the Editor
• Tom Lynch

Dear readers,

After seven years serving as editor of Western American Literature, I find myself on the glide path toward retirement. I am pleased that I will soon be handing the flight controls of the journal over to the able guidance of Amy T. Hamilton at Northern Michigan University.

I have had many highs and lows in my tenure as your editor, some of which I didn’t anticipate. A few surprising lowlights: (1) reviewers who agree to do a book or peer review and then ghost us, never to be heard from again. Seriously? And (2) needing to correct English professors’ MLA formatting. Really, folks? You’re supposed to be teaching that stuff.

Well, I needed to get that offmy chest. But in fact I am grateful to the vast majority of you who graciously agreed to review articles or books, did so courteously and professionally, and returned them more or less on time. With your help, adequate articles often became excellent ones.

This is some of the hidden labor of the profession, mostly unnoticed, uncompensated, and undervalued by administrators. But the whole system collapses without it.

Fortunately there have been many highlights as well. I’ve been especially pleased to have had the opportunity to shepherd graduate student and early career faculty work into publication, sometimes their first peer-reviewed article. As an editor, it’s easy to lose sight of how literally life-changing a first publication can be for people, sometimes even ensuring a job or tenure. Another wonderful highlight has been producing special issues that have had significant impact on the field. For example, when we published the spring 2017 special issue on settler colonial studies, edited by Alex Trimble Young and Lorenzo Veracini, the phrase “settler colonialism” and its theoretical concepts were rarely used in the discourse [End Page ix] of western literary studies. In just a few short years, the concept and its theoretical approaches have become ubiquitous. I trust that our special issue had something to do with that.

I’m also pleased that we have been able to continue publishing without any delays during this global pandemic. Since March we have all been working from home, both at the journal and at the University of Nebraska Press, but we didn’t miss a beat. (The one thing you might note is that a few issues, like this one, will contain fewer book reviews. When universities and their presses shut down in March, a lot of books got stalled in the mails, either incoming to us or outgoing to reviewers, and only began to arrive in late summer.)

What lies ahead: I will continue as editor until January 1, 2021. At that point Amy will officially take over. I will continue on to see the issues I edited and put into the publication pipeline through to completion, which would be the February and May 2021 issues. Then I’ll be done. But as of January, all correspondence should be sent to Amy. Her contact information is

• Amy T. Hamilton

• Professor of English

• Northern Michigan University

• 1401 Presque Isle Avenue

• Marquette, MI 49855

Amy can be reached at <amyhamil@nmu.edu>.

We will continue to maintain the online submission portal that we have used for the past few years, so no change there for the time being.

We will also be changing book review editors. Shortly after I became editor, I was searching for someone to serve in that capacity. I knew George Wolf had been working as book review editor for Great Plains Quarterly and asked him if he might know of anyone who could step in as book review editor of Western American Literature. I wasn’t trying to corner him, really, but he replied sure, he knew someone— himself. And so he has been ably handling our book reviews since that time. I’m truly grateful. One of the things that surprised me when I became editor was just how much work [End Page x] being a book review editor entailed. More than I had guessed. We typically run three or four articles in an issue, but ten to fifteen book reviews, so that’s...

• 来自编辑
• 汤姆·林奇

尊敬的读者，

在担任美国西部文学的编辑七年后，我发现自己正朝着退休的滑坡之路走。我很高兴我很快将把该杂志的飞行控制权交给北密歇根大学的艾米·汉密尔顿（Amy T. Hamilton）精干的指导。

在担任您的编辑期间，我遇到过很多高潮和低谷，其中有些是我没想到的。以下是一些令人惊讶的不足：（1）同意做书或同行评审，然后使我们陷入困境的审稿人，再也不会被听到。严重地？（2）需要纠正英语教授的MLA格式。真的，伙计们？您应该在教那些东西。

好吧，我需要把我的胸部弄掉。但实际上，我感谢你们中的绝大多数人，他们慷慨地同意阅读文章或书籍，以礼貌和专业的态度进行审查，并或多或少按时归还它们。在您的帮助下，足够的文章通常会成为出色的文章。

这是该专业的一些隐性劳动，大多数情况下未被管理员注意，未被补偿且被管理员低估了。但是没有它，整个系统就会崩溃。

幸运的是，还有许多亮点。令我感到特别高兴的是，有机会让牧羊人的研究生和早期职业教师的工作发表，有时是他们的第一篇同行评审文章。作为编辑，很容易就看不到改变第一本出版物对人们的生活有多大的影响，有时甚至可以确保一份工作或任期。另一个奇妙的亮点是产生了对现场产生重大影响的特殊问题。例如，当我们出版由Alex Trimble Young和Lorenzo Veracini编辑的关于定居者殖民研究的2017年春季专刊时，“定居者殖民主义”一词及其理论概念在讨论中很少使用[End ix]西方文学研究。在短短的几年内，这个概念及其理论方法已经无处不在。我相信，我们的特刊与此有关。

我也很高兴在这次全球性大流行期间我们能够继续出版而没有任何延误。自3月以来，无论是在期刊上还是在内布拉斯加大学出版社，我们都从家里开始工作，但我们丝毫没有动摇。（您可能会注意到的一件事是，像本期这样的少数问题将包含较少的书评。当三月份大学及其出版社关闭时，很多书都停滞在邮件中，无论是寄给我们还是寄给我们评论员，直到夏末才开始到达。）

前景是什么：我将继续担任编辑，直到2021年1月1日。届时，艾米将正式接任。我将继续看到我编辑并在发行过程中完成的问题，即2021年2月和5月的问题。那我就办完了 但是从1月起，所有信件都应发送给艾米。她的联系方式是

• 艾米·汉密尔顿

• 英语教授

• 北密歇根大学

• 1401 Presque Isle Avenue

• 密歇根州马奎特49855

可以通过<amyhamil@nmu.edu>与Amy联系。

我们将继续维护过去几年使用的在线提交门户，因此暂时没有任何变化。

我们还将更换书评编辑。成为编辑后不久，我正在寻找可以担任这种职务的人。我知道乔治沃尔夫（George Wolf）曾在“大平原季刊”（Great Plains Quarterly）担任书评编辑，问他是否可能认识任何可以担任“西方美国文学”书评编辑的人。确实，我并没有试图拐弯他，但他肯定地说，他认识一个人-他本人。因此，从那时起，他一直在负责处理我们的书评。我真的很感激 当我成为编辑时，令我感到惊讶的一件事就是要做多少工作[End Page x]作为书评编辑。比我想像的还要多。我们通常在一期中刊登三到四篇文章，但通常会有十到十五本书的评论，所以...