It is hard to love the high, cold plains of the American West. They are vast and harsh and demanding. And perhaps because they are so hard to love, prairies challenge the imaginative mind and the adventurous heart. The Wide Open reveals how some of the most interesting and accomplished writers and photographers in the country have met that challenge and given the genius of the prairie a vision and a voice. Their stories are as diverse as the tellers, ranging from fiction by Barry Lopez, Richard Ford, and William Kittredge, to the childhood histories of Mary Clearman Blew and Judy Blunt...

In pieces of literature rich with imagery and symbolism, the concept of dancing is often dominant because its elements have so strong a resemblance to the elements that make up our lives--the diverse steps in choreography, the partners, the moods, the missteps, the reasons for the dance. Dancing, therefore, provides an ancient instrument by which we can understand and know ourselves but also a metaphor for how we learn language and use it to communicate. In this handbook, you will see the steps that you can follow as you move through the dance of language. Though not always graceful in the...

Shakespeare by Any Other Name is a collection of two-act plays for teenagers. Set in different time periods and places, their plots, nevertheless, mirror the story lines of five favorite plays by Shakespeare: Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, As You Like It, and Cymbeline. "Circle Dance" delivers the zany bewilderment of love that one might see in Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night. "Bob Weaver and the Teen Angel" takes its characters and plot from Midsummer Night's Dream. True to the setting of the play, all of its musical numbers are top of the chart songs of the 1960s....