Reading Westerns
In my NQT year I was looking for a poem to do with a boisterous S1 class. Nothing too complicated, just something that would spawn a thousand activities and keep them interested – you know the type of thing. A seasoned colleague suggested ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ (1907) by Robert W. Service. For anyone who doesn’t know this poem, it’s a pure hoot. Set in the Yukon valley during the Gold Rush of the 1890s, the narrative poem tells the story of hardened prospector (Dan McGrew), his ‘lady love’ Lou and a haunted stranger who enters the crowded saloon bar where they both are. This stranger – weather-beaten, exhausted, filthy – orders a round of drinks for the house, paying for it from his newly-mined poke of gold. With drinks flowing, he heads to the piano to play a tune that is both vigorous and melancholy. Through all this, McGrew remains disgruntled. It soon becomes clear that he and this stranger have previous. The lights cut in the bar and two gunshots ring out. When the lights come back on, the two men are dead, while the formidable Lou has made off with the stranger’s poke of gold. Like I say, a hoot.
That first year, when we’d studied the poem, I asked my class to do a bit of writing (either a prequel or sequel) to the ballad. I brought in various newspapers and magazines for pupils to trawl through for lettering and images for their ballad book covers. Make it look fancy, I said. One pupil went over and above: at the end of a week’s pure graft he handed me his attractively presented story, bearing images of William Shakespeare and the disembodied head of Ruth Davidson. ‘That’s Dan McGrew and Lou, Miss.’ Is it, aye? Oh, how I laughed.
But I’m digressing.
Engagement was high, and the end result was a fistful of sensationalised stories of the American West, more romanticised than Service’s original poem. I couldn’t possibly mess with a winning formula. And so, mindlessly, I rolled out that poem with S1 classes every November for years.
Why am I telling you all this? Well, this month — being at a new school and moving along a very different timeline — I found myself thinking about that poem, wondering why I’d turned to it repeatedly. Another thing that brought me back to thinking about Westerns (and the disservice that I was probably doing to them in the classroom) was Frank Skinner’s Poetry Podcast episode on Cathy Park Hong. Skinner — a self-proclaimed fanboy of Western films — talked engagingly about Hong’s un-romanticised versions of the West in a selection of poems from her Engine Empire (2012) collection. These poems sounded utterly compelling, subversive, and important. When I thought about CPH’s poetry, I realised that other than having a short unit that would see me through the cruellest of teaching months I had no real excuse for reading ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ over and over again with classes. I (shamefully) hadn’t even engaged properly with the features of the genre or the thematic concerns of Western texts when I’d looked at the poem. I’d just read an enjoyable text with pupils (granted, there’s nothing entirely wrong with that), picked out some basic techniques, and then moved on quickly to something else. Like Lady Lou herself, I’d used Dangerous Dan purely as “filler” content to get me through the harsh November climate.
With all of this in mind, then, I felt the need this month to rectify my mistakes. I needed to go back to basics and research the Western. It turns out that this genre has had a bit of a renaissance since Robert W. Server’s day (who knew, eh?). There are so many brilliant texts to study with pupils that it is difficult to know where to begin. So here’s a few thoughts to kick things off.
If you want to study a Western with BGE Levels 2/3…
Try the animated movie Rango. In this award-winning 2011 movie, directed by Gore Verbinski, we follow the fortunes of an unlucky pet chameleon who finds itself lost in the sheriff-less frontier town of Dirt. All the Western tropes are present and parodied as this chameleon (voiced by Johnny Depp) is forced to step up to become the town hero.
Ask pupils to study genre conventions of Westerns before working collaboratively to write their own parody story. Stories could be compiled into a collection, with front and back covers, as well as title plates for each story. Alternatively, pupils might record their story as an audio book, adding sound effects to increase the humour.
Or: ask pupils to undertake a research project on the genre itself. Where did it come from? Who are the famous writers/film makers within the genre? What are the best Western films of all time?
If you have a Level 4 class…
Introduce the genre by asking pupils to undertake a listening paper on the Words To That Effect podcast episode ‘Weird Westerns’. Then, develop their study of genre by using Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire to generate a set of thematically and stylistically linked poems that could be used as Set Text practice for National 5.
Use ‘Ballad in A’ (the title gives the game away as to the poetic conceit Hong has used in this one) as a creative writing prompt. Ask pupils to write a ten-line poem about the Wild West using words that only use the same vowel (ie. ‘Ballad in A, E, I, O, or U’).
If you have an S5 National 5 class…
Teach The Ballad of Buster Scruggs as a media text for the Critical Essay component of the award. This brilliantly comic text is available on Netflix and therefore readily available to most learners. See the Teaching and Learning section of the website for entry-level study notes on Buster Scruggs.
Candidates might try their hand at writing a piece of genre fiction as their Broadly Creative folio piece.
If you have a Higher class…
Study The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007). This examination of the detrimental impact of idolatry is a beautiful masterpiece in the Western genre.
If you have an Advanced Higher candidate looking to study the genre…
Suggest the Man Booker-shortlisted novel The Sisters Brothers (2011) by Patrick DeWitt. This darkly comic picaresque novel could be compared and contrasted with established greats in the genre (such as All The Pretty Horses from Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy).
You’ll find a Sway resource for pupils on Westerns and How to Read Them in the Teaching and Learning Section of the website.