Exchanges & Attempts

Abstract

Page 24 American Book Review Ball continued from previous page than it offers, since it includes only contemporary nonfiction by mostly US writers, who predominantly, though not exclusively, treat places in the US. But it also delivers more than it promises: Most of the essays have at least as much to say about happiness, love, self-discovery, the meaning(s) of (human and nonhuman) life, spirituality, and the art and craft of creative writing as they do about place(s) per se. Moreover, each of the thirteen authors whose texts are collected here (most of which were previously published) wrote an additional essay specifically for this volume—a commentary situating, reflecting on, or otherwise extending their earlier text. I would argue that some of these commentaries (David Gessner’s, John Hanson Mitchell’s, and Reg Saner’s come to mind) are about as rewarding as the “real” essays to which they refer, almost workable as stand-alone pieces. Therefore, I was able to imagine different readers benefiting from the book in different ways. I could imagine an environmentally-sensitive creative writing professor making it required reading for her undergraduate students in order to expose them to a wider-than-usual range of contemporary approaches to American “nature writing”—a range that even includes Gessner’s thoughts about his love-hate relationship with the whole genre and its practitioners, and Simone Poirier-Bures’s almost ethnographic account of an encounter with Kyrgyz people. I could also imagine nature writers and literary ecocritics— even those who are already familiar with the previously published essays—taking an avid interest in the new auto-commentaries. (As a big fan of Scott Russell Sanders’s Staying Put [1993] and Writing from the Center [1995]—essays from both appear here—I was excited to discover him backpedaling on his earlier use of the phrase “native ground.”) Actually, I could picture aspiring writers of creative nonfiction in general finding the book provocative for its authors’ deliberations about the challenges of striking an appropriate balance between descriptive accuracy and other elements and concerns. Elizabeth Dodd: “The challenge always was to keep from veering too far in either direction: to keep the factual information from sounding as though I had eaten a textbook and to keep the music of imagination grounded in the actual details of the literal world.” Robert Root presses the issue further, arguing that writing about the world inevitably turns into writing about “not the way the world is but the way certain filters affect the way the world appears to be to the author.” Such readers will also benefit from the many questions the authors raise about the dialectic of looking outward and looking inward. “For me, writing about place means examining the intersection of place with self.” Personally, I was most taken in by one of the collection’s many undercurrents: the question of humans ’attachments to places, especially investments in landscapes and nonhuman organisms. There is much talk of love, affection, affinity, intimate connection , and attachment—even of “having a love affair with the land.” Revealingly, the metaphor of marriage comes up repeatedly. Kim Barnes describes her attachment to western landscapes as “[a] stable and monogamous marriage of need, expectation, and fulfillment.”And Sanders says, “We marry ourselves to the creation by knowing and cherishing a particular place, just as we join ourselves to the human family by marrying a particular man or woman.” Gessner, on the other hand, takes it in a different direction: “Talk of settling and geographical marriage made me uneasy…If [Wendell] Berry had married his land and become its steward, that was fine. But I was beginning to define myself against him as a kind of polygamist of place.” Collectively, the texts in this collection transform love and attachment into a larger argument—an argument that place matters, that places like these matter, that landscapes and organisms like these matter.And, consequently, these texts comprise an argument that these kinds of love and attachment matter. Still, as someone persuaded that human psychodynamics relating to love, marriage, and family emerge in patterns which correlate with particular historical forms of social, economic, and political organization, these authors’ accounts left me...