Time Enough and Space: A New Expansion

Abstract

E s s a y R e v i e w Faye Maxfield. LITTLE SECRETS. Materials are Japanese handmade paper, book cloth and book board, Arches text wove, gouache written with a metal pen. The book is folded and twisted and then placed in a book casing. Photograph: Martha Moss, Idaho Inkspots Calligraphy Guild. W o r k s R e v i e w e d Hasselstrom, Linda M. Between Grass and Sky: Where I Live and Work. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002. 232 pages, $24-95. Knopp, Lisa. The Nature of Home. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. 231 pages, $24-95. Sinor, Jennifer. The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing: Annie Ray’s Diary. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. 254 pages, $49.95/ $19.95. T i m e E n o u g h a n d S p a c e : A N e w E x p a n s i o n M a r y C l e a r m a n B l e w The decade of the 1990s has been called the decade of memoir, a genre that, with its close relation to the personal essay, has flowered during this period in western regionalist writing. It’s a genre that shows no signs of drying up, in spite of the hectoring it has taken from certain reviewers whose notions of what ought not to be written are at least as arbitrary and stringent as any since 1581, when Sir Philip Sidney scolded the Elizabethan dramatists for ignoring the unities of time, place, and action. In the western region, as elsewhere, many of the writers of memoir and personal essay are women, and at least some of the hectoring would seem to be gender-related: “After reading her book, I know more about this woman than I do my wife, and I ought not to,” wrote one university-based reviewer a few years ago, perhaps with uncon­ scious irony. Other critics apparently have aligned themselves according to the old binary of East versus West, as when a recent reviewer for Harper’s derided five collections of essays by writers who can be called westerners (or, at least, midwestemers): “The name of a loved local landscape— ‘Oregon’s Willamette Valley,’ ‘Nebraska’— appears in the first sentence of each one” (Nehring 79). The horror! one is tempted to gloss. O f course, along with other genres in western regionalist writing, personal essays and memoirs have received serious critical attention. Krista Comer considers several autobiographical texts, among others, in Landscapes of the New West, and writes that “the new female regionalists deploy representations of western lands and nature to talk about and, more, to challenge and change myriad social and political topics: [including] the qualities and compromises of women’s lives, ... the pain of racism, ... the relationships between human and nonhuman nature, ... a female-imagined ecology, ... and the list goes on” (11). The next question, however, is not whether regionalist writers, including the writers of autobiographical texts, aim to “challenge and change” social and political issues, but whether effective challenges can be raised or changes effected by writers who have positioned themselves as regionalists . In his recent essay, “Literature, Growth, and Criticism in the New West,” M att Herman says of Com er’s book that it “is highly envi­ 2 9 2 WAL 3 8 . 3 F a l l 2 0 0 3 able in that it perhaps more forcefully than any other lays the ground­ work for a western literary criticism committed to progressive social change” but “its reluctance or incapacity to break completely from cer­ tain bad habits of literary regionalism threatens to dull its radical cut­ ting edge”— that is, the “bad habit” of overlooking ways in which regionalism becomes exceptionalism or exoticism (67). Herman’s pen­ ultimate question— “Critical efforts that address these problems [social changes linked to growth] by seeing them in larger and more precise frameworks will surely benefit broader commitments to social transfor­ mation, but when a ‘literature of place’ is methodologically foregrounded [‘a loved local landscape, “Oregon’s Willamette Valley,” “Nebraska” ’], can these approaches be politically and epistemologically efficacious within...