Robert Root, who helps locate the nonfiction of place in his introduction to Landscapes with Figures, has written or edited a dozen books, including several on the teaching of writing and the composing of nonfiction. He is also the author of Recovering Ruth: A Biographer’s Tale (Nebraska 2003). Contributors: Kim Barnes on changing terrain in Idaho; Alison Hawthorne Deming on the territory of birds; Elizabeth Dodd on a Colorado canyonland; David Gessner on Cape Cod; Barbara Hurd deep in a cave in Virginia; Lisa Knopp on a Nebraska salt marsh; John Hanson Mitchell on one Massachusetts square mile; Simone Poirier-Bures on back-country Krygystan; Robert Root on the Anasazi ruins of the Four Corners; Scott Russell Sanders on a drowned valley in Ohio; Reg Saner on a Colorado mesa and a Tuscan countryside; Natalia Rachel Singer on expatriate life in Mexico; Deborah Tall on recovering the past in Kraków
“Although most obviously united by each writer’s skilled
articulation of setting, this collection of literary nonfiction
could also serve as a miniature anthology of writing method. In his
introduction, Root carefully defines nonfiction of place (including
an explanation of the title metaphor). The collected essays and
excerpts from memoirs and narratives that follow are clearly the
product of serious dedication to the art of writing, meticulous
research and revision, and devotion to the chosen
subjects.”—Library Journal
“A welcome addition to ‘nature writing’ collections . . . . Its
twenty-eight essays demonstrate the continuing expansion of
creative writing that celebrates, questions, and reflects on the
complexity of the Homosapiens Eros for landscapes and species—of
the variety of human attachments to place and environments—without
usually falling prey to geographic determinism or other vulgarly
romantic invocations of nature as national symbol or as evidence of
cultural distinctiveness or superiority. . . . [These texts] help
legitimate passionate intellectual exchanges about nature and place
that reflect commitments to something other than narrowly romantic
place identity politics.”—Eric L. Ball, American Book Review
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