Books of Place
Beautifully Evocative Language of Landscape
As a place-based writer, I am always on the lookout for other books centered on place. Today, I’d like to mention four that I have read recently. The oldest was published in 1788 and the most recent in 1996. One consists of a series of letters, one is more academic, another more personal, and one is a mix of personal, historical, and fiction. Each is as grounded in place as any books I have read, and each is written by or about people whose lives center so deeply on a specific place that who they are cannot be separated from where they live. As one of the authors, Keith Basso, writes “they show by their actions that their surroundings live in them.”
The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, in the County of Southampton by Gilbert White (1788) - White (1720-1793) was a parson who spent most of his life in the small town of Selborne, about 45 miles southwest of London. Everything about the natural world caught his attention from pondering how female hedgehogs give birth (“No doubt their spines are soft and flexible at the time of birth, or else the poor dam would have but a bad time at the critical moment of parturition.”) to where/when/how swallows migrate, or not, to nest building (“It is curious to observe with what different degrees of architectonic skill Providence has endowed birds…”). His language is charming (his description of swift (the birds, not the speed thereof) sex is truly wonderful), his observations perceptive (and often astounding for one without a good pair of binoculars), and his passion all-encompassing. Reading his book, I felt as if I was seeing the dawn of natural history writing, of someone who couldn’t, as we do in modern times, rely on what others had seen and described. (Now, anytime I want to know what animal I am seeing, and even learn about that species’ natural history, the information is no further than my phone, or a book. Imagine seeking that information when nothing of its kind was in a book, or perhaps even known by anyone you knew.) And, in contrast to many writers who came before him, White personally made all his observations (often some of the first written ones for a particular species), which is why the language is so evocative, before trying to draw inferences and conclusions. He wasn’t always correct but he always truly marveled at the beauty and complexity of the natural world within his “narrow sphere of my own observations at home.”
Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier by Wallace Stegner (1962) - I have long been a fan of Stegner’s writing—fiction and non-fiction—and this is one of my favorites (I think this is the third time I have read it). The book is a trip down Stegner’s memory horse trail of his childhood. From the age of six to twelve, he and his family lived on the open plains near Eastend (fictionalized to Whitemud), Saskatchewan, on the Canada/USA border, a few miles north of Havre, Montana. Divided into four parts plus epilogue, Wolf Willow starts by telling the history of the place, woven together by Stegner’s personal strands of connection, part nostalgia, part hindsight (he is writing the book 40 years after leaving Whitemud), part ruefulness, and part fondness for a childhood that profoundly shaped him. He follows with a novella focusing on a young man, who dreams of being a real cowboy, on a cattle drive in the dreaded winter of 1906-1907, the winter that killed Whitemud, and then a short story about the young wife of one of the men on the cattle drive. Both are unsparing in the grim challenges of living in such a desolate place. Stegner ends by returning to town and continuing his walk down his youthful path. The book feels like Stegner’s entire writing style and career boiled down into a single book, mixing history, his usual perceptive observations, first rate writing, great storytelling, and precise and evocative descriptions of landscape.
Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams (1991) - Few books of natural, or unnatural, history have had the impact of Refuge. Searing in her honesty, fierce in her integrity, and lyrical in her descriptions, Tempest Williams (no relation, though we have been friends for many years) weaves the rise and fall of Great Salt Lake (ranging between 4203.25 - 4211.65 feet above sea level; at present it is 4192.5’) with her mother’s cancer diagnosis in a reverent evocation of life and death. As the lake level changes, the water exposes and covers the shoreline, particularly at her beloved Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, her centering place, where she often finds solace, resiliency, tenacity, and beauty in the birds that inhabit the wetland. “It is another trick of the lake to lure gulls inland. On days as this, when my soul has been wrenched, the simplicity of flight and form above the lake untangles my grief.” Beautifully sad and uplifting, Refuge is a love letter to her mother, her home, her family and to the bonds of nature that weave them and her into a whole.
Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache by Keith H. Basso (1996) - To the Western Apache people, place names are far more than a simple moniker used to designate a place, for when one applies a place name, he/she is recognizing the stories, connections, and lessons that place embodies. “Knowledge of places is therefore closely linked to knowledge of the self, to grasping one’s position in the larger scheme of things, including one’s own community, and to securing a confident sense of who one is as a person.” Based on more than 30 years of field work by anthropologist Keith Basso, including a five-year period spent in conversation with Apache men and women about place names, landscape, and maps, this “ethnography of shared topographies” beautifully illustrates the power of language and story and the profound ways that place shapes culture and community. Sometimes academic, often mind blowing, and always thought-provoking, Wisdom Sits in Places is ultimately about living in accord with the lessons one can learn by listening to and learning from the intersection of the stories of our past and the knowledge embedded in landscape.
Please let me know if you have other books to recommend. I am always looking for more good, place-based non-fiction and fiction.
Honored to be included in this list of top ten 10 Seattle books by Jean Godden.
A few spots are still left on my Who’s Watching You walk at 10:30AM this Saturday, Oct 5.
I'd recommend anything by Saskatchewan writer Trevor Herriot.
This book has stayed with me for decades. “This Place on Earth; Home and the Practice of Permanence”