Northwest Variety: Personal Essays by 14 Regional Authors ed. by Lex Runciman and Steven Sher, and: Owning It All by William Kittredge (review)

80 Western American Literature Northwest Variety: Personal Essays by 14 Regional Authors. Edited by Lex Runciman and Steven Sher. (Corvallis: Arrowood Books, 1987. 151 pages, $9.50.) Owning It All. By William Kittredge. (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1987. 182 pages, $8.00.) Northwest Variety is well-titled—the essays are various in form and per­ spective. This collection of “comments, views, reflections” was solicited from current Northwest residents who have published three or more books and who represent a mixture of locations and styles. The authors were asked to write about place and they do. Madeline DeFrees defines “sense of place” as “corre­ spondence between a person’sphysical and imaginative locale.” Vern Rutsala discusses this sense in “The Frozen Lake,” an excellent model of the develop­ ment of a personal, local image. Even Charles Deemer, who “confesses” that he “. . . began with the technical lack of a sense of place . . .”, has developed that sense with the aid of friends and collaborators and finds some western values—“space, solitude, individuality, self-reliance”—enduring in his work. Aside from scenery—“this dramatic unlevelness” as Robert Wrigley calls it—psychic elbow room isanother factor linking these essays. AsVi Gale points out, “There is room to move around, live independently, and work undis­ turbed.” This room isvaluable, Richard Hoyt asserts, because the problem for a writer is not always to find community, but often “. . . to get people to leave you alone.” Most authors in Northwest Variety would agree with Rutsala that “the local is crucial”—not just the local scenery, but the local people, ethic, and mythology as well. William Kittredge would subscribe to this idea: “. . . most of the great stuff starts local. . . .” His essay in Variety contains passages and ideas which are developed further in Owning It All. In fact, Kittredge’s basic premise, the failure of the myth of the Western, illuminates the collection. The autobiographical passages of Owning It All give substance to Kit­ tredge’s theory about a dying mythology. He vividly describes in the title essay the change in his vision of the land in southeast Oregon where he grew up: “We shaped our piece of the West according to the model provided by our mythology, and instead of a great good place such order had given us enor­ mous power over nature, and a blank perfection of fields.” The heroes of his youth are unmasked and viewed in their complexity. Kittredge defends regional literature as a way of knowing the self and of creating meaning and resonance within a particular locality: “This kind of emotional ownership is as close as we will ever come, really, to owning any place.” The admission that ownership is not an absolute or automatic right also informs the Northwest Variey essays; as Tony Hunt, a Native American artist on the Northwest coast says, “. . . things we don’t own are being sold and degraded.” Such questions of ownership lead well beyond the local; the larger world is present in both these volumes. Lawson Inada shows the possibility of a world orientation even when embedded in the local: “After all, it’s not Reviews 81 simply a matter of ‘living in the Northwest’—but living, period. And north­ west ofwhat?” CAROL S. LONG Willamette University A Treasury of the Sierra Nevada. Edited by Robert Leonard Reid. (Berkeley: Wilderness Press, 1983. 363 pages, $16.95/$11.95.) Robert Leonard Reid acknowledges the idiosyncracy of his selections in A Treasury of the Sierra Nevada, warning us that “it is a highly personal collection, chosen to reflect my own tastes and interests rather than those of a brainstorming committee of Sierra literati.” Despite Reid’s disclaimer, this is a remarkably rich and well-balanced collection, ranging from chilling glimpses of the pitiful Donner party to some of the “gooiest. . .poetry extant.” The arrangement isgenerally chronological, covering the first 150 years of recorded Sierra history in sections labeled The Explorers, The Immigrants, The Vacationers, The Naturalists, The Moun­ taineers, and The Conservationists. Selections are well-chosen and skillfully edited, with economical headnotes which provide continuity and unity. Reid has combed the early exploration literature as well as current works, and has made prudent use of “the six-foot shelf of...