Out of Place: Mapping the Country

Wallace Stegner believed that writing from and about the American West was ignored, and as he became known throughout his home region, he chafed against being considered regional—when considered at all—by the East. I remember watching a television interview with Stegner in which he mentioned that something he had written had not been reviewed or recognized properly.

“Because it’s provincial?” the interviewer asked.

Stegner just stared at the poor man as the silence swallowed him.

“No,” Stegner finally replied. “Because the critics are provincial.”

His point was simple. There is danger in writing about your particular place, if your particular place is not Manhattan or one of the outlying provinces currently in favor with Manhattan. It was the New York critics who were the regionalists, and their region was a tiny crowded island.

This is a lament still heard, sung in a bitter warble, from the mouths of writers from the Midwest, the South, the West, even New England. How true is it, or if true once, how true does it remain in our supposedly decentralized age? It is not a question I can untangle, certainly not in this short space. It remains a fact that despite the proliferation of small presses, those brave microbreweries of publishing, and the blogification of reviewing, it still takes less than a day’s hike to cover the city blocks that form the territory of many of the largest publishers and most influential magazines. Does this geographic proximity influence what they review and publish? It would be hard for someone who edits a magazine called Ecotone to say otherwise. On the other hand, some of our very best regional writing comes to us pumped through the pipes of Manhattan.

In my particular field of nature writing the word regional has traveled a long road, from a pejorative to a high compliment to its now-more-confused place somewhere in between. When a genre basically begins with some guy extolling the virtues of his backyard in Concord, it is by definition regional, and regional it has remained. Wallace Stegner might not have liked being considered regional, but his region deeply concerned him, and the writers who followed him, in the sixties and seventies and spilling into the eighties, brought forth a virtual celebration of home regions—from Gary Snyder in northern California to Terry Tempest Williams in Utah to Wendell Berry in Kentucky to a hundred others. Scott Russell Sanders, who celebrated his own homeground in his essay collection Staying Put, also celebrated those “tough-minded” writers throughout the country who became “cartographers” of their own backyards, neighborhoods and watersheds. He writes:

A map of my neighborhood on Cape Cod, from the frontispiece of my first book, A Wild, Rank Place

As we walk our own ground, on foot or in mind, we need to be able to recite stories about hills and trees and animals, stories that root us in this place and that keep it alive. … We cannot create myths from scratch, but we can recover or fashion stories that will help us to see where we are, how others have lived here, how we ourselves should live.

This stirs me, and I bet it stirs you a little too. It is, in effect, the distilled rallying cry of a generation or two of so-called nature writers who judo-flipped the insult of “regional” and then made it into a badge of pride. It is also a notion that—with some hedging that I will get into below—I have staked my life on. The need to know the birds, plants, people, paths, trees, parks, coffee shops, bars, and creeks where we live. To know our places. To tell the stories of our places.

My own commitment to place may at first glance look less pure than those that Sanders describes. I have spent many years living in New England, many more in the South, with seven or so years out west thrown in. In this way I am the antithesis of Sanders’s burrower—a migrant, a mover, a polygamist...