Interior Places (review)

3 167 f u l l - l e n g t h b o o k r e v i e w Interior Places lisa knopp university of nebraska press, 2008. 289 pages, including works cited. paper, $21.95 S everal years ago, I was asked to create a nature-writing course for Fisheries and Wildlife majors on my campus. Students choose the major, the faculty told me, because they love the outdoors, but become so immersed in lab-based courses that they lose touch with what it was that drew them to study wildlife in the first place. I was asked to create a course that would remind them of what they love. But as I set about designing the course, I quickly found myself questioning its premise: after all, what isn’t part ofnature?Whatdowedotoourselvesandtoourlivingconditionsifweassume that “nature” doesn’t also mean the natural in the urban, or forget that wildlife adapts to human-built environments and coexists? Not wanting to perpetuate an old dichotomy, I gave the course the name “Writing Nature and the Nature of Writing,” a clunky attempt to evoke the tensions and questions too often elided by the shorter, more common name. My F&W colleagues continue to call it the nature-writing course; I continue to focus on the questions and find that over the years, their field and the course itself has changed. Ecologists know that nature is place, and this knowledge has transformed the biological fields from focus on single species to focus on ecosystems. You can’t, my colleagues have taught me, study species without looking at the places in which they live and thrive. So, too, what was once easily labeled nature writing by critics and publishers more frequently now appears under the heading “placed-based writing.” Place-based writing manifests itself not only in how marketers label books; itmanifestsinlocalgatheringsofwriters,publicpolicyinitiatives,andeducators working to shift the focus of school curricula. It is a movement that includes 168 3 f o u r t h g e n r e writers like Wendell Berry, John Elder, and Scott Russell Sanders; books titled A Place on Earth and Imagining Home; initiatives such as No Child Left Inside; organizations such as the Orion Society, the American Folklife Center, the Iowa Project on Place Studies, and Franklin Pierce College’s Monadnock Institute. Those working in the field include not only naturalists and environmentalists but also human geographers, historians, and cultural theorists. I have been interested in how the emergence of place-based writing as a category, eclipsing in name what has been a long tradition of American nature writing, has changed the subject—whether it has changed the way we approach narrative and self, nature and place. At times it can seem that much place-based writing aims primarily to memorialize, render, or save lost places. And perhaps this is inevitable, in that ecologies evolve but the written word fixes. But I am not the only one to wonder if place-based writing has been a way of shifting our attention and broadening the conversation, or if, as writer Mary Swander suggested in her question to those of us on a panel about narrative landscapes of the Midwest at the AWP conference in Chicago this year, place-based writing includes writing about any place—the subway or the coffee shop, as well as the woods and streams. Iaminclinedtosidestepadirectanswertothatquestionandinstead,along with Lisa Knopp, presume that any close, deep, or extended investigation of a place, no matter what place, will eventually find itself paying attention to all the species that inhabit it—the nature of the place, and the place of nature in that place. Knopp is an essayist who longs for a particular place—the Burlington, Iowa, of her childhood—a place that is both geographical and psychological, residing as much in memory as in the present. Interior Places continues the project of her two earlier collections (both from University of Iowa Press) in essays that weave personal history with the histories of place and culture, aiming sometimes to memorialize, sometimes to unearth—to follow a thread of linkages among the pieces of her life in place. Knopp takes the shaping image for these essays from the...