Interior Places (review)

Lisa Knopp's quietly significant Interior Places is surely among the more important essay collections of our millennium's first decade. Grounded in Knopp's compelling attachment to her midwestern "first geography," this book speaks not only to readers "imprinted by a river-sculpted landscape," but to any reader who has ever experienced such attachment to a place "that each of [our] dreams begin or end there" (253, 248, 253).

Summoning faint memory and vivid imagination, in "Visiting Frederic," Knopp recalls an encounter in her teens with wood duck expert Frederic Leopold. She remembers little of the encounter during a time when she "didn't care about wood ducks, … the Leopold family, the river, or the fleetingness of youth" (247). Now, however, in this essay and throughout her book, she answers the call of Frederic's more famous brother, Aldo, "for a land-based history" (248). "In the Corn" offers such land-based history. Demonstrating discovery of the remarkable in the quotidian, Knopp moves from seeing corn as "the constant, the background, the seemingly unremarkable" to tracing its genetic development and the costs of "trading … genetic diversity for … monoculture" (104, 117).

"The Fence" (a Missouri Review Editors' Prize Contest finalist) is a literary exploration of the 19,127 fenced-off acres that constitute the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant (IAAP), established in 1941 as the Iowa Ordnance Plant. Deaths of forty workers in early explosions and fires signaled worse to come. Shortly after World War II, it became a nuclear bomb production facility. Like corn, the IAAP moved from the periphery "to the center" of Knopp's awareness only recently, as secrets surfaced: "First we learned that the land and the water were poisoned. … Next we discovered that the workers had been poisoned" (155, 156). She found "memories, like the once-buried shards of depleted uranium, worked their way" to the surface, memories such as a childhood friend's father crying from "fear for his coworkers" after a plant alarm sounded (162).

In this narrative of reckless or intentional contamination produced because "people in high places felt that people in a seemingly insignificant [place] … were not worthy of honesty and respect and were … dispensable," Knopp asks, "Would my father be suffering from the cancer that is spreading … if he had lived in some safer place?" (171). She follows the bureaucratic nightmare of poisoned workers who seek compensation for their injuries. Knopp writes her chapter in our nation's narrative of contamination with a compacted elegance that sets it apart as a careful exploration of the metaphorical and actual legacy of Cold War discourse. "Tending" illustrates her view that no individual is dispensable. Completing an application for social welfare volunteer work that asks why she wishes to volunteer, Knopp responds from her desire to tend to "the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned, and those who are far from home" (180). Because Interior Places reflects this tending, it is a work of intellectual and literary import as well as of spiritual and moral intelligence.