Deep Map Country: Literary Cartography of the Great Plains by Susan Naramore Maher (review)

Susan Naramore Maher’s Deep Map Country provides a seminal, expansive study of major nonfiction authors whose work grows out of and into the Great Plains, intersecting with its history, biology, sociology, temporality, and spirituality.

In her opening, Maher articulates the foundational concept of deep-map writing on which she builds her survey of “the literary cartography of place”—all of which rests on the endless trust that the land, this place, the Great Plains matters.

Upon this foundation, her inquiry begins with the vast historical, often heavily masculine, narratives of loss and reconciliation in the work of William Stegner and William Least Heat Moon, and then proceeds to authors invested in the land as land, as biome, and as specific biology. Here she presents Don Gayton, John Janovy Jr., and Wes Jackson, who are her active participants in the land, authors stepping into the ponds and prairies of the Great Plains.

From these land participants, Maher moves naturally to the land’s experimenters—John McPhee, journalist, and Loren Eiseley, anthropologist-philosopher. In Eiseley, Maher presents one of her strongest segments, a sense of Eiseley’s journey into the land and his subsequent freedom of poetic imagination grown from the Great Plains.

In the final full chapter, Maher covers Julene Bair, Sharon Butala, and Linda Hassel-strom, who turn their deep-map nonfiction toward the lived space, a place and time as temporal and beautiful as human life. This chapter, a rich presentation, rises above the others, best capturing these authors, their ability to consider land, humanity, and existence.

Finally, the book’s coda extends the conversation briefly to other approaches, including Kathleen Norris’s spiritual geography, furthering the deep mapping of the Great Plains.

To its credit, Maher’s text works not only for the scholar but also for the casual reader. Scholars, no doubt, will benefit from the text’s analysis of each author’s literary cartography, but the casual reader benefits from learning the author’s approach—which is to say, reading one of Maher’s sections before or after reading the original works should serve readers’ understanding and appreciation of the original works.

Maher’s Deep Map Country reminds us that writers have many fruitful ways of engaging the land: “The Great Plains, for two generations of nonfiction writers, has proven anything but arid, hardscrabble, and marginal. In truth, it is rich soil for American and Canadian writers seeking to tell those stories that discern new ways into the heart of the continent” (34). To her readers’ benefit, Maher has walked through the pages of plowed fields, thickets, and prairie grass to guide us on the unique trails of the best deep-map nonfiction of the Great Plains.