I’d like to see a softball game between two factions in American literature: Home versus Away. The Away team, the exiles and movers, would be captained by Kerouac, Hemingway, and Henry James, the Home team by Thoreau, Dickinson, and Faulkner. While the Homers might be more patient at the plate, the Aways would have the edge in sheer aggression and ambition. No doubt Thomas Wolfe, all six foot seven of him, would bat cleanup for the Aways, having both strip-mined his own hometown for material and coined the phrase that defined the split. He would likely, in the style of his squad, swing mightily for the fences.
If these team names—“Home” and “Away”—seem too bland, we can turn to Wallace Stegner for inspiration. Stegner, who, by the way, would be one of the home team’s better players, liked to divide Westerners into two camps: "Boomers" and "Stickers." Boomers were those who came to a place, mined and exploited it for anything from uranium to real estate to tourism, and then moved on. Stickers were those who found a place they loved, stayed there and fought for it for the rest of their lives.
Boomers and Stickers, then. But whom to root for? Judging by sales and readership, Boomers would have a bigger, louder crowd. But the Stickers have always had a loyal, if small, following (kind of like the Minnesota Twins). Stickers’ fans tend to romanticize those who go home again, like Wendell Berry returning to his childhood home in Kentucky. As Berry has written, the effort of truly knowing one place "proposes an enormous labor." The results of that labor, whether with Berry in Kentucky or Thoreau in Concord, are often extraordinary, and some of our best writing of place has come from those who have followed through on the radical notion of staying still, of “wedging downward,” as Thoreau put it, in one beloved spot. For instance, here is Berry describing what happened to him after he returned to Kentucky and fully committed to his home place: “I began more seriously than ever to learn the names of things—the wild plants and animal, the natural processes, the local places—and to articulate my observations and memories. My language increased and strengthened, and sent my mind into the place like a live root system.” The word "settling" is often a negative one in our culture—with its connotations of accepting less and giving up on dreams—but Berry puts the lie to this. In his words, the idea of settling in a place is nothing short of exhilarating.
Since this is a journal of place, it might be assumed that our editors would root wholeheartedly for Berry and the rest of the Stickers. And we do root them on, we do. But immersion in a place is just one way to write, and if immersion has produced some brilliant place writing, then so has exile. Think of Hemingway re-creating Michigan from the distance of Paris, Wolfe imagining Asheville from New York. As with anything else in this sloppy life, there is no formula, and the theme of finding home, which so sparks Berry, could easily deaden a different writer. There are those who can only put words to a place once they have left it. And there are those who rely on cycles of movement, of leaving and returning, to excite them. For instance, this simple sentence stands out from the backs of Annie Proulx’s recent books: “She lives in Wyoming and Newfoundland.” Hard to picture without one hell of a straddle. But you can imagine Proulx, who for my money is as fine a contemporary place writer as we have, immersing herself in Newfoundland, absorbing its rhythms before migrating to Wyoming—so utterly different in climate and culture, smell, and sky—where, from a distance, she re-creates the other world (while simultaneously immersing in and absorbing the current place). In this way, I suppose, both movement and settling would stimulate the work. So which team does she play for?
The answer is we don’t know. Or really care that much. When it comes to writing about place there is no set method, no one way, no orthodoxy. And, thankfully, there are no teams.
What there is instead is a vast range of sloppy possibility. A thousand ways of making the land where we happen to find ourselves, or the land we have left, a part of the stories that we tell.
In past issues I have used this space to briefly describe each and every piece in the issue. As wonderful as our writers are, this process of doling out mere phrases of praise begins to feel like feeding single fish to trained dolphins. This time, I will instead focus on the work of one writer, the poet and essayist Reg Saner. Reg would no doubt play for the Home team since he is generally associated with one region, the American West, and the mountains and deserts of that region have shaped him—or as he puts it, “We become what surrounds us.” Of course there is a professional risk in staking a claim on one place: you are suddenly a "regional" writer, as if we didn’t all write from where we are. But calling Reg a "Western writer" seems to me only a little less preposterous than calling Thoreau a "Concord writer." In fact he uses his rambles across Western land as an occasion to speculate on what are, quite literally, universal themes. If he is a regional writer, then his region is the cosmos, and he never walks too far without considering the larger issues that afflict and inspire the human animal, while simultaneously, by employing the universe for perspective, revealing just how small those larger issues are. This sounds very lofty, but what roots it directly to earth is Reg’s hiking boots (to be specific, his heavy, Swiss-made Mendls). “Fresh air keeps language alive,” he has written. And in his case, his brain seems inter-wired with those bulky boots, the movement spurring words about larger worlds. It has been one of my delights as a reader to follow him on his rambles.
As it happened, I was taking an actual, not literary, hike with Reg on September 11, 2001. We had a unique perspective on that day, as we looked down on the country from close to 14,000 feet on the peak of Mount Arapahoe. Having lead troops in Korea, Reg is that rare combination of poet and (ex-)warrior, and on that day he accurately predicted that after a period of shock the country would experience a rising tide of jingoism. But even he couldn’t have anticipated the extreme cynicism with which our leaders would funnel our national anguish and rage. Worse than cynics, of course, are true believers. The type of mind that can only see one thing one way, a way of thinking and being antithetical to Reg Saner’s own agile thinking. In much of Reg’s work the great enemy is dogmatism and orthodoxy, and his own efforts and exertions in the open air are geared toward keeping his mind open, toward resisting, in A. R. Ammons’s words, the “humbling of reality to precept.” But if Reg is critical of religions and creeds that offer up “pat answers and no questions,” he is also, by his own admission, “incorrigibly religious.” Each morning he hikes up the mesa behind his house on Colorado’s Front Range to collect dawn, and how can that not be a type of worship? The difference is that, unlike much of what passes for religion today, his is a “mystery religion” where admitting uncertainty is a part of the larger prayer. Not taking a “narrow view of what’s sacred,” he opens himself to a world so obviously and infinitely larger than ours, that to think we could understand and explain it with pat answers would be laughable.