Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 1999
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 19, No. 2, Spring 1999, pp. 85-87.
Abstract
In compiling this issue of Great Plains Quarterly, Charlene Porsild responds to issues at the heart of the rising "new regionalism." One premise of the renewed interest in regionalism is that learning to navigate the virtual world of cyberspace means needing to know place in the actual world, and understanding mapping means learning how to orient oneself, how to read a landscape, and how to move from one place to another. The four essays presented here offer complementary responses to that challenge.
One's stance in time undergirds one's relation to place, as Walter Isle demonstrates in "History and Nature: Representations of the Great Plains in the Work of Sharon Butala and Wallace Stegner." In their contrasting perspectives toward their common part of the southwestern corner of Saskatchewan, Stegner and Butala illustrate the point. Stegner looks backward, recovering memories of youth in the context of his later historical understanding of the region, memories of a childhood experience that "helped form the adult writer and historian." From that same part of the Plains Butala writes from the present looking forward. She conceives of her "new life" as beginning when she came to the ranch that lier husband, Peter Butala, has lived on all his life, and she tells of "learning the place she finds herself in and gradually becoming a native to that place."
In her reading of Nebraska poet Ted Kooser's Weather Central, Mary K. Stillwell locates her subject by the particularity of place on a map-Lincoln (where she lives and Kooser works), and Garland (where Kooser lives and writes). Stillwell then uses language of place to address epistemological questions of how the poet creates and how readers know the experience of the place. Kooser's answer has to do with metaphor, the open "place" that occurs as "the space between" a lover and a heron, a thing and that with which it is compared. The relation between poet and reader is the bridging, crossing, and closing; together poet with reader arrive "at a map, designed above all else, to proffer at least momentary order." "Mutuality" is at the heart of the experience; connection in separation is its premise. Appropriately, the essay itself is circular. As Stillwell began her essay by situating herself with Kooser in a particular place, she returns to that place to end the essay, arguing that like the metaphor itself, Nebraska in Weather Central is the geographic "in-between."
Whereas Kooser creates poetry as an experience akin to conceiving a map, William Least Heat-Moon writes a book structured as a map, as O. Alan Weltzien argues in "A Topographic Map of Words: Parables of Cartography." PrairyErth treats the familiar question of how one best knows a chosen landscape "in ways that expose new affinities between mapping and reading and writing as fundamental interpretive acts." Beginning in Columbia, Missouri; Heat-Moon reads US Geological Survey maps of Chase County, Kansas, adapts the grid for his narrative design, then provides exercises-"formal tricks in engagement"-that "not only cast us as vicarious co-author, but force our scrutiny of maps and stories as complementary distillations of a place." Weltzien writes of a "participatory cartography" that resembles Stillwell's "mutuality" in its premise of collaborative engagement of writer with reader, language with landscape. By adopting the "ultimately playful artifice" of a "map of words," Heat-Moon offers a pretense of pretending that we draw words and write maps. "The pretense teases the space between these domains so that we more fully read-Le., know or enter-this particular landscape."
Comments
Copyright 1999 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln