| dialogue. Many of us sense that there's something important at stake, something as important as the land itself. Like me, like the early pioneers, like the earliest inhabitants of this continent, these four writers have not stayed put. None of them is living where he or she grew up. They find themselves "going West" into a West that is all too attractive to all too many people. They wantand needto preserve its wilderness. Seeking to stake a claim somewhere new, someplace else, these writers must first observe themselves as outsiders. The house of the present is building on the pasta conflation of place and memory. This shift of perspective involves both landscape and historya history that includes the cultural, political, and geological layers that give shape to the present. W. Scott Olsen's wide sky and open prairieits weather and its physical propertiesdetermined the orientation of the house he built. Dawn Marano's personal history sometimes collides with the communal Mormon history of her adopted home in Salt Lake City. Douglas Carlson's Chautauqua County carries its Iroquois origins in its very name. And Wendy Bishop, after youthful wanderings, matures into a Florida suburb very like the California she left behind. But the challenge is internal as much as external. These writers are looking for what Scott Russell Sanders has described as a feeling of "rightness, at-homeness, a knitting of self and world." They have moved physically, and now must move spiritually as well. They have to turn "place" into "home." |
| How they do this varies. Olsen, beginning a career and a family, deliberately settles into a community. Marano embarks on a course of active study (aided both by a new husband who equips her to enter the terrain and by a number of women who share their knowledge). Carlson, clearly the most rooted, makes the effort to shake himself loose from old ties, only to find new connections. Bishop, struggling to make a home for her children, almost by accident finds her daily ritual has become a way of life. In each case, however, becoming a part of a community involves a meaningful encounter with naturewith its snowstorms, its floods and erosions, its very indifference. Home, it appears here, is more than a sense of belonging. It's all the various ways we fit ourselves into a landscape, meet its demands, give it a human significance. In the end, these writers make a place for the |
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