Summary:

Exile is a romantic notion for many American writers; those who don't
make it to Paris or Tokyo gravitate to New York or Los Angeles, as if
pulled by some sort of undertow to the country's edge. Scott Russell
Sanders spent some time abroad, but he found that he answered less to
the lure of foreign soil than the gentle tug of his native Midwest.
Just as Sanders is nourished by living in the landscape that he most
considers home, so is the reader nourished by the writing that grows
out of that experience. "Any landscape is made up of
particulars--sweet ferns and wheatstacks, this creek and that
meadow," writes Sanders, "and writers who imagine the land with most
authority honor the details." Sanders honors the details, whether
pondering a canoe trip with his daughter, a kitchen renovation, or
the place of the writer in the academy, and his authority is evident
from the book's first page. It is with great pleasure that one reads
these 12 evocative essays, which somehow manage to detail the
devastation we humans wreak on nature and on one another and yet
still affirms all that is good about home, the land, community, and
honest hard work. For Sanders's father, that work involved carpentry
and farming; Sanders's trade is writing, and he sees it as no more or
less grueling than such manual labor. "Writing is work, and it can
leave you gray with exhaustion, can devour your days, can break your
heart," he writes. "But the same is true of all the real work that
humans do, the planting of crops and nursing of babies, the building
of houses and baking of bread." --Jane Steinberg

Book Details:

Physical Description: 212 pages
Edition Info: Paperback; 1997-08

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•	Kwantlen University College (Vancouver, BC) (last modified on 05/04/2011)