Imagining Home

by Vinz, Mark; Tammaro, Thom

• ISBN13: 9780816627806
• ISBN10: 0816627800
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1995-09-01
• Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr

Summary

From Kathleen Norris's thoughts on being a member of a literary culture outside of where "place can stick to us in western South Dakota", to Jon Hassler's remembrances of the houses of his childhood, Imagining Home begins at the real places of the Midwest and finishes with the locales that fill a writer's memories and desires. Imagining Home centers on the premise that a sense of place is far more than a matter of geographical landscape, comprising instead a complex web of associations, human communities, history, spirituality, and memory. In untangling and reweaving these various strands, the authors consider that although the Upper Midwestern terrain is quite diverse, there is nonetheless a kind of cohesiveness - a lack of large urban centers, a low density of population - that makes the area almost invisible to itself. These essays offer a chance to look at the way landscape plays a key role in the formation of imagination as well as to come to terms with the paradox of love and disdain for one's home place.

Table of Contents

Introduction	vii
Discovering a Home
The Flyover	3	(10)
Michael Martone
Putting Myself in My Place	13	(14)
Robert Schuler
The Roosting Tree	27	(18)
Mary Swander
Places and Displacement: Rattlesnakes in Cyberspace	45	(6)
Kathleen Norris
Homing In	51	(12)
Jack Driscoll
Recovering the Past
Stewards of Memory	63	(14)
Martha Bergland
Remembering Houses	77	(10)
Jon Hassler
Breckenridge Hills, 63114	87	(18)
David Haynes
From the Pole Vaulter's Bluff	105	(10)
David Allan Evans
When Everybody Wore a Hat	115	(8)
Larry Watson
In the Mountain Ranges and Rain Forests of St. Paul	123	(8)
Patricia Hampl
The Changing Present
Rosewood	131	(14)
Paul Gruchow
How I Became a Broken-In Writer	145	(18)
Linda Hasselstrom
The Maternity Wing, Madison, Minnesota	163	(14)
Carol Bly
Is Minnesota in America Yet?	177	(14)
Bill Holm
Abandoned Farmsites, Yuppies, Drug Wars, and Geese	191	(14)
Kent Meyers
Contributors	205