Bibliographies

Place and Composition

From: Joshua Stearns <jstearns@english.umass.edu>
Date: September 20, 2005

I am going to be teaching a unit in my Introduction to College Writing course (the mandatory first year writing course on campus) on writing place. I am looking for some key example essays that suggest ways people approach writing about place. I am not only looking for compelling or well written pieces but also essays that illustrate a range of ways people define/explore/negotiate place. Also of particular interest is those authors, like Scott Russell Sanders, who are attentive the role and importance of writing about place. My focus will be on natural places, but I am also interested in essays that discuss other kinds of place (urban, public, home, etc...).

Please reply directly to me and I will compile a list of suggestions to feed back to the group if there is interest. jstearns@english.umass.edu

Thanks in advance.   Josh

Joshua Stearns <jstearns@english.umass.edu>
October 25, 2005 5:20:28 PM CDT
To: asle@interversity.org

Hello ASLE list.

Thanks for your many suggestions regarding place based readings for use in an intro composition course. Below is the compiled results.

Joshua C. Stearns
English Department
UMass Amherst

If you want some truly graceful writing about place, check out John Hay.  His first book, "The Run" (1959, reprinted recently), is a prolonged exploration of a place--Cape Cod--and its emblematic fauna, the alewives. His later books, especially "A Beginner's Faith in things Unseen" and "In the Company of Light" (both still in print) contain individual essays, still investigating the notions of place itself, and of humans' place in nature.

I've found Barnhill's anthology At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place to be a good collection of readings on this topic. Have used it in several classes, and plan to again.

Professor David Nentwick at Syracuse University successfully used my book "Steep Passages" alongside Thoreau's "Walden" in his undergraduate environmental writing course.  There are 18 nature/place essays in the book, each essay using a different interesting structure and technique in its approach. I notice his assignment is still on the web at: http://writing.syr.edu:16080/~danentwi/WritingAssignments.htm  (Scroll down to September 30)

Barry Lopez, "Borders"

Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

Barbara Kingsolver's  "The Memory Place," and Scott Russell Sanders' "Buckeye", I also use Carol Polsgrove's portrait of Wendell Berry which discusses his attachment to his own little corner of Kentucky.  Each of these is collected in Anderson, O'Grady, and Slovic's Anthology "Literature and the Environment."

Joan E. Maloof, "Teaching the Trees: Lessons from the Forest"

"Saving Place: An Ecocomposition Reader" edited by Sidney Dobrin from the University of Florida, Gainsville

And thanks to Jason Arenstein for sending along this extensive list:

Andrass, Christopher Van.  Home!  A Bioregional Reader.
Barnhill,ed.  (Anthology) At Home on the Earth: Becoming Native to Our Place.
Bate, Jonathan.  "Poetry and Biodiversity."  Writing the Environment.  Kerridge, et al., eds.
Berry, Wendell.  Various.
Bradford, William.  Of Plymouth Plantation.
Creveceour, J. Hector St. John de.  Letters from an American Farmer.
Devall and Sessions.  Deep Ecology.
Douglass, Frederick.  My Bondage and My Freedom.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo.  Various.
Green, Daniel.  To Colonize Eden: Land and Jeffersonian Democracy.
Hay, John.  The Run, A Beginner's Faith, and In the Company of Light.
Heidegger.  Various, incl. Poetry, Language, Thought (esp. "Building Dwelling
Thinking")
Jefferson, Thomas.  Notes on the State of Virginia.
Jehlen, Myra.  American Incarnation.
Kowalewski, Michael.  "Bioregional Perspectives in American Literature."  Regionalism Reconsidered.  David Jordan, ed.  1994.
Least Heat-Moon, William.  PrairyErth: A Deep Map.  1999.
Locke, John.  Second Treatise on Civil Government.
Lopez, Barry.  The Rediscovery of North America.  1990.  See
www.rsiss.net/ecologylit/naturewriting/rediscovery.html
Marx, Leo.  The Machine in the Garden.  1964.  AND his sources.
McGinnis, Michael Vincent.  Bioregionalism.  1999.
Miller, Perry.  Various.  Esp. Nature's Nation and Errand into the Wilderness
and "Nature and the National Ego," anthologized in Mazel, A Century of Early
Ecocriticism.  314-28.
Ness, Arne.  (Deep ecologist)
Olson, Charles.  Call Me Ishmael.
Ray, Janisse.  Ecology of a Cracker Childhood.
Sale, Kirkpatrick.  Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision.
--------------------.  "The Mother of All."  The Schumacher Lectures, Vol. 2.  S. Kumar, ed.  London: Abacus, 1984.  esp. 224.
Sanders, Scott Russell.  Various.
Schumacher, E.F.  A Guide for the Perplexed.  1978.
--------------------.  Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.  1973.
Smith, Henry Nash.  Virgin Land.
Snyder, Gary.  The Practice of the Wild.
----------------.  A Place in Space.
Thoreau, Henry David.  Walden.
---------------------------.  "Walking."
Tocqueville, Alexis.  Democracy in America.
Turner, Frederick Jackson.  "The Role of the Frontier in American History."
Whitman, Walt.  "Preface" to Leaves of Grass and various poems.

Carson Bennett <carsonb54@yahoo.com>
October 28, 2005

Hello everyone,
I just wanted to say that I am currently using Sidney Dobrin's "Saving Place: An Ecocomposition Reader" to teach a 200 level composition class at the University of New Mexico, but I think it is so well organized and easy to use that 100 level comp. students could also get into it. It is a fantastic book that has helped me to engage students in contemporary environmental issues, and teach them to write effectively at the same time.

- Carson Bennett