Walking Towards Walden is an exploration of the sense of place, what it means, how it developed, and why it matters. Based on an eighteenth-century literary device in which a group of friends undertake a walking tour and discuss a certain subject, this wide-ranging story emerges from the author’s fifteen-mile bushwhack through woods, backyards, and marshes—from a hilltop in Westford, Massachusetts, to the town of Concord, Massachusetts—trespassing all along the way. A mock epic, complete with encounters with armed mercenaries and vicious dogs, the book covers all the aspects of place—art, literature, myth, and even music.

In compelling, often stunning black-and-white photographs, The Weather and a Place to Live portrays the manmade landscape of the western United States. Here we come face to face with the surreal intersection of the American appetite for suburban development and the resistant, rolling, arid country of the desert West. Steven B. Smith’s extraordinary photographs take us into the contemporary reality of sprawling suburbs reconfiguring what was once vast, unpopulated territory. With arresting concision and an unblinking eye, Smith shows how a new frontier is being won, and suggests too how it may be lost in its very emergence. Since the early 1990s Smith has been making large-format photographs in California, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado. Based on this body of work, he was chosen as winner of the biennial Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography.

The power of these photographs lies in part in Smith’s unusual knowledge of the places he portrays. Raised in Utah, Smith has worked on construction crews, and he was a contractor in California after living on the East Coast for a few years. When he moved to Los Angeles in 1991, he writes, “I was so astounded by what I saw happening to the landscape as it was being developed that I started photographing it immediately. The landscapes I saw were scraped bare, re-sculpted, sealed, and then covered so as not to erode away before the building process could be completed.”

Smith’s photographs offer a disturbing vision of the future of our planet, where the desire for home ownership is pitted against the costs of development in epic proportions. These altered landscapes force us to consider the consequences of human design battling natural forces across great expanses, a fragile balancing act and a contorted equation in which nature becomes both inspiration and invisible adversary. Smith’s elegant photographs of this constructed universe confront us with the beauty of images as images, yet push us to reflect on the devastation possible in the simple act of choosing a place to live.

In contrast to nature poets of the past who tended more toward the bucolic and pastoral, many contemporary nature poets are taking up radical environmental and ecological themes. In the last few years, interesting and evocative work that examines this poetry has begun to lay the foundation for studies in ecopoetics.

Informed in general by current thinking in environmental theory and specifically by the work of cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, The West Side of Any Mountain participates in and furthers this scholarly attention by offering an overarching theoretical framework with which to approach the field.

One area that contemporary theorists have found problematic is the dualistic civilization/wilderness binary that focuses on the divisions between culture and nature, thereby increasing the modern sense of alienation. Tuan’s place-space framework offers a succinct vocabulary for describing the attitudes of ecological poets and other nature writers in a way that avoids setting up an adversarial relationship between place and space. Scott Bryson describes the Tuanian framework and employs it to offer fresh readings of the work of four major ecopoets: Wendell Berry, Joy Harjo, Mary Oliver, and W. S. Merwin.

The West Side of Any Mountain will be of great interest to scholars and teachers working in the field of contemporary nature poetry. It is recommended for nature-writing courses as well as classes dealing with 20th-century poetry, contemporary literary criticism, and environmental theory.

In his powerful memoir Where the Wind Dreams of Staying, Eric Dieterle captures the emotional storms of a boy, and then a man, who seeks meaning in a place, or a place with meaning. His restless search for purpose and identity in the American West moves through cycles of success and failure, love and loss.

Dieterle’s journey leads from the plateaus of eastern Washington through the landscapes of seven states, ending in the shadow of the San Francisco peaks in northern Arizona. In a series of interwoven essays, readers will find rich, detailed explorations of western landscapes, balanced with stories of personal reflection, determination, doubt, and fulfillment. Along the way, Dieterle grapples with anxiety and depression, substance abuse, and failed relationships. The interior life of the author is tightly bound to the external landscapes, ecosystems, and ecologies, so that person and place become lost in one another.

Ultimately a story of resilience, Where the Wind Dreams of Staying is a lyrical tribute to the richly varied landscapes and lifestyles of the inland West. It will be welcomed by readers of environmental literature and personal memoir, and anyone who has struggled against the odds in pursuit of a balanced life.

WHEREABOUTS: STEPPING OUT OF PLACE is an anthology of the best nonfiction stories from OUTSIDE IN LITERARY & TRAVEL MAGAZINE, an online journal founded in 2011. Editor Brandi Dawn Henderson presents 38 emerging and established global storytellers who share stories discussing what it means to enter a new place; the kinds of worlds that exist to others that we, ourselves, do not experience; and how place and/or circumstance can affect who and how we are. Whether it is the story of a dog musher's girlfriend, a heavy-metal-loving Marine, an Inner Mongolian lover, or a Mormon missionary living in a dangerous land, this anthology explores the question: Why does anyone take the first step to anywhere he or she doesn't belong?

Whether referring to a place, a nonhuman animal or plant, or a state of mind, wild indicates autonomy and agency, a will to be, a unique expression of life. Yet two contrasting ideas about wild nature permeate contemporary discussions: either that nature is most wild in the absence of a defiling human presence, or that nature is completely humanized and nothing is truly wild.

This book charts a different path. Exploring how people can become attuned to the wild community of life and also contribute to the well-being of the wild places in which we live, work, and play, Wildness brings together esteemed authors from a variety of landscapes, cultures, and backgrounds to share their stories about the interdependence of everyday human lifeways and wildness. As they show, far from being an all or nothing proposition, wildness exists in variations and degrees that range from cultivated soils to multigenerational forests to sunflowers pushing through cracks in a city alley. Spanning diverse geographies, these essays celebrate the continuum of wildness, revealing the many ways in which human communities can nurture, adapt to, and thrive alongside their wild nonhuman kin.

From the contoured lands of Wisconsin’s Driftless region to remote Alaska, from the amazing adaptations of animals and plants living in the concrete jungle to indigenous lands and harvest ceremonies, from backyards to reclaimed urban industrial sites, from microcosms to bioregions and atmospheres, manifestations of wildness are everywhere. With this book, we gain insight into what wildness is and could be, as well as how it might be recovered in our lives—and with it, how we might unearth a more profound, wilder understanding of what it means to be human.

Wildness: Relations of People and Place is published in association with the Center for Humans and Nature, an organization that brings together some of the brightest minds to explore and promote human responsibilities to each other and the whole community of life. Visit the Center for Humans and Nature's Wildness website for upcoming events and a series of related short films.

Words Marked by a Place is a book of interconnected writings reflecting on the human and natural history of central Oregon. This chronological collection presents the reader with key episodes of central Oregon history, from nineteenth-century exploration to the railroading and homesteading era to the era of community-building and development that followed.

While telling these local stories, Jarold Ramsey explores alternative ways of engaging history in the act of writing, breaking new ground by discovering and exploring primary sources that bear on the region’s colorful but little-known past. Throughout the collection, he interrogates “local history” as a subject. What is local history? How is it related to mainstream academic history? What are legitimate ways of doing it? How do the details of what we call local history inform “history-at-large,” and vice-versa?

From the opening narrative concerning Lieutenant Henry Larcom Abbot’s “Railroad Survey” of the region in 1855 to the concluding account of Lieutenant Robert Cranston’s last months and dramatic death, when his “Airacobra” fighter plane crashed near Madras in 1944, Words Marked by a Place sheds new light on the ongoing story of central Oregon by illuminating forgotten corners of its past. Through both theory and example, it represents an important contribution to the history of the region and the endeavors of local historians, wherever they happen to work.

In Writing out of Place, Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse explore a countertradition of nineteenth–century writing previously ignored by American literary history that challenged the definition of nation and literature that emerged after the Civil War.
Regionalist writers such as Alice Cary, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Grace King, Alice Dunbar–Nelson, Sui Sin Far, and Mary Austin present narrators who serve as cultural interpreters for persons often considered "out of place" by urban readers. Critiquing the approaches to regional subjects characteristic of local color, this book gives contemporary readers a vantage point from which to approach regions and regional people in the global economy of our own time.
Reclaiming the ground of "close" reading for texts that have been insufficiently read, Fetterley and Pryse situate textual analyses within larger questions such as the ideology of form, feminist standpoint epistemology, queer theory, intersections of race and class, and narrative empathy. In its combination of the critical and the visionary, Writing out of Place proposes regionalism as a model for narrative connection between texts and readers that has the potential to transform American literary culture. Arguing the need for other models for human development than those produced in heroic stories about men and boys, the authors offer regionalism as a source of unconventional and counterhegemonic fictions that should be passed on to future generations of readers.