In our increasingly homogenized America, a land of freeways, strip malls full of familiar franchises, grocery chains and big box superstores, there is a strong urge to connect once again to everything local.

This is exemplified by a booming “locovore” movement, for which many are willing to pay a premium. This food is fragile. To be eaten fresh, it must be from nearby, and can’t possibly survive a long journey by truck, rail or even plane. We seek the tangible effect of “grown here, grown today” food.

Literature can have that effect too. And even better, a good book is non-perishable.

Writer Barry Lopez says of “Literature of Place,” that it is characterized by “geography as a shaping force, not a subject.” 

Place is not just a point on a map. Cormac McCarthy’s vivid southern borderlands and Raymond Carver’s rain and alcohol-soaked Northwest are less about landscape and geography than they are about characters for whom that place is their only reality – they exist in, make use of, and are shaped by their environs.

Nature writing has been an integral part of American literature since its inception. As the relationship between humans and the land has grown more tenuous and distanced, the focus has evolved from a wilderness of mystery and transcendental potential to recognition of the environment’s fragile existence and its key to our own practical and spiritual sustenance.

Writing about place works to give readers a benchmark. A good story is a brass plaque embedded in the asphalt of a city street, or the granite of a Sierra peak. We respond to markers, from which we can set out in any direction and mark our journey. “Place” is not simply a sense of geography. It helps us to mark time, our location in culture and society, and our own sense of personal and collective existence. Literature of Place then, is a microcosm of one of the key purposes of literature itself. It is a way through which we can comprehend a sense of otherness, not only for its empathetic effect, but also as a means through which we can better understand ourselves.

We like to be some where.

Come discuss Literature of Place tonight (11/16/12) at Sundance Bookstore as part of the Nevada Humanities Salon series with Mark Maynard, Dr. Alicia Barber and moderator Karen Wikander.