The Place Within: Portraits of the American Landscape by 20 Contemporary Writers

by Jodi Daynard

These writers, in voices ranging from the lyrical to the meditative, awaken or allow us to discover anew a feeling for what we call America in all its many faces. Here you'll find the American spirit in Phillip Lopate's gridlocked "Manhattan," in Richard Rodriguez's gay San Francisco, and in Gerald Early's uneasily "integrated" St. Louis. In her moving essay on South Dakota, Kathleen Norris reflects on the way objects change our experience of space. Gretel Ehrlich's essay on Wyoming is also about a cure for human grief. As a whole, these intimate portraits celebrate a sense of place, rural and urban, gritty and placid; and they show how landscape transforms us, becomes a place within. A fresh, indelible portrait of America as it appears to our most gifted contemporary writers. For more than 200 years artists and writers have sought to capture not just America's face but also her polymorphous spirit, as it is embodied in the land itself. These portraits about places in our country's diverse landscape range from the hummingbirds of Montana to the neon lights of Times Square, the brush fires of Alaska to the Grand Canyon's silent grandeur. They share a common desire: to explore both the sensual and the spiritual connections we have to places and the creativity they inspire. Harry Crews, Joy Williams, Alan Lightman, Kathleen Norris, Bradford Morrow, Phillip Lopate, Gerald Early, Diane Ackerman, Scott Russell Sanders, and many others take us to places as they appear not through the camera lens of a traveler, but to the artist's inner eye. Finally, NASA astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman lifts us up above America into space, where he looks down upon the country in all its vast and yet poignantly fragile entirety. Taken together, The Place Within is a time capsule in words, by some of our most distinguished writers.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1996

About the author

Jodi Daynard is the author of the bestselling novels The Midwife’s Revolt and Our Own Country. She has also published The Place Within: Portraits of the American Landscape by 20 Contemporary Writers. Her essays and short stories have appeared in numerous periodicals, including Agni, The New England Review, The New York Times Book Review, Fiction, and the Paris Review. Ms. Daynard has taught writing at Harvard University, at MIT, and in the MFA program at Emerson College.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to read more of Philip Lopate, his story Manhattan, Floating World, which really did a wonderful job depicting a place I have yet to travel but could now reference thanks to Lopate. One line in particular that I love and really encapsulates the story for me: "I love the ability of Manhattan's public spaces to absorb without a fuss a mix of classes, races, ethnicities, sexual orientations. For the moment, at least, everyone in the pedestrian swirl is assigned the same human value: You are either in my way or not." It's so well written I found myself trying to imagine what kind of effort it took on Lopate's writing to go through and sift through what to keep in, and what to omit from the reader. Terrific read.