Flight Dreams: A Life in the Midwestern Landscape

by Lisa Knopp

“When I was eleven the world was filled with birds,” writes Lisa Knopp of her girlhood in Burlington, Iowa. Picking up where she left off in her first book, Field of Vision, Knopp knits together sections of her life story through a pattern of images drawn from nature. The most prevalent of these unifying themes are metaphors of flight—birds, wind, moving upward and outward and across the midwestern landscape from Nebraska and Iowa to southern Illinois.

Reminiscent of Thoreau's introspective nature writing and Dillard's taut, personal prose, each chapter in Flight Dreams stands alone as a distinct narrative, yet each is linked by profoundly personal descriptions of dreams, the natural world, defining experiences, and chance encounters with people that later prove to be fateful. Part Eastern meditation, part dream sequence, part historical reconstruction, Flight Dreams testifies to a deep understanding of how the natural world—its visible and invisible elements—guides our destinies.

278 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Lisa Knopp is the author of six books of creative nonfiction.

Her most recent, Bread: A Memoir of Hunger (University of Missouri Press 2016), explores eating disorders and disordered eating as the result of a complex tangle of genetic, biological, familial, psychology, spiritual, and cultural forces through research and personal story. What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte (University of Missouri Press) won the Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction in 2013 and was tied for second place in the 2013 ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment) book awards.

Lisa’s essays have appeared in numerous literary publications including Missouri Review, Michigan Review, Iowa Review, Seneca Review, Gettysburg Review, Northwest Review, Cream City Review, Brevity, Connecticut Review, Shenandoah, Creative Nonfiction, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, and Georgia Review. Currently, she's working on a collection of essays called Like Salt or Love: Essays on Leaving home.

Lisa is a Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, where she teaches courses in creative nonfiction. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Please visit her website: http://www.lisaknopp.com/

Reviews

[CatReader · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lisa Knopp (b. 1956) is an American writer born, raised, and living in the Midwestern US. Flight Dreams, published in 1998 when Knopp was in her early 40s, is Knopp's first (?) memoir, recounting in detail her Iowan childhood and teenage years, her rambling 20s, finding direction in her 30s, and having several kids along with several unproductive or unhealthy relationships along the way.

I read a lot of memoirs and feel I have built up a high tolerance for the navel-gazing that's often inherent in this genre...but my frustration with this memoir is that it's entirely navel-gazing and entirely unwarranted as by 42 nothing in Knopp's life was either particularly interesting/remarkable (in my opinion) or far enough in the past that she could write about it with a meaningfully earned perspective. This was particularly glaring in the pages Knopp devoted to attending her 20 year high school reunion and classifying every former classmate by whether they had been popular or not then, as well as how their physical appearance in their late 30s stacked up to their teenage looks. (This further evinces my lack of desire to attend my own 20-year high school reunion this year, as honestly it never occured to me to care about those things then and it seems like an even bigger waste of time to care now.)

For better or worse, Knopp has continued to write and publish books about her own life experiences ever since, which I won't be seeking out. I wouldn't recommend this one either.

My statistics:
Book 183 for 2025
Book 2109 cumulatively