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A CONVERSATION WITH BARRY LOPEZ,
Editor of HOME GROUND
What inspired you to create HOME GROUND and why do we need a language for our landscape?
I was inspired to create Home Ground
one evening when I walked into the library at the University of Oregon
and couldn’t find a satisfactory definition for a folk term,
blind creek, in a geographical dictionary. My search turned up an
interesting fact—no one had ever published a dictionary of
American landscape terms. I had neither the time nor the skills
to do that, but I thought I might do a handbook, and it occurred to me
then that I might invite a group of writers—as opposed to
geographers—to define these words and give people a feeling for
this language with two or three hundred definitions. What was
compelling about the project was having an opportunity to bring all
these interesting terms together in one place, and having writers put
their imaginations to the task. I knew from the beginning that
I’d have to have a board of geographers and other experts as
advisors, but I wanted a literary tone to the book. And I wanted
it to be useful, to serve a purpose. I believed it would, because
so many people now are actively involved in talking about American
landscapes and their fate—county commissioners, zoning
committees, attorneys, developers, city councils, land trusts. We
need to be accurate and articulate in these discussions.
Where did
you find all these words? Why have some of these words fallen out of
use? Do you hope to resurrect some of these vivid terms?
A lot of the words were in my head. I’d read
them somewhere or had heard them in conversation. I talked with
friends, a lot of folklorists, and scanned dictionaries and slowly
built up a list of about 1500 terms. The board of advisors vetted
the list with us and, given the limits on our capabilities, we pared
the list down to about 850 words. As time went on we tended to
drop some of the technical terms, like “patch reef,” and
add more colorful terms, like “looking-glass
prairie.” As we become more urbanized, words like
looking-glass prairie drop out of our vocabularies, but they’re
beautiful words, they evoke an era of our history, and are still widely
used. An enormous amount of this kind of “landscape
language” has never been written down. Nearly every day now
somebody gives me a word I didn’t know. It’s fun, if you
will, to bring this language to light, and using it allows us to be
more precise, more evocative when we talk about the places we’re
interested in.
You resist using the word “dictionary” when describing HOME GROUND, but
isn’t that what we’re dealing with here?
When I think of dictionaries I think of tens of thousands of
brief entries, in which the writer’s personality is opaque. We’re talking about hundreds of entries with Home
Ground. Bill Kittredge’s
definition of “finger drift” is twenty-four words long and Trish Hampl’s
definition of “lake” is, if I remember, 366 words.When you read Gretel Ehrlich on “gumbo” or
John Daniels on “hoodoo” or Joy Williams on “dry fall,” you learn something
about how that writer’s imagination works. And, in the aggregate, these words are all directed towards one object,
the physical earth. Home Ground stands alone as a landscape dictionary, but “dictionary”
doesn’t fully convey what’s happening on these pages. The right word—which I’ve never found—would
be something like an anatomy, the dissection of a whole—an event, an era, the
universe, a river—into its constituent parts.
How did you select the writers, match them up with the words, and how did they create their definitions?
I phoned a lot of friends and most of them said yes, they were eager to
go to work on the project. We were guided by several thoughts in
selecting the writers. We wanted writers from different parts of
the country, we wanted an equal number of men and women, and we wanted
a range of imaginations. In selecting terms we tried to
give each writer three sorts of words—common terms like
“ford” or “pond,” inherently interesting words
like “flatiron” or “lunette,” and then regional
terms keyed to where the writer lived—Carolina bay for someone in
the Carolinas, for example. We told the writers to take whatever
tack they wanted with the definition—the etymology of the word, a
quote from American literature, an anecdote about the word, an approach
that was scientifically precise. We told them the definition
would have to pass muster with a board of academic advisors, but that
only meant that, as far as they took the definition, it had to be
scientifically correct and not misleading. In instances where
there was disagreement, we always came down on the side of the
writer. As far as I know, the writers never spoke to one
another. They each took their own path, which gave us the range
of imagination in Home Ground.
Why is land, nature and a sense of place important for so many American writers?
For four hundred years or more, writers in America have been at work
creating a literature distinct among the world’s
literatures. I’m not a literary critic, but the sense I
have is that one thing that sets our literature apart is the degree to
which landscapes and seascapes loom in it. There’s a clear
line from Moby-Dick through
Whitman and Dickinson and on through Willa Cather and John Steinbeck,
right down to current novels like Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. And then, of course, there’s the impact that Emerson and Thoreau
have had on the way we see ourselves as Americans. The land is
very important to us, it’s central to our sense of identity, no
matter where we live. In poll after poll, we’re absolutely
adamant about preserving parts of this landscape, places that left the
first European immigrants awestruck.
Do you think
HOME GROUND will inspire readers to re-discover the vast American
landscape as well as the nature in their own backyards?
What about if you live in the middle of a big city?
I hope the book inspires people to look more deeply into the question
of why a particular place matters to them—Park Slope in Brooklyn,
the San Fernando Valley in California, the Texas hill country, the Wind
River Range in Wyoming, some unnamed valley in Vermont where dairy
cattle are pastured. The pace and demands of modern life make
many of us feel like we’re not anchored anywhere. We want
to feel like we belong somewhere. I think this is true no
matter where you live. I spent my adolescent years in the Murray
Hill section of Manhattan. I remember it as a hill, and that I lived on an island,
and I remember the sound of the wind in the trees in Central
Park. I’ll never lose that sense of attachment to
Manhattan. And now I know that those footpaths in Central Park,
worn in the grass between sidewalks, are called desire paths, and that
those strange, narrow lots squeezed between two big buildings in the
city have a name: terrain vague. Home Ground explores a vocabulary that gives us back a sense of belonging. |
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