Landscapes with Figures: The Nonfiction of Place Book

For some, a sense of place is about travel, about plunging oneself into new settings. For others, it is about being—and knowing—home. This book is a collection of essays, memoirs, nature writing, and travel narratives that document the impact this sense of place has on writing. In locations as familiar as Cape Cod or Mesa Verde and as exotic as Kraków or Kyrgyzstan, thirteen accomplished writers of contemporary creative nonfiction share some of their most memorable work, disclosing how place alters our perception and influences our insight.

Taking readers to deserts and forests, islands and mountains, Landscapes with Figures is an encounter not only with places but also with writers themselves. Each contribution is accompanied by an author's commentary  that discusses the relationship to place in his or her writing. The authors reveal the connections they feel to the places they write about, the role that place plays in the choices they make in relating their experiences, and the strategies and work habits that produce such writing. This compilation is at once a wide-ranging anthology of the nonfiction of place for the armchair traveler and a book about writing for those who aspire to understand and practice the craft, carrying with it the invitation to reflect on one’s own special places.

American Book Review

"A welcome addition to 'nature writing' collections . . . . Its twenty-eight essays demonstrate the continuing expansion of creative writing that celebrates, questions, and reflects on the complexity of the Homosapiens Eros for landscapes and species-of the variety of human attachments to place and environments-without usually falling prey to geographic determinism or other vulgarly romantic invocations of nature as national symbol or as evidence of cultural distinctiveness or superiority. . . . [These texts] help legitimate passionate intellectual exchanges about nature and place that reflect commitments to something other than narrowly romantic place identity politics."

— Eric L. Ball, American Book Review