New publications announced--and accepted in the English Department:

Prof. Bill Elgersma published an article in The English Record, a reflection on how reading and writing can be utilized with at-risk high school students as the hidden curriculum. “Sneaking in Reading and Writing” touches on several units from a class labeled "Lifeskills English," where a cross-disciplinary approach was utilized to develop reading and writing skills while the content of the class appeared to be completely unrelated to the students.

Prof. Leah Zuidema’s student, Theo Mobach, a senior biology, pre-med major from Edmonton, Alberta, created an “EMT Transition Guide” for emergency medical technicians, as an assignment in Zuidema’s Business and Technical Writing. The 31-page document trains new EMT volunteers and was presented to the local, Sioux Center squad. Mobach has been part of that organization for all of his years at Dordt. The project was so well received that it is presently being shown to EMT inspectors throughout the state as a model for local squads to imitate.

Adrianna Oudman, a junior from Wheatfield, OH, recently received word that an interview she did for Prof. James Schaap’s class has been accepted for publication in the Banner, the denominational magazine of the Christian Reformed Church in North America. In the interview, she talks with an unnamed subject about his experiences as an illegal immigrant to this country.

Dustin Biel, a senior from Lacombe, Alberta, also was contacted recently with the good news that an essay of his has been accepted for publication in the Christian Courier, an independent, cross‑Canada, Reformed‑in‑origin magazine. Dustin’s essay, a travel narrative highlighting his stay in Lebanon last year, was done as an assignment for Prof. Schaap’s writing class.

Waldo

Today, Emerson. Today, "Self-Reliance," for just about the fortieth time.

No matter. Still thrills my soul--or Oversoul, or whatever weird spiritual essence the dreamer Emerson had in his sights. I admit I'm powerless in the man's charms, even though I've been over and over and over that silly essay. I know it's crazy, just so much dreamy madness, the rantings of a parlor prophet who watched the heavens so fervently his feet only rarely touched the ground. I know it. But no matter.

Transcendentalism was among the goofiest excuses for a religion America ever birthed. Ian Frazier calls the Ghost Dance, a cultic phenomemon in Native America in the late 19th century "America's first religion," and skips thereby New England's hybrid Transcendentalism. But then, there were Europeans similarly convicted; the roots of Emerson's dreaming lay as much in Europe and the Far East as his own native soil. Even though it grew here, I suppose it wasn't born here.

In whatever soil it took root, Transcendentalism was a hazy hybrid that curled up and died in 1860, once this nation went to war. When blood flowed as deeply as did then, reality brought transcendentalism down like fire did the Hindenberg, and Emerson and his band of New Age groupies became little more than a chapter in a history book.

No matter. I love him, always have. "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." Those were marching orders way back when, during the late 60s, I first read Waldo. And they still thrill me, even though when I look back it's hard to conceive of a life's path that has been more conventionally institutional than my own. Mark me among those most rarest of evangelicals--I never left the church into which I was born.

No matter. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." Still thrills me, even though, after years and years and years, I still call myself a Calvinist.

No matter. "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members." Still thrills me, even though I've been on boards and committees more often that I care to count, even chaired 'em. I've been a conspirator myself, for heaven's sake.

No matter. "I would write on the lintels of the doorpost, Whim." Still thrills me, even though I came to place where I teach close to two generations ago and, like a barnacle, never left.

No matter. "Nothing is at last sacred by the integrity of your own mind." Still thrills me, even it's as heretical as it is poppycock.

No matter. "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string." Still thrills me, even though, methodically and even consciously, I just about always do the opposite.


Today, in class we have Ralph Waldo Emerson--flaming heretic, peddler of grandiose illusions, pie-in-the-sky romantic, dizzy dreamer, buzz-bomb idealist, founder of the uniquely American school of positive thinking, half-whacko, three-fifths genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.


Today, Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous essay, "Self-Reliance." Forty times over, I'm still thrilled.

Today I'm thankful for a heretic, a lovely dreamer named Waldo. I'm no disciple, but he still gives me goose bumps.

Revenge of the New Kids

When the New Kids on the Block emerged from the pop scene of the mid ’80s, I did what any self-respecting, early teen male did: revile them. Clearly, the five boys put together to create the first of the modern boy band sensations were a media construct designed to make teenage girls scream and swoon, pieced together out of psychological profiles to match the largest possible range of archetypal young males that would appeal to the largest range of young females. They were a formula, a Pavlovian reaction, a late Twentieth-century example of social Darwinism—and as such they were truly dangerous, subversive and Satanic. Filling young heads with vacuous lyrics on love and “the right stuff”—this was a recipe for world takeover by the megalomaniacs behind their construction, by the media moguls who used them as pawns to brainwash half the population.

Okay, so when I was 14 I didn’t say this in so many words—I mainly used adolescent slurs and questioned their sexuality. But I saw through the ruse that they represented—I did.

The alternative in the mid-80s, of course, was hair bands: Motley Crue, Poison, Bon Jovi, and Guns ‘n’ Roses, just to name a few, bands that wore make up and wigs and cut a path of decadence that coincided nicely with Reaganomics and the arms race. Not much of an alternative.

Fortunately for me, also in the 80s, my sister Heidi, a bit too old and too smart to be touched by the New Kids craze, came upon an Irish band called U2. Heidi and I made our home in U2 and the Australian INXS, thus staving off the total depravity of the late 80s. Then came an actual alternative: the grunge bands that emerged from Seattle to save the world: Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Sound Garden, among others.

In high school I consumed a steady diet of these alternative bands and became an alternative snob: clearly, the integrity of these bands as they questioned capitalist excess and captured the teenage angst a la The Catcher in the Rye made them transcendent beacons for civilization. Of course, I hadn’t actually read The Catcher in the Rye or really knew what Reaganomics or capitalist excess really was, but no matter. I knew authenticity when I saw it: alternative bands were the model of it; the New Kids were the antithesis of it.

And so it is with great irony that I married a huge New Kids fan. And not just a New Kids fan, a Back Street Boys fan, an NSYNC fan, an all-around pop music fan. In fact, my wife is such a big NKOTB—that’s a current nickname for the group—fan that she not only went to their concert as a teenager, she went as an adult to their reunion tour! Yes, there on the fridge is the picture of my wife with the New Kids, standing next to the one she always liked, Jonathan Knight, the one she says I remind her of.

Lucky me.

But it doesn’t end there. Currently, my children’s—my boys’—favorite CD to listen to is, you guessed it, en-kot-buh’s (that’s the best I can do to phonetically pronounce the acronym NKOTB in an attempt at mockery) greatest hits album. My four year old break dances to it. Woe is me. I am undone.

If this feels like a cry for help, gentle reader, it’s not. It’s more of a confession.

No, I’m not starting to like their music. If anything, the dated simplicity of it shows how thin it really was. Musically, it really does rank right up there with the Toddler Tunes CD my kids used to listen to.

Rather, I’m confessing to a sort of amelioration. I’m confessing to being a snob, an elitist and trying to change that. Marrying a self-proclaimed pop queen has been the best thing for me. I depend on my wife to keep me current on these things as a matter of principle. I confess to letting her open up my world a bit, to stepping down from my high and mighty throne of superiority where I ruled with my scepter of authenticity. I even confess to being a Whitney Houston fan. Honestly, I am clearly aware that “The Greatest Love of All” is sheer narcissism but it can still bring me to tears.

I confess to not being bothered that my sons sing “The Right Stuff,” but now I’m wondering why it doesn’t bother me. And I’m not sure what to say. I don’t want to say that it’s because the music is meaningless and pointless because I don’t think it is, and I don’t want to say that it doesn’t matter that they really were a media construct because I think it does. I don’t want to say anti-intellectual acceptance has taken over because I don’t think that’s it either.

Perhaps I’m just tired of big-bad-wolfing it—of finding the big bad wolf in everything. Perhaps I’m not bothered because I want to accept the no-brain part of human existence. I want to accept the odd mystery that is female adolescent sexual development—words I very well may eat as my daughter hits the “tween” years.

On the other hand, I know that I admire my wife’s ability to maturely and determinedly remain a kid at heart. I also know I’ve learned how arrogant I was—okay, "can be" or "am" would be better verbs there. Perhaps, too, I believe in the larger structures of society a bit more than I did in the past, that family and community and education and faith lasts while the New Kids just age.

Who can explain human culture? Who can explain the phases we go through? The things we cling to get us through the turmoil of adolescence? The kind of culture we’re drawn to? I can’t. Rather, I’ll have a world where the fluffiness of pop rubs the edges off the angst of grunge. Isn’t this, among other things, why we marry--to get outside ourselves? And have kids—even kids that dance to the NKOTB?

Counting Beans

Her hair was thin, streaked with a bothersome auburn rather amateurishly rinsed in. She wore more makeup, I thought, than most other 50-year-old women I knew; her cheeks seemed glazed, her lipstick a bright, cardinal red against her shiny, dark skin.

She was Cuban, she told me, a refugee. She spoke with an accent, and she was unlike any other student in my college writing class. I was fifteen years her junior, and, like most of the rest of the students, I was lily white--in country of origin, like them, some flavor of European.

Writing teachers get to know students well because what we read from them comes from the insides of their minds and hearts and souls. I looked forward to reading the Cuban woman's papers because I wanted to learn what she could teach me.

When she wrote her personal narrative, I expected something as fascinating as she was. What I got was an account of the what she felt, years before, at the near-drowning of her daughter on a beach in Cuba--how breathlessly scared she was at the moment, how awful it might have been to lose that child.

I expected something exotic written by a middle-aged Cuban emigre, and what I got was the story of a mom. I expected the specific, but what I read was far, far more universal.

I like to think that beneath the colors of our skin there lies a humanity with more to share than to differentiate. The horrors of the 1862 Sioux Uprising in Minnesota began when four young Indian males got out of control, just lost it, did insanely stupid things. Does that ever happen in other cultures? Seems it does.

Honestly, I have an aversion to bean-counting, to tallying the numbers of minorities in any given situation, as if making sure we have a token person of color on our committee insures righteousness or equity or that totally blessed word these days, "diversity."

However, yesterday I sat in a lecture hall to hear yet another white male hold forth--admirably, I might add--before an assembled audience of college students, most of whom had their note pads out in front of them. Another white male. Like me. When it was over, someone announced the next speaker in this semester's special series. Yet another white male.

Twenty years ago, I taught--for the very first time--a course in "the short story." There among my more traditional students was a non-trad, the wife of a visiting professor, who took the course. After the final class period, she came up to me. I remember the room, remember it empty because she waited. She told me that she enjoyed the course. She was polite, not pushy.

And then she said the line that I'll never forget. "Do you realize that all semester long we didn't read one woman writer?"

What hurt even more than the truth of her assertion was that I honestly didn't realize what she said was true. I hadn't thought about it. Skinheads and neo-Nazis aren't the only folks guilty of racism or sexism. I was. I am.

Some of us--me, for instance--have to work at being deliberately inclusive.

Why? When I was one of those students, years ago, I read a book by a man named Frederick Manfred, who'd come from northwest Iowa, where his roots were Dutch Reformed. When I read his novel, I suddenly understood that the very life all around me, as a Dutch Reformed kid, was fair game for fiction. I didn't know anyone in my childhood who wrote books before I met Frederick Manfred between the covers of one of his own most obscure novels. But when I read him, I knew I had a place, even a calling.

And there's this. The most significant cause of the 1862 Sioux Uprising in Minnesota wasn't a bunch of testosterone-wild kids gone berserk and out of control; it was starvation, poverty, and cultural genocide created by the Great White Father and his minions, who perhaps would have been more generous and just (that's speculation, of course) if it hadn't been for the fact that in 1862, no one in Washington D. C., was thinking about the lowly Dakota out in the territories. There was, after all, this war going on, the Civil War. One story has a mix of angles.

Yesterday, an uninterrupted string of white males reminded me of all that, but most specifically of a day I stood in an emptying classroom and discovered something about myself and my course I honestly hadn't realized.

Something I haven't forgotten.

Some observations--Prince Hamlet

“Alas, poor Yorick”: Hamlet, Act 5.1

I have just finished reading Hamlet with my Shakespeare class. It’s a difficult play to teach—as well as to read—and I tried something new this year: I invited students to take on the role of an expert—on words, on psychology, on the text, on acting, on historical context—and to bring that point of view to class each day. It helped. It gave, at least to the students who took the task seriously, both a voice in the class and, what’s more important, a little wedge by which they could crack their way into the play. Good!

I was struck by a few things as I read through the last act early in the morning on my way into class. The first is this general observation, one that has been creeping up on us since Act 4, namely that we think the play is about how to live (how should Hamlet react and act?), but we discover that is a play about how to die. My reading of the last act is governed by Maynard Mack’s insight that when we see Hamlet in Act 5 (he’s been sent off to England in Act 4), we find “a different man,” a man who has come to a kind of peace with the world he has fought so hard to understand and the self he has also fought with so famously (“To be or not to be” and all that). That peace is somehow defined by words he (rather, Shakespeare) drops on us in stages: “divinity that shapes our ends” (5.2.10), “heaven ordinant” (48), “special providence” (217-18). It’s hard to gather these scattered leaves together (the “special providence” speech is one of the toughest in Shakespeare, also because its text is vexing), but Hamlet seems to accept that he is less an actor than an agent, and he trusts something larger than himself to bring justice and to make his life (or death!) meaningful. “Let be,” he says, which is a long way from “To be or not to be.”

To the observations. I don’t like the label comic relief, but when I check my Bedford glossary of terms to make sure I’m not abusing the phrase, I find the gravedigger scene (5.1) cited (along with Macbeth’s porter’s scene) as a classic instance. What bothers me about the label is that it can imply the word just, as in “just comic relief.” It says, “There’s nothing more going on here. It’s a break, a bit of relief, an orange thrown back at the groundlings.” But with Shakespeare, there’s always more. In fact, his minor characters often are given the most profound insights, and here’s an instance. The gravedigger, through his jokes, his song, his tossing of bones on the stage, his observations about how long a tanner’s body would be preserved in the grave, brings to the fore the central issue of the play: the common, comic, serious banality of death. This is exactly what Hamlet is coming to grips with in the scene.

I also notice that Hamlet is acutely in touch with his senses in the scene: he mentions that his bones “ache to think on’t” (92) when he contemplates the bones strewn on the stage; later he says his “gorge rises” (187) when he remembers Yorick (he means he’s feeling nauseous); and later he reacts to the smell of Yorick’s skull with “And smelt so? Pah!” (200). These reactions signal the intensity of Hamlet’s thoughts and feelings at this moment—he’s very sensitive to his surroundings—and they point to his being in better control of his emotions: the Hamlet of Act 1 could not have held a skull in his hand without complete disgust. He’s calmer. At the same time, he’s intense. Hmmmm.

His speech on Yorick gives me a hunch: I think you could find in Act 5 Hamlet talking back to each one of his earlier soliloquies—from “Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh” through “To be or not to be” to “How all occasions do inform against me.” In the last act, Hamlet reconsiders everything.

Dr. De Smith

How to write an ivy-league essay. . .

In a bit of a snooty how-to advising high school seniors how to write the perfect college admission essay, Kathleen Kingsbury, who writes for The Daily Beast and Time magazine, lists seven basic rules for getting into big-time colleges. I don't know if any of our own prospective students are thus engaged, but her guidelines for good writing shouldn't simply be written off as a how-to for snobs.

Here's what she says:

Rule #1: When Tackling a Global Issue, Make it Personal

Such advice may not make sense on a paper for poly sci or world affairs, but making things personal almost always makes writing more vivid and strong. But if you haven't been to the Sudan, don't try to fake it. When you're finished, go back over the paper, I'd say, and cut out at least half the personal pronouns. Making things personal doesn't mean crowding the real issues off the stage with your own story.

Rule #2: Show That You Have Some Perspective

I don't know a college prof who wouldn't say the same thing. "Perspective" has a specific meaning at Dordt College, but what Ms. Kingsbury is advising here is simply this: being able to see a bigger picture. Know how to do that?--get an education. Or read. Turn off the TV and the iPod. Get some ears. Know what's going on in the world, and you'll write far, far more authoritatively.

Rule #3: Essays Succeed or Fail in the Details

Couldn't agree more. I don't care what the assignment, specificity always bests generality. "After supper, we went right back at it" isn't as good as "After some greasy liver and onions, we went back at it." Generalizations are pretty much useless. Always show the reader--don't tell. The best preachers are always the ones who understand this timeless truth about writing. I'd move it up to #1, in fact.

Rule #4: Make Sure You're the Hero of the Story

My guess is Ms. Kingsbury knows what she's talking about. If you want to get into the flashy schools, show your colors. But if you're writing for any other reasons under the sun, who cares? Tell the story.

Rule #5: Make Your Intellectual Curiosity Clear

Absolutely on the money. Every teacher worth her salt wants, more than anything, a class full of bright eyes. Accomplishment, intelligence--sure, that's good too. But what profs want more is curiosity, an insatiable hunger to learn. I could teach forever with hungry kids. In many places, that kind of intellectual curiosity is scorned outright by the dominant youth culture. Don't be a victim. Get hungry. God's world is incredibly complex, powerfully beautiful, endlessly fascinating. See for yourself.

Rule #6: Know your audience.

I've been teaching writing for almost 40 years and writing for almost as long. If there's one skill that I see sadly lacking in college students it's consideration of the reader. My students always write primarily for their own ears, not for someone else's. When it comes to our own scribbles, we're often--at least initially--nearly tone deaf. Think about your roommate, your little sister, your grandpa--how would they read what you're writing? Listen with their ears. Good writers are immensely attentive to their audience. If they aren't, they're going to miss.

Rule #7: Don't Be Afraid to Show You're Not Perfect

What made Charlie Chaplain a comic genius?--a lot of gifts, but a healthy dose of self-depricating humor. Pride is the first the seven deadly sins, and even though we all have to fight it, we pick it up in a flash in others. And dislike it. Who wants to hang out with a know-it-all? Humility may well be the most precious of virtues.

Interesting stuff. Basic really, but worth repeating, methinks.

__________________________________

You can read the article--and winning essays, by the way--at http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-25/7-perfect-college-essays/2/

Landscape Writing from the Margins

Everything, I thought to myself yesterday, is landscape writing. This, after finishing Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon in Ethnic Lit, where the main character, Milkman, discovers his identity in the landscape of his ancestors; after encouraging Core 120 writers to take me through “the landscape of their particular issue” in writing literature reviews; after considering the paths cut and re-cut by parents and children over three generations in the fiction of Alice Munro. All writing is landscape writing.

Last weekend was pheasant opener in Minnesota. Since both my hunting buddies had deserted me (I have two friends), we loaded up the entire family and drove out to Grandpa’s old farm for the 9:00 start to the season. On a corner adjacent to our farm, a quarter section my dad used to rent, there’s a small piece of CRP that always holds birds. As a one man show, I figured it was the perfect piece to walk. It turned out the piece was flanked by corn this year. Even better, I thought to myself, the birds will have moved out from the corn to bed down in the grasses and the blanket of snow we’d received overnight would keep them locked in—they would sit tight in order to avoid contact with the snow, offering me good shots once I’d flushed them.

Leaving the wife and kids in the idling van, I donned my orange vest, loaded a shell in my pea-shooter single shot, and blew in my hands, which weren’t cold yet but were bound to be on this thirty-degree morning. I waded through the thickest cover of canary reed grass, high-stepping through it to flush the tightest sitting birds. Then I moved up to the thinner if taller switch grass, raising my gun slightly in case a bird would flush in grass that was high as my head. Since I don’t have a dog to do the work for me, I paused every so often in order to unnerve some skittish hen—if I could just get one bird to flush it might cause a maelstrom of flushing birds this early in the season. I traipsed around every corner of the five or so acres of grass for at least a half hour. Nothing. No birds, no shots, no tracks in the snow. Turns out the birds must have stayed in the corn.

No matter. Just over the hill from this corner was another one-man piece to hunt: two waterways, one of them bordered by gnarled trees craving alms of the sun, that bend around a three-acre hump of land and meet to form one larger waterway thick with canary grass and cattails and a few clumps of sorghum-like grasses higher than your head and thick like young bamboo. After the snow, this thicker cover would be a better refuge from the snow. Surely, I could jump a rooster or two from there, providing other hunters hadn’t gotten to it first. It’s a favorite spot to hunt among the locals.

Cresting the hill, however, I saw a vision quite different than what I’d expected.

The waterways have been decimated. The trees have been dug out. The pile of rubbish left from what was a farm place, the one where my dad was born, has been buried or carted off somewhere. Both arms of the waterway have been neatly tiled out and tilled flat. I am breathless at the change.

There will be no birds here this year.

I’m trying to figure out what they’ve gained, the two brothers who farm thousands of acres and rent this land from my dad. I suppose they’ve gained a couple of acres. No doubt they’ll be able to farm what were the edges of this waterway next year. In fact, they may be able to farm right through the waterways. It’s so nice not to have to turn your large equipment around more than you have to. Turning is so inconveniencing. As Paul Gruchow has written satirically, it’s so too bad we can’t just have one huge tractor with one huge implement that could farm an entire section in one pass.

But then we’re getting close.

Yes, I’m feeling sorry for myself. Yes, grass will grow here again. Probably some nice tame brome grass that might hold one pheasant. But I still wonder why. Do farmers think about the inches that they can "put into production"? Because these particular farmers don’t have livestock, aren’t diversified at all except for corn and soybeans, do they get bored during certain seasons of the year and think up how they can wreck hunting ground—or, more the point, how they can wreck my hunting ground? Do they fantasize about a completely flat and featureless landscape?

However, it’s not just about me, this ire I feel at more land being put into “production,” narrowly defined.

Several years ago already, just up the road, on the border of this same quarter section, our neighbor took out the fencerow that marked where our neighbor's land ended and ours began. I remember that fence: rotted fence posts like old bones, broken down barb wire and one ridge of built up dirt and grasses, a last refuge for wildlife. It’s one of the great ironies of the prairie: the hated barbwire that broke up this ocean of space had become one of the last refuges—albeit marginal—for wildlife. Now that’s gone.

Where the fencerow used to be.

(I’m not sure we’ve seen the last of those hated fences. Like Robert Frost, I know that “good fences make good neighbors.” If inches of land are worth the effort of radically altering the landscape, then it’s only a matter of time before farmers come to blows over whose is whose.)

The point, beyond my selfish concerns, is margins. Wendell Berry wrote about the importance of margins more than twenty-five years ago. In eliminating the margins—of a field, of society—we remove integral elements from creation, elements we may need to survive, elements as stewards of creation that we must remember the Creator cares about.

Farm policy in the 1970s famously encouraged farmers to farm “fencerow to fencerow.” Now, we’ve moved beyond even that. The fencerows are disappearing. Even ditches are under attack: I’ve seen ditches in South Dakota fenced up to the very shoulder of the road for grazing.

At a literature conference I recently attended, I heard Dan O’Brien, a South Dakota author and rancher, read an essay about his search for a rare butterfly, the Dakota skipper. He’d been asked to write a series of essays on the Great Plains and had been hesitant to do so: He was comfortable writing about the western plains, he’d said, but Minnesota—that was hopeless. It’s too late there, he said. The prairie’s gone there.

Still, he took on the task and the essay he composed was about his search for the Dakota skipper in Minnesota and Iowa, an essay that’s pure horror. O’Brien couldn’t find any Dakota skippers, try as he might, but his nightmares were filled with the unremarkable butterfly trying to get in his window. The Dakota skipper, he said, was probably responsible for pollinating a few rare prairie plants. Both of them may be gone forever.

Marginal creatures. Marginal creations. Is that what we’ll tell the Creator when he asks us about their disappearance?

Last night, after I drove home with landscape on my mind, I decided I had to photograph this decimated landscape under the heavy gray rain clouds of a soggy October, my marginal camera and photography skills notwithstanding. I decided I had to write about it. No, I don’t make my living directly off the land. No, I don’t have to think of it in financial terms, and especially during this wet fall, I’m glad I don’t have to.

But my marginal perspective on the land still counts, and I can still write about it and so I am. All writing is landscape writing. It’s of the utmost importance to consider the landscapes we inhabit: the economic, the psychological, the familial, and the actual landscape. That’s why writing is so important. It shows us the landscapes we inhabit which we shape and which shape us and which we sometimes deform and which in turn sometimes deform us.

And yet I’m not convinced that the pen is mightier than the plow. Much writing is marginal writing in that it comes from the margins in a voice that has been marginalized. Ultimately, all I can do is write what I see, call for action, write from the margins. I can continue the marginal voice of Henry David Thoreau, Wendell Berry, Paul Gruchow and others on how we should deal with landscape.

The tallgrass prairie of Minnesota and Iowa is one of the most deformed landscapes in the world. We’ve lost so much of it that I’m afraid it’s permanently deformed. But here I stand, on the margins of the land, describing the landscape I see. As Christians, as thinkers, as writers this is what we must continue to do: describe the landscape we see from the margins, calling for preserving and even expanding those margins, lest more margins are lost to our Creator’s masterpiece.