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Imagination in place : essays / Wendell Berry.

by Berry, Wendell, 1934-

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Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint : Distributed by Publishers Group West, c2010.

American essays.

viii, 196 p. ; 24 cm.

Imagination in place -- American imagination and the Civil War -- The momentum of clarity -- In memory : Wallace Stegner, 1909-1993 -- Speech after long silence -- My friend Hayden -- In memory : James Still -- A master language -- My conversation with Gurney Norman -- Sweetness preserved -- Some interim thoughts about Gary Snyder's "Mountains and rivers without end" -- In memory : James Baker Hall -- Against the nihil of the age -- The uses of adversity -- God, science, and imagination.

A writer who can imagine the "community belonging to its place" is one who has applied his knowledge and citizenship to achieve the goal to which Wendell Berry has always aspired -- to be a native to his own local culture. And for Berry, what is "local, fully imagined, becomes universal," and the "local" is to know one's place and allow the imagination to inspire and instill "a practical respect for what is there besides ourselves." In Imagination in Place, we travel to the local cultures of several writers important to Berry's life and work, from Wallace Stegner's great West and Ernest Gaines' Louisiana plantation life to Donald Hall's New England, and on to the Western frontier as seen through the Far East lens of Gary Snyder. Berry laments today's dispossessed and displaced, those writers and people with no home and no citizenship, but he argues that there is hope for the establishment of new local cultures in both the practical and literary sense.

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