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Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape

Edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney

Trinity University Press, 447pgs.

 

America is first a ground, a place, yet we didn't have a comprehensive record of our specific landforms. When Barry Lopez trekked over to the University of Oregon Library to look up the term “blind creek,” he was struck by the paucity of resources available to describe North American landforms. He left the library imagining the book that he couldn’t find, a reference book of scientific, regional, and folkloric descriptions. He teamed up with co-editor and main-squeeze Debra Gwartney. They corralled 45 of the nation’s best writers in literature of place and to describe 850 words including, dust bowl, singing sand, desire path, kiss tank, and nubble The definitions range from enlightening, historic and cultural, to fun. Literature quotations using the landform terms act as marginal notes and illustrate the binding of place to culture.  

 

Home Ground might be the most American book ever written. How can we know who we are without a precise language for the characteristics of our home ground? The authors have given us much more than a catalog of terms; it's American literature. This reference is essential to the lexicology of loving our land.      

 

Read an interview with co editor Debrah Gwartney.  Also read about Gwartney's latest book project.  Live Through This;  Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love