Literature
Other
literature
Language
American
Dialect
Cowboy
Dialect in Print
Writing
Our
Writing Workshops
Writing
Other
Subjects
|
My
review in Southwestern American Literature, Volume 30, Number
1. Fall 2004.
For
fifteen years, Susan Hanson wrote a weekly column for the San Marcos
newspaper. I read it regularly, and when she quit writing the column,
I was one among many who urged her to collect the best of the essays
and publish them. At last she has done so, but she has not just selected
from her earlier essays. She has added new essays, revised earlier ones,
grouped them. And Texas Tech University press has put them into a remarkably
attractive package, one featuring illustrations by Melanie Fain. Now
I and others have a chance to read these little gems at our leisure.
And that is the way I suggest the book be read. I put it on my bedside
table, and most nights I read or reread an essay. But I am not sure
essay is the proper category for them. Probably prose poems is closer
to what they are. Normally, I am not fond of prose poems, but these
I like, not just because they are well written but because many are
about Central Texas, the place where I live— its weather, trees,
flowers, insects. In her initial essay, Hanson tells about moving from
the Gulf Coast of Texas and having to adjust her gardening to the harsh
reality of Central Texas. She tells of planting Azaleas and hydrangeas
and watching them die as they were starved by the chalky, alkaline soil.
She learned to accept the reality of life in her new place, first by
inventorying what was on her small semirural lot and then learning from
those plants she found: “Instead of treating every unknown seedling
as a weed, I let it be—at least until I knew for certain what
it was. And rather than imposing some design more suited to a different
time and place, I let the landscape show me how it worked.” And
we are the beneficiaries of what she learned. Most of her selections
are about her piece of Central Texas. Typically, she tells of seeing
or hearing something there, and then she reflects on implications of
what she observes. She brings her widespread reading to bear on the
situation with short, well chosen quotes from such writers as Mary Oliver,
Michael Pollan, Wendell Berry, Jack Kerouac, Henry David Thoreau, John
Tveten, Aldo Leopold, and Richard Phelan. Hanson also reports on what
she sees and thinks at a retreat center, Lebh Shomea, in South Texas,
and at parks and camps in the Texas Hill Country along several rivers,
the Little Blanco, the Guadalupe, and the Frio. Occasionally she goes
farther afield, visiting and reporting on far West Texas, Utah, and
Colorado.
From the marmot in Colorado to the javelina of South Texas, from the
False Dayflower in her yard to the palmettos in the Ottine swamp, from
the Cooper’s hawk to the cormorant—Hanson calmly and gracefully
informs us. And she relates all of this to the humans who live with
these and other things, things natural, every day, and wondrous. She
writes of the change of seasons and our acceptance or resistance to
that and other changes. She relates the losses of nature to those humans
have—the death of a child or a parent. She asks, “How can
I understand that what is absent is not gone, that what has ended is
not finished, that what is taken is returned as more than memory?”
She says she can’t: “What I can do, though is listen for
the sound of the sandhill cranes flying high above my house this fall,
feel the supple shoots of next spring’s phlox, memorize the curve
and hue of Michaelmas daisies in full bloom. What I can do is live as
though beauty matters, as if its imprint on the soul never fades.”
What
I like most about the essays is both her precision in reporting and
her hesitance in concluding. She is willing to admit paradox: “We
must be patient, reminding ourselves that whatever comes will arrive
a piece at a time. And finally, we must bear the weight of paradox,
recognizing that delight and sorrow are soul mates, that redemption
and loss are a part of the same sacred ground.” What I like least
about them is that they are so few. Already, I and other readers are
urging her to mine her former columns for another volume of essays.''
Nature
Writing
Other
Literature |
A Cavalcade
of Oilfield Novels
Fountain
Wells
My
Writing Guides
English
Syntax:
A Guide to the Grammar of Successful Writers—
Writing Style 1
Connecting
for Coherence:
A Guide to Building Sentences With Syntax And Logic—
Writing Style 2
Purposeful
Punctuation:
A Syntactic Guide to English Punctuation—
Writing Style 3
Word
Wisdom:
A Guide to Selecting Words
for Writers and Editors—Writing Style 4
|