Place. Limits. Liberty.
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Wallace Stegner 10

Making a Home in my Hometown

As I learn how to be a sticker, I hope to continually see the beauty of Battle Creek, no matter its faults. I want to persist in finding the good…
February 16, 2023

The Only Bonds to Be Found: A Review of The Most Beautiful Place on Earth

An imagination like his, fictions like his – born from affection – may not provide us with data or answers but may help us feel “somehow more substantial and less…
Seth Wieck
August 5, 2022

The Missed Opportunity of “Rugged Individualism”

The tragedy of the hold Hoover’s rugged individualism continues to have on the American psyche in our increasingly atomized age is that his formulation risks presenting a false dichotomy between…
November 3, 2021

Will Hoyt‘s Ohio River Journey to the Middle Ages

Host:  John Murdock Guest:  Will Hoyt Will Hoyt, author of The Seven Ranges, discusses his journey along the Ohio River into the physical, historical and philosophical interior of the strip-mined…

Dear Mom: A Letter on Time

Learning from Wallace Stegner, Doug Sikkema considers the timeless blessings of his childhood in a letter to his mother.

Larry McMurtry and Wendell Berry at the Dairy Queen

McMurtry couldn’t quite set the Bowie knife to the scalp of the Western like Cormac McCarthy did the same year, maybe because he knew those people weren’t grotesque caricatures; they…
Seth Wieck
April 7, 2021

Grace Olmstead on Uprooted, Place, Idaho, and Prairie Lupines

Fidelity to place needn’t (and shouldn’t) result in stuckness, a condemnation of ever moving at all. But we must beware falling into that second trap: rejecting roots altogether.
April 5, 2021

Tending the Soil of our Homes: Gracy Olmstead’s Paean to Roots

At the heart of Gracy Olmstead's book is the conviction that roots do not just serve the individual person or plant—they also are vital to the health of one’s soil,…

The Roots of Originality

It is only our own town or neighborhood that is specific enough, and someday knowable enough, to enable a capable writer's imagination to imagine it clear and whole.
Katherine Dalton
January 14, 2010

Made in Vermont

BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY. It’s town meeting day in the once and future republic of Vermont.  Herewith, from the American Conservative, my profile of Frank Bryan, the University of Vermont professor…
March 3, 2009