Wallace Stegner 10

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…

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…

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…

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…

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

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…

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.

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,…

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.

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…