Interior Places & What the River Carries

Of the many books that I read this past summer, two stand out. It’s not just because they are beautifully written (although they are), but also because they are by my friend, Lisa Knopp.

Lisa has published five collections of her essays with some of the most prestigious university presses in the country: Field of Vision (University of Iowa Press, 1996); Flight Dreams (University of Iowa Press, 1998); The Nature of Home (University of Nebraska Press, 2002); Interior Places (University of Nebraska Press, 2008); and What the River Carries (University of Missouri Press, 2012). All of her books have been well reviewed, and a few have won prizes.

Lisa’s style is consistent, for her essays are typically a blend of detailed observation, either of people or of scenes in nature, and of her own life. In a sense, her essays are memoir, but they are much richer than the typical memoir since her “field of vision” isn’t restricted to herself and her own experiences.

Interior Places is a collection of sixteen essays that, as she says in her first essay, “The Way In,” ranges over “the outer and [the] inner terrain.” Using the analogy of a geode, she argues that the exterior surfaces of many things may seem bland, but one can often find rare, even exquisite beauty on the inside.

One of my favorite essays in this collection is “Surrender,” a meditation on the necessity of submitting one’s self to the larger world and its realities. Almost Buddhist in its tone, Lisa describes how releasing a bird from her hand (a ranger had just banded it) made her realize that she had to let her grown children leave the nest that she had made for them. “’There’s the sun,’” she softly tells the titmouse, lifting her hand skywards. Then she watches as “a burst of wing beats carried the bird into the cloudless sky.”

Another equally powerful essay is “Enclosures,” which juxtaposes the depths of her personal struggles with claustrophobia with the necessity of living in the modern world, with its cars, windowless offices, and elevators. Wondering about the root causes of her phobia, she reads psychological and neurological texts to find out why people have such paralyzing fears. Ironically, she learns, many phobias (of heights, of snakes, etc.) can be a blessing.

As much as I enjoyed Interior Places, I probably liked What the River Carries even more since many of its essays center on historical figures. Like Caesar’s Gaul, Lisa’s book is divided into three parts: Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte. Each of these sections details her encounters with that particular river in the three distinct phases of her life: childhood, mid-life, later-life.

One of my favorite essays from this collection is “Restorations,” which describes how the Boyer Chute National Wildlife Refuge on the Missouri River has been restored to its “wild” state, which leads Lisa to contemplate how her son, Ian, had recently been restored to her after some time in delinquency. She explains how being in nature helped to calm her son by allowing him to express his “wild” side through hunting and fishing. She concludes, with gratitude, that her son, whom she thought she’d lost, has now found his path in life.

Two other of my favorite essays in this collection are “Mound Builders,” about the Native American tribes in the Midwest who constructed the mysterious pre-Columbian mounds, and “Little Dixie,” about the family of Jesse James. In both of these essays, like in many other essays in this collection, she describes the historic sites with the same attention to detail that she uses to describe her relationships with her family.

Lisa has spent most of the past twenty-five years in Lincoln, Nebraska, and so she has come to think of the Platte as her “home river.” Every spring she drives to the central part of the state to watch the Sandhill cranes return for a stop on the Platte as they migrate from the southern United States to northern Canada. In “No Other River,” she writes about her love for these birds and how a flourishing migration means a healthy river for future generations of cranes and crane-watchers. She closes this essay by joining in the mating ritual: “I’ll watch the dance closely enough that I can join in, bowing my head, strutting a bit, tossing sticks, and leaping high above the earth.”

Wouldn't you like to join her?