On Topophilia and a Complicated Love of Jim Harrison’s Fiction
Topophilia, coined by W.H. Auden in 1947, means the love of place; a straightforward word to describe thoughts and feelings I have with regularity.
Rural
Unhaunting the Small Town Narrative in NIGHT IN THE WOODS
What makes up the American small-town identity feels solidified in the cultural consciousness, but that depiction is a veneer that needs interrogation. The game Night in the Worlds and novel Universal Harvester comes at a time to do just that and rehabilitate that archetypal image.
Rural Pride in the Walleye Capital of the World: Emily Fridlund’s HISTORY OF WOLVES
Loose River is a town where the two key descriptions of Christmastime are “competing nativity scenes” and the “strings of colored lights up and down Main Street.” Linda, the protagonist, thinks in terms of natural geography: her friend lives “in a trailer three lakes over.”