Walking Home Ground book review
By Robert Root
Hardcover: $22.95
Paperback: $22.95
224 pages
ISBN: 978-0-87020-786-0
E-book: $9.99
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About
the book
A lyrical mix of memoir, travel
writing, and environmental history When longtime author Robert Root moves to a
small town in southeast Wisconsin, he gets to know his new home by walking the
same terrain traveled by three Wisconsin luminaries who were deeply rooted in
place—John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and August Derleth. Root walks with Muir at John
Muir State Natural Area, with Leopold at the Shack, and with Derleth in Sac
Prairie; closer to home, he traverses the Ice Age Trail, often guided by such
figures as pioneering scientist Increase Lapham. Along the way, Root
investigates the changes to the natural landscape over nearly two centuries,
and he chronicles his own transition from someone on unfamiliar terrain to
someone secure on his home ground.
In prose that is at turns
introspective and haunting, Walking Home
Ground inspires us to see history’s echo all around us: the parking lot
that once was forest; the city that once was glacier.” Perhaps this book is an
invitation to walk home ground,” Root tells us. “Perhaps, too, it’s a time
capsule, a message in a bottle from someone given to looking over his shoulder
even as he tries to examine the ground beneath his feet.”
My
review
Root begins his story by admitting
he’s a non-native Wisconsinite, though claims home territory along the Great
Lakes. A naturalist, an observer, teacher, and one endowed with curiosity, Root
endeavored to discover and begin to learn all he could about his final home in
a way few even bother to consider. Having just relocated from one side of the
state to another to settle on a farm we’ve owned for over twenty years, I was
enamored by Root’s introspection and tenacity to uncover secrets of the land,
and perhaps, portend the future. He kept a detailed journal of his hikes,
research, and thoughts for several years.
As mentioned in the blurb, Root
follows three of our more known historical naturalist homeboys on his tour
after becoming familiar with his immediate new neighborhood west of Milwaukee.
He visits John Muir’s boyhood territory in Marquette County, as well as August Derleth’s
Prairie du Sac/Wisconsin River, and Aldo Leopold’s sand country. These three
lived and wrote about south central Wisconsin. Root spent hours with maps and
literature from Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources and the Ice Age
Trail Alliance, as well as dozens of resources about the authors, nature,
topography, geography, history, and so forth about the area. The book is filled
with generous details of the types of land, the differences between fen, bog,
and marsh, the type of flora during the different seasons, underground, soil,
native and invasive species. His knowledge of bird and animal life leaves me
envious.
A somewhat saddened note sounds
toward the end of the book in the section “The Land Itself.” “Settlement
eliminated a great deal of Wisconsin life,” Root writes. Early pioneers
describe a wondrous mix of topography and its supporting flora and fauna. “The
last bison was killed in 1832,” he says, with a litany of now missing creatures.
In his epilogue, Root invites us to “see the land as a community to which” we
belong, and urges us to consider our lifestyle’s impact on the environment. He’s
encouraged me to get to know my little piece of Wisconsin better.
Detailed and thought-provoking, Walking
Home Ground is for those who love Wisconsin and enjoy nature and
environmental reading. It’s a subtle call to action, and a request to remember
where and who we are.
Any quibbles I had are the lack of
maps, though I understand the reader is encouraged to get out his own map, or
better yet, go. The book is detailed as mentioned above; once or twice I almost
expected a test at the end of the segment. Included is an Index and a Resource
list.
About
the author
Bob Root (Robert L. Root Jr.)
believes he has been a writer since he was around eight years old, when he came
home with a friend from a showing of Superman and the Mole Men, pried
open the lock on his mother’s typewriter, and created a series of very short
adventures about Tiger Boy. Since then, his life and career have centered on
his writing, his study of the way other writers compose, and his teaching of
writers and writing teachers. His bachelor’s degree from State University
College, Geneseo, New York, was in English education and theater and his
graduate degrees from the University of Iowa were in English literature, but he
also did post-graduate work in composition and rhetoric before beginning
twenty-eight years of teaching at Central Michigan University. There he taught
courses in composition and rhetoric, nonfiction, editing, English education,
literature, and media. He retired from full time teaching in 2004 to devote
more time to writing creative nonfiction and to writing about it.
A frequent presenter on creative nonfiction and composition at national,
international, and regional conferences, his scholarship and teaching led to
many articles and books. They include: a book for writers, Wordsmithery, which
went through two editions; a book for teachers of writing (co-edited with
Michael Steinberg), Those Who Do Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching; and
an anthology of creative nonfiction (also co-edited with Michael
Steinberg) The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative
Nonfiction, now in its sixth edition. His essay “Collage, Montage, Mosaic,
Vignette, Episode, Segment,” originally published in The Fourth Genre, has
been used often in creative writing courses across the country. He has also
published three books examining how nonfiction writers do what they do, Working
at Writing: Columnists and Critics Composing, E. B. White: The Emergence
of an Essayist, and The Nonfictionist's Guide: On Reading & Writing
Creative Nonfiction.
His creative nonfiction includes essays of place published in literary journals
such as North Dakota Quarterly, Colorado Review, Rivendell, Ecotone, The
Concord Saunterer, and divide; “Knowing Where You’ve Been,”
in Ascent, was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays
2004; "Postscript to a Postscript to 'The Ring of Time'" in The
Pinch was a Notable Essay in 2010 as well as a Pushcart Nominee, and
"Time and Tide" in Ascent was a Notable Essay in 2011. As
an essayist he has been an Artist-in-Residence at Acadia National Park, Rocky
Mountain National Park, and Isle Royale National Park; his anthology co-edited
with Jill Burkland, The Island Within Us: Isle Royale Artists-in-Residence
1991-1998, won the 2001 Excellence in Media Award from the National Parks
Service. He edited and contributed to Landscapes with Figures: The
Nonfiction of Place, an anthology of essays and writers’ commentaries on
their composing published in 2007 by the University of Nebraska Press. His
first full-length work of creative nonfiction, Recovering Ruth: A
Biographer’s Tale, was named a Michigan Notable Book in 2004 by the
Library of Michigan. His second book-length work of creative nonfiction, Following
Isabella, chronicles his attempt to learn how to live in Colorado by tracing
the trail of nineteenth-century travel writer Isabella Bird around the Front
Range. He has also published a collection of his essays, Postscripts:
Retrospections on Time and Place, a collection of his essays for radio, Limited
Sight Distance: Essay for Airwaves, and an edition of columns by his
grandmother, Betsy Root, titled How to Develop Your Personality. He is the
author of a family memoir, Happenstance. His twentieth book, Walking
Home Ground: In the Footsteps of Muir, Leopold, and Derleth, a book of place
set in Wisconsin, was published in Fall 2017.
From 1999 through 2013 Bob Root was a contributing editor for Fourth
Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, one of the first literary journals
devoted exclusively to literary nonfiction. He continues to talk about creative
nonfiction at creative writing and English education conferences and has been a
visiting writer and speaker in writing programs at colleges and universities
around the country. In addition to essays and haibun, he is presently at work
on The Arc of the Escarpment, a travel narrative tracking the Niagara
Escarpment across Wisconsin, Michigan, Ontario, and New York, and Literary
Remains: Essaying Myself and Others, a polyptych memoir.
From 2008 until 2017 Bob was a visiting faculty member in creative nonfiction
in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Ashland University in Ohio. He is
currently a teaching artist at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and a
freelance editor of essays, memoirs, and literary nonfiction. He lives in
Waukesha, Wisconsin.
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