PLACING THE ACADEMY: ESSAYS ON LANDSCAPE, WORK AND IDENTITY, edited by Jennifer Sinor and Rona Kaufman, Utah State University Press, 307 pages, $34.95

The theme is attractive — essays from 21 writers, all of whom write literature based upon who we are by understanding where we are.

"Placing the Academy" is edited by Jennifer Sinor, author of "The Extraordinary Work of Ordinary Writing," a professor of English at Utah State University and a resident of Whitney, Idaho, and Rona Kaufman, professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University, who grew up in Pittsburgh, has lived in Main and Michigan, and now resides in Tacoma, Wash.

In the introduction, the editors suggest that the scholars assembled for this book write about "growing up and growing older, of moving and remaining, of working and playing. We learn what the campus plumber can teach us about the classroom, how one might continue to work on fragile ecosystems knowing that you are responsible for killing the last of an endangered species ... as well as the difficulty of imagining places like Vietnam for your students."

Charles Waugh teaches English at Utah State University but recently spent a year in Vietnam, challenging himself to teach about Vietnam in a way with which students may identify. He was happy that they were willing to listen to his account of the My Lai massacre even though many had not heard of it before.

As Waugh grew up, he thought of Vietnam as a "dangerous place," where numerous Americans would suffer both personal and national humiliation. That's a hard image to shake. Although he had studied Vietnam as a young man, he was unprepared "for the brilliant green of the rice paddies outside of town under a bright August sky ... nor could I have predicted how much I would marvel at the waves of two-wheeled traffic surging through the streets, some of the bikes piled 6 or 7 feet high and just as wide with wicker baskets or hat stands or bamboo cages full of pigs or dogs or chickens."

Charles Bergman suggests in his essay that "every campus needs a wilderness," as he recalls that Clover Creek once flowed nearby. About 30 years ago, several faculty members who worked in the natural sciences "put an artificial pond in the area ... to create a natural area on campus." Now in disrepair, the pond is "a crime scene waiting to happen."

Jeffrey Buchanan, who grew up in Detroit, teaches English at Youngstown State University in Ohio. He talks about being "uncomfortable in the most immediate landscape" of his academic life — his office.

So he picks up piles of papers from the floor, throws some away, puts the rest in files, moves bookcases, because "the spaces in which we live and work shape us — and we shape the spaces in which we live and work."

Places, he writes, are different than spaces. Quoting Kevin Hetherington, he says that "place is an effect of a labor of division ... of bringing in and keeping out. Places are relational; they make knowable a space in relation to any other."

The writing in this volume is diverse but unified — each writer admirably defines place and the role it plays in writing, teaching, working and living. It's a stimulating piece of work.

---

E-mail: dennis@desnews.com