Collected here are essays by Louise Erdrich, Michael Rosen, Gary Comstock, Mary Swander and Jane Staw, David Hamilton, Janet Kauffman, Douglas Bauer, and Michael Martone. Sixteen black-and-white photographs by David Plowden illustrate the sweeping territory covered in the essays. Together they bring a new understanding of the moods, emotions, people, and places that form the Midwest, proving it to be as complex and unordinarily beautiful as it is modest.
"A Place of Sense will stir up memories of those of us who live(d) in the Midwest and give the rest of the country a sense of what they've missed."—Small Press
"…should give any Midwesterner a sense, in both meanings of the term, of freedom of thought and feeling possible within the even metre of the streets and fields."—Indianapolis Star
“. . . left me wanting to invite each essayist to my own kitchen table for dinner. Then I would coax more talk over a second cup of coffee, so provocatively have the writers thought about place, about the way who mixes up with where.”—Plain Dealer
“Musing on exuberant butter sculptures at the Ohio State Fair, the soul-numbing flatness of northern Indiana, a farmers’ suicide hotline in Iowa, or deserted fields gone wild in southern Michigan, the essays evoke a major American myth of simpler lives and stronger values. . . . By listening to their world and telling its stories, the authors poetically document an endangered species of humanity.”—Booklist
