Mary Ann Gwinn / Seattle Times book editor
The power of place in the work of Northwest writers

	LARRY STEAGALL / AP The Olympic Mountains are among the natural wonders that inspire the authors discussed in Nicholas O'Connell's "On Sacred Ground."
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" 'What do you think of the White Mountains?' he asked.

" 'What do you mean?'

" 'Right there,' he pointed outside the car window. 'Those are the White Mountains.'

Author appearance Nicholas O'Connell will read from "On Sacred Ground" at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Seattle's University Book Store (206-634-3400 or www.bookstore.washington.edu) and at 6 p.m. Saturday at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park (206-366-3333 or www.thirdplacebooks.com).

"When I realized that he wasn't joking, I replied. 'Those aren't mountains — those are hills.'... To a Northwesterner like myself, they were beautiful, but not large enough or impressive enough to qualify as mountains."

O'Connell, who authored 1987's "At the Field's End: Interviews With Twenty Northwest Writers," believes his home ground is an exceptional place. In "On Sacred Ground: The Spirit of Place in Pacific Northwest Literature" he's linked his love of his native landscape with his familiarity with Northwest authors. His thesis: an "obsession with landscape pervades all of Northwest literature" and infuses the work of the region's storytellers and authors, from Native American mythmakers to contemporary novelists and poets.

The author defines "Pacific Northwest" as the region from the Pacific Ocean to the Rocky Mountains; from Washington state to Oregon's Siskiyou Mountains, a delineation that includes Idaho and parts of Montana. He begins his exploration with Northwest native storytellers and their rich culture, contending that it thrived in part because the region's bountiful aboriginal diet and temperate climate freed them from the survival-oriented grind of harsher regions.

One of "Sacred Ground's" strengths is its linking of local trends to larger cultural movements. In his section on the writings of Northwest explorers, O'Connell notes that Capt. George Vancouver, writing in 1792, had an Enlightenment-influenced exactitude for naming and categorizing the region's features.

"On Sacred Ground: The Spirit of Place in Pacific Northwest Literature" by Nicholas O'Connell University of Washington Press, $24.95

But a few years later, the awe of the Romantics crept into Meriwether Lewis' otherwise documentary description of Great Falls of the Missouri River: "... a perfect white foam which assumes a thousand forms in a moment sometimes flying up in jets of sparkling foam ... scarcely formed before large roling bodies of the same beaten and foaming water is thrown over and conceals them."

By the mid-19th century, Romantic-influenced Northwest travelers such as Theodore Winthrop wrote effusive dispatches that recalled the French philosopher Rousseau. They were narratives long on awe and imagination; short on fact and authentic experience of the hardships faced by new settlers to the region.

That would change with the advent of a school of writing that O'Connell calls "Western Realism." This chapter begins with Ivan Doig, the Seattle author whose hardscrabble upbringing in Montana has given him a lifetime's worth of material for novels and memoirs. But O'Connell considers Jack London's "The Call of the Wild," a brutal story of a dog's battle for survival (now thought of mostly as a children's book), a key precursor to a generation of writers who wrote about the land and its human occupiers in harsher and more realistic terms.

It's a group as diverse as A.B. Guthrie, Ken Kesey, Betty MacDonald and Norman Maclean. Though their styles are quite different, they all shared a more realistic view of settlers and their relationship to the land. Kesey's "Sometimes a Great Notion," often called the archetypal Northwest novel, splendidly conveys the embattled psyche of a man loose in a large, daunting and unmanageable place: "And for another thing there was nothing, not a thing, about the country that made a man feel Big and Important. If anything it made a man feel dwarfed, and about as important as one of the fish-Indians living down on the clamflats. Important? Why there was something about the whole blessed country that made a soul feel whipped before he got started."

"On Sacred Ground" moves on to the Northwest School of Poetry, analyzing the works of Theodore Roethke, Richard Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, William Stafford, John Haines and David Wagoner for their links to the landscape. Most of this work supports O'Connell's thesis, though he admits the inclusion of Spokane native Kizer's later work is a bit of a stretch. This Pulitzer Prize-winning poet once wrote of her home town: "After Spokane, what horrors lurk in Hell?"

The book concludes with some contemporary authors preoccupied with civilization's impact on our culture, environment and spirit. Poet Gary Snyder (a California resident, Snyder grew up in Seattle), Portland's Ursula K. Le Guin, Oregon nature writer Barry Lopez and Idaho author Marilynne Robinson all "seek to reconnect human culture with the environment. They consider the split between the human and the nonhuman as a dangerous illusion, which encourages the destruction of the environment and the spiritual impoverishment of human beings," O'Connell writes.

"On Sacred Ground" is earnest, readable and informative, but this reader found herself talking back to the author on a couple of points.

It seems inarguable that our region's writers have been affected by the "spirit of place," but the same could be said of almost any region's writers. The writings of Southern authors William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren simply could not take place any place other than the authors' humid, firefly-lit home ground. California poet Robinson Jeffers' work is inextricably linked to the grand contours of his native landscape, as is the brooding work of New England novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. In Annie Proulx's "The Shipping News," Newfoundland is as much a character as any of Proulx's band of eccentrics. O'Connell echoes other charmed Northwest chauvinists I have known, folks who couldn't get the mountains out of their minds long enough to appreciate the more subtle charms of other places.

I also thought he quit too soon. The youngest of the last batch of authors, Robinson and Lopez, are in their mid-to-late 50s. Snyder and Le Guin are in their 70s. A new wave of Northwest authors, including Chuck Palahniuk, Matthew Stadler, Katherine Dunn and Rebecca Brown paint a more urban picture of the Northwest, creating worlds where landscape is often subsumed to other themes. Do these more avant garde Northwest writers support his thesis? Or not?

Despite these qualifications, "On Sacred Ground" is an invaluable book. Readers looking to connect with their region will appreciate its succinct survey of the history of literature, and its connection with the essence of our native or adopted home.

Mary Ann Gwinn: 206-464-2357 or mgwinn@seattletimes.com

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