Writing from the Center

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Summary: Midwest Landscapes and Inscapes
Review: "Although grounded in the personal, all my essays push toward the impersonal; I reflect on my own experience in hopes of illuminating the experience of others," confides the author, and yet, it is the personal sense of Scott Russell Sanders--fair minded fellow traveller--which is the chief blessing of his works. Sanders' character--vulnerable yet open, sensitive yet insistent, boldly direct yet fine minded--sets the ultimate human value of his work. Reading Sanders is like walking with him down a Midwestern street, out of town, along a path through a wilderness that brings you back home safe and more sane, and that is why his books of essays A PARADISE OF BOMBS (1987), SECRETS OF THE UNIVRESE (1991), STAYING PUT (1993) have won so many awards and gathered such a large and attentive audience. A recent winner of the Lannan Literary Award, Sanders joins such company as Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Edward Hoagland, and Noam Chomsky--those bioregionalist writers who deal so earnestly with living sanely in our time and place. Always deeply rooted in the Midwest--Ohio and Indiana country--Sanders nevertheless takes on large questions and universal themes, many of them dealing with what it means to write from a strong sense of place. WRITING FROM THE CENTER is perhaps his most diverse and demanding collection as he deals with questions of landscape and values, work and family, love and regret. For this reader, the family portraits ring strikingly true as they attempt to deal with the issues of living today. Sanders has always been most excellent at scoping out a subject, in leading us into the territory, and bringing us close to those truths nearest to home