‘The Land’s Wild Music: Encounters with Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin’ by Mark Tredinnick

I should have read this book sooner because I would like to talk to Barry Lopez (via Ouija Board), Peter Matthiessen (same Ouija board), James Galvin, and Terry Tempest Williams. And also, I like the wild music the land sings to us when we walk slowly and listen. The awareness one finds when listening to Earth’s music and, perhaps, the Creator’s music is what I was talking about in yesterday’s post about “gnosis.” That music is more difficult to hear inside a building, no matter how sacred the structure.

From the Publisher

“‘The Land’s Wild Music’ explores the home terrains and the writing of four great American writers of place―Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin. In their work and its relationship with their home places, Tredinnick, an Australian writer, searches for answers to such questions such as whether it’s possible for a writer to make an authentic witness of a place; how one captures the landscape as it truly is; and how one joins the place in witness so that its lyric becomes one’s own and enters into one’s own work. He asks what it might mean to enact an ecological imagination of the world and whether it might be possible to see the work―and the writer―as part of the place itself. The work is a meditation on the nature of landscape and its power to shape the lives and syntax of men and women. It is animated by the author’s encounters with Lopez, Matthiessen, Williams, and Galvin, by critical readings of their work, and by the author’s engagement with the landscapes that have shaped these writers and their writing―the Cascades, Long Island, the Colorado Plateau, and the high prairies of the Rocky Mountains. Tredinnick seeks “the spring of nature writing deep in the nature of a place itself, carried in a writer’s wild self inside and resonated over and over again at the desk until it is a work in which the place itself sings.”

About the Author

Mark Tredinnick is an essayist, poet, and writing teacher. He is the author of The Blue Plateau: A Landscape Memoir and the editor of A Place on Earth: An Anthology of Nature Writing from Australia and North America. His essays and journalism have appeared in Island, ISLE, Orion, Resurgence, the Bulletin, and the Sydney Morning Herald. Winner of the 2005 Wildcare Tasmania Nature Writing Prize, Tredinnick lives in the highlands southwest of Sydney, Australia.

–Malcolm