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A Place That's Known
Michael Pearson is a seeker of places, and his avenue to them is his own imagination. His quests, intense and introspective, take him to real terrains. At the terminus he always finds the universal.
In this, his second book of literary odyssey, he looks to places for a way to understand his heritage. In Imagined Journeys into Literary America he wrote about his search to match fictional sites with the images that his reading of them had instilled in his mind. As Pearson explores, it is memory, imagination, and the rejuvenating power of literature that are his unfailing resources.
His narrative journey in A Place That's Known probes the indelible locales from his past - the Bronx, where he spent his Catholic boyhood, the placid shores of Long Lake in Maine during his adolescence, and Flannery O'Connor's Georgia, where he spent a troubled time in his young manhood.
He follows paths opened in the present by contemporary writers. In the Pine Barrens of New Jersey he meets John McPhee. In the Navajo country of the American Southwest he encounters Tony Hillerman. In Britain he discovers a part of himself in the landscapes of past masters - Shakespeare, Chaucer, Yeats, and Joyce. His journey ends back home in Virginia, where his young sons on the brink of their own quests make him perceive the full circle, life at the beginning where the odyssey started.
Pearson's interior travelogue combines narrative, reportage, and autobiography as he reaches out for rays of light that will reveal the meaning of the search. In these poignant essays he roves over American and British landscapes and in the play of the imagination and experience discovers familiar yet transformed terrain. To him this "place that's known" is the intersection where "our soaring dreams and the hardscrabble world converge." To his readers this place is their own.
In this, his second book of literary odyssey, he looks to places for a way to understand his heritage. In Imagined Journeys into Literary America he wrote about his search to match fictional sites with the images that his reading of them had instilled in his mind. As Pearson explores, it is memory, imagination, and the rejuvenating power of literature that are his unfailing resources.
His narrative journey in A Place That's Known probes the indelible locales from his past - the Bronx, where he spent his Catholic boyhood, the placid shores of Long Lake in Maine during his adolescence, and Flannery O'Connor's Georgia, where he spent a troubled time in his young manhood.
He follows paths opened in the present by contemporary writers. In the Pine Barrens of New Jersey he meets John McPhee. In the Navajo country of the American Southwest he encounters Tony Hillerman. In Britain he discovers a part of himself in the landscapes of past masters - Shakespeare, Chaucer, Yeats, and Joyce. His journey ends back home in Virginia, where his young sons on the brink of their own quests make him perceive the full circle, life at the beginning where the odyssey started.
Pearson's interior travelogue combines narrative, reportage, and autobiography as he reaches out for rays of light that will reveal the meaning of the search. In these poignant essays he roves over American and British landscapes and in the play of the imagination and experience discovers familiar yet transformed terrain. To him this "place that's known" is the intersection where "our soaring dreams and the hardscrabble world converge." To his readers this place is their own.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 1994
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March 20, 2026
Pearson writes lyrically and intelligently about his own places, including his inner ones, and other people's that, in some sense, he makes part of his own. Part memoir and a large part essay, he considers Tony Hillerman's country, John McPhee and the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, some pieces of his own Irish heritage, his sons and their future, and first and last the place he most intimately knows.
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