Essayist John Price’s eagerly read literary memoir and study of Midwestern nature writers the likes of William Least Heat-Moon and Mary Swander has finally hit bookshelves in paperback. The essence of Not Just Any Land is John’s rediscovery of his Midwestern roots and affinity for the American grasslands where he had grown up but had longed to escape from. Fortunately, Fate intervened. His love of literature—he studied literature and creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa—introduced him to regional writers who, like John, struggled with their own identities as Midwesterners and yet chose to write about, rather than abandon, a place disparaged by people as varied as nineteenth-century immigrants and twentieth-century coastal urbanites who had neither knowledge of nor interest in experiencing and intimately knowing a place
popular culture condemned as a wasteland—dare I say it, the Great American Desert! The authors Price read, met, interviewed and then wrote about confronted and overcame this and other persistent and ill-founded myths and arrived at their own conclusions and sense of commitment to place. Through them and his own explorations of the grasslands, Price discovered his own intellectual roadmap to home. Now that Not Just Any Land: A Personal and Literary Journey into the American Grasslands (UNP, 2004) is in paperback, hopefully it will reach the larger audience Price’s story rightly deserves and in the process help others also find their ways home.

If you’ve never read anything by Price before, check out Orion magazine, where he often publishes creative nonfiction essays, or read his essay “Nuts” in The Big Empty, a compilation of writing by and about Nebraskans and Nebraska. The book, edited by Ladette Randolph and Nina Shevchuk-Murray, was published by UNP in May 2007. Also be on the lookout early next year for John’s latest book, a memoir that includes previously published humorous selections from Orion and elsewhere, as well as new selections, in which he continues to explore the unexpected and enriching intersections between nature and personal life. The book, tentatively titled Man Killed by Pheasants (and Other Kinships), is expected to be published in April 2008 by Da Capo, a member of the Perseus Books Group.

On a final note, any readers interested in America’s grasslands, most specifically the national reserves (akin to national forests) that preserve and also are called grasslands, you might want to check out Francis Moul’s and Georg Joutras’s The National Grasslands: A Guide to America’s Undiscovered Treasure. The book was published by UNP in October 2006.