The spring 2008 forecast for new essays, memoirs and other works of creative nonfiction by Cornhusker State authors looks to be unparalleled, especially for readers with an affinity and a passion for writing about the Midwest as a place and space to be savored and celebrated. Not only does Not Just Any Land (UNP, 2004) author John Price have a new book due out, but so too does Nebraska’s preeminent essayist Lisa Knopp. Her latest collection, Interior Places, will be published in March by the University of Nebraska Press / Bison Books.

If you’ve read any of Knopp’s previous books—The Nature of Home (UNP, 2002), Flight of Dreams: A Life in the Midwestern Landscape (University of Iowa Press, 1998), and Field of Vision (University of Iowa Press, 1996)—you know how intelligent, intense, and incisive her literary gaze is; how passionate her prose; and how inspiring her love for and attention to the Iowa and Nebraska of her childhood and later adult life. Interior Places returns to and expands on the themes that have informed her already deep and impassioned discovery and recovery of life on the Great Plains—what it means, for example, to live in the interior of the country, the heartland, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and also what it means to be middle aged, both daughter and parent, and still discovering a deeper appreciation for what’s here now.

If you’ve never read any of Knopp’s wide-ranging essays, including memoir and nature and travel writing, you don’t want to miss this opportunity. You’ll never forgive yourself. The journey you’ll experience in reading Interior Places will be as much a journey of physical and historical discovery—a discovery of the heartland that is and why—as it will be a discovery of Knopp’s (and our, her readers’) previously unknown personal connections to the people, places and events that are and give meaning to the Midwest.

Essays in Interior Places also carry on Knopp’s much respected reflections on the resilience of nature and how land and history have unpredictably combined in wondrous ways to create the place she so fervently and eloquently called home in her previous collection, The Nature of Home. The environmental historian William Cronon once wrote that “The romantic legacy [of wilderness] means that wilderness is more a state of mind than a fact of nature, and the state of mind that today most defines wilderness is wonder.” Knopp might not be writing about wilderness per se—one essay in Interior Places, for example, explores the origin, history and impact of corn on the land—but her essays nonetheless reveal her heartfelt wonder at the richness of nature and the depth of life in America’s interior places and show us—her lucky readers—what it means to be from here, the heartland. I can’t wait to return to the journey.