Reading Journal 2024: Imagined Places: Journeys Into Literary America

Reading Journal 2024: Imagined Places: Journeys Into Literary America
Author: Michael Pearson

Hardly an exhaustive list, but as a literary roadtrip, anchored by a boots on the ground itinerary, it’s a highly entertaining jaunt through the pages of a handful of America’s most well known voices.

It is essentially tying person to place, looking at their stories through the lens of the spaces that shaped them and inspired them. In rhe same way it allows us to experience these places too by way of armchair travel- Frost’s Vermont, Hemingway’s Florida, O’Connor’s Georgia, Faulkner’s Mississippi, Twain’s Missouri, and Steinbeck’s California.

Here is a brief post that I made about one portion/idea that really stood out for me and inspired me personally:

In his book titled Imagined Places: Journey’s into Literary America, Micheal Pearson talks about how people have two basic conceptions of place- the place in which we can live, and the place in which our imaginations are drawn precisely because of the ways in which the place we imagine contrasts with the place in which we live. For Micheal Pearson we need both:

“Everybody has their ideal landscape and an antithetical landscape as well, a place that the person is drawn toward. It’s a place, he feels, that fascinates and startles with the difference from our own home ground. There’s a positive and a negative pole.”

For me, it is prairie and ocean/river. Living technically 10 blocks from the Red River is a microcosm of living 3,000 kilometers from the ocean. The 70 km drive from Winnipeg to Lake Winnipeg a slightly bigger microcosm. All manifest this basic tension in their own way. One roots us, one draws us, and inbetween these places we find perspective