Picturing Minnesota's Wild Places

Daniel J. Philippon is associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. He is editor of Our Neck of the Woods: Exploring Minnesota's Wild Places (Minnesota '09) and author of Conserving Words: How American Nature Writers Shaped the Environmental Movement. Today, he writes about why Our Neck of the Woods is "decidedly old school."

In his recent post to NYT's Happy Days blog, Tim Kreider quotes from James Salter's 1975 novel Light Years: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox." (Had he been writing today, Salter might have called this the Sliding Doors paradox.)

So it goes with books, as publishing is not a non-zero-sum game. Choose to do something one way, and you can't do it another way--at least, not until the second edition comes out. Thus have my thoughts been turning since I caught my first glimpse of Our Neck of the Woods: Exploring Minnesota's Wild Places, the recently published collection of nature writing I edited.

What struck me most about the book is the relationship between words and images, and how the choice I made early in the editorial process not to include illustrations has created a certain kind of book, and prevented another kind of book from coming into being. Don't get me wrong: this is not the voice of regret, wondering how I could ever have imagined a nature book without images! Quite the opposite. Now, more than ever, I'm certain I made the right choice.

Here's why.

(keep reading)