For Lisa Knopp, homesickness is a literal sickness. During a lengthy sojourn away from the Nebraska prairie, she fell ill, and only when she decided to return home did she recover. Homesickness is the triggering event for this collection of essays concerned with nothing less than what it means to feel at home. Knopp writes masterfully about ecology, place, and the values and beliefs that sustain the individual within an impersonal world. She is passionate about her subject whether it be an endangered beetle in the salt marshes near Lincoln, Nebraska, a forgotten Nebraska inventor, a museum muralist, a paleontologist, or Arbor Day as the misguided attempt of Eastern settlers to "correct" a perceived deficiency in the Great Plains landscape. Here is a writer who has read widely and judiciously and for whom everything resonates within the intricately structured definition of home.
Lisa Knopp is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the author of Flight Dreams: A Life in the Midwestern Landscape, Field of Vision, and The Nature of Home: A Lexicon of Essays (available in a Bison Books edition).