“We must include Knopp among those whom Barry Lopez calls our ‘local geniuses of the American landscape,’” Fran Shaw remarks in the journal Parabola. And, indeed, in this new book, Lisa Knopp’s singular genius burrows deep into that landscape in showing us what it is to know, feel, and inhabit unique yet quintessentially American places.

 

A collection of essays embracing nonfiction from memoir and biography to travel writing and natural history, Interior Places offers a curiously detailed group photograph of the Midwest’s interior landscape. Here is an essay about the origin, history, and influence of corn. Here we find an exploration of a childhood meeting with Frederick Leopold, youngest brother of the great naturalist Aldo. Here also are a chronicle of the 146-year alliance between Burlington, Iowa, and the Burlington Route (later the CB&O, the BN, and finally, the BNSF) and a pilgrimage to Amelia Earhart’s Kansas hometown. Whether writing about the lives of two of P. T. Barnum’s giants or the “secret” nuclear weapons plant in southeastern Iowa, about hunger in Lincoln, Nebraska, or bird banding on the Platte River, Knopp captures the inner character of the Midwest as Nature dictates it, people live it, and history reveals it.

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).

"Although Knopp focuses on the Midwest, her writing should interest readers who desire to live a life informed by the flora, fauna, geology, and history of the region where they reside."—Lisa Woolley, Bloomsbury Review

"In these engagingly written pieces Knopp describes the people and places of Nebraska, Iowa, Ohio, and, in one essay on the famous flyer Amelia Earhart, Atchison, Kansas. Her recounting of a visit to the aviatrix's birthplace, interspersed with town history and an account of Earhart's equal dedication to flying and serving the urban poor (the latter manifest in her work with the settlement house movement of the early twentieth century), demonstrates Knopp's method of looking closely at geographical spaces as windows upon more interior places."—Kansas History

“Whether watching wood ducks with naturalist Aldo Leopold’s brother Frederick or contemplating the quotidian lives of two of P.T. Barnum’s circus giants, Knopp’s observations have been finely honed over time and place into purposeful explorations of themes that have percolated throughout her childhood and finally come to fruition in her adult roles as writer and professor, mother and daughter.”—Carol Haggas, Booklist

"It is always a pleasure to read Lisa Knopp's prose. Not only does it flow smoothly, but it offers wonderful visual images. This is a book that makes me pause while reading as I mentally make a list of the people to whom I will be giving it as a gift."—Becky Faber, Great Plains Quarterly