John T. Price’s anthology of prairie writing, The Tallgrass Prairie Reader, goes on
sale in June—just the right time to enjoy Iowa’s wild beauty! Editor Holly
Carver talked to him about the book. Come back next week to read the remainder of the interview!
Holly Carver: Your reader collects literature from and about
the tallgrass prairie, which you say is endangered as a literary landscape. What
do you mean by this?
John T. Price: When I first started searching in grad school
for literature about the tallgrass prairie, I remember being surprised I
couldn’t find more examples. There were a number of reasons for that absence, I
think. As some of the early contributors to this anthology reveal, tallgrass
prairie was not only difficult to traverse because it was so wet and the plants
so tall, it was also radically different from any other landscape they had
seen. They had trouble finding the words to describe it, so they compared it to
other places, especially the ocean, or, as in the case of Charles Dickens, they
dismissed it as ugly. As Europeans, many of them were more accustomed to
praising the beauty of oceans, forests, and mountains—an aesthetic prejudice
that still exists.
As this anthology also reveals,
however, there were many writers from the nineteenth century and earlier, such
as George Catlin and Eliza Wood Farnham, who found the tallgrass prairie to be
profoundly beautiful, even “sublime.” So there was this early, dynamic conversation
going on among various impressions of the tallgrass prairie, positive and
negative, that was unfortunately cut short by the near complete destruction of
that ecosystem in the seventy-year period between 1830 and 1900. The positive
impressions nurtured by some of those early writers, and the literary environmental
advocacy that might have emerged from them, lost its momentum because there
simply wasn’t that much tallgrass left to see and write about.
The grasslands literature that
emerged was instead focused on the mixed and short-grass prairies farther west,
which remained relatively wild and were the setting for immensely popular
descriptions of bison hunts and cowboys. The scientific restoration efforts
that gained steam during the mid twentieth century have led to a major resurgence
of writing about the tallgrass, but as scholar Matthew Low has pointed out, there
continues to be an “inexcusable underexposure of the prairie in modern
environmental discourse.” It is still relatively difficult to find writing
about the tallgrass prairie in nature anthologies and magazines or in scholarly
articles on environmental literature.
I worry that the unspoken message
to young environmentalists, including scholars and writers, is that the
tallgrass prairie is either beyond hope or not worthy of their talent and
advocacy. One of my hopes is that this anthology will help correct that impression.
Even if readers aren’t scholars or writers—or even environmentalists—I want
this anthology to offer affirmation that the tallgrass prairie is truly unique
and amazing and worthy of our best efforts to save it from extinction.
