Excerpt: THE TALLGRASS PRAIRIE READER, edited by John T. Price

To celebrate the flowers of July, an excerpt from The Tallgrass Prairie Reader, edited by John T. Price.

The sun is high and hot. A single yellow jewelweed blossom, large and pale yellow, not orange like the jewelweeds in the pasture and the draws, dangles above the stream. A hummingbird zooms and sizzles through the flowers. The propeller wash of his wings shakes the whole plant from stem to stern. Mulleins along the stream have reached their peak. Spires plastered with pale-yellow blossoms, pale-green and hairy leaves flopped out. Gold coral fungus grows out of old stumps. One could go about gathering an enormous yellow bouquet out of the heart of July. Fill the arms with orange lilies, the ubiquitous gold; sweep up the sunflowers, the gold honeysuckle, the great stalky suns of compass plants and prairie dock; find clumps of black-eyed Susans rimmed with gold, and wild coreopsis, ragwort and squaw weed through the high, dry woods, yellow hearts of daises and bedstraw in the fields.

Gold bugs, yellow butterflies, orange lilies. What to do with this great fragrant glow? Well, hold on to it. You’ll want it in the days to come.

--Josephine W. Johnson, The Inland Island (1969)

Interview with John T. Price, pt. 4

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.

Holly Carver: I hear that your cold-hearted editor forced you to leave fiction and poetry out of your anthology. Which pieces were hardest to omit?

John T. Price: Terribly cold-hearted (I say with affection), but early on I could see how, if we were to include all our favorite works about tallgrass prairies, across all genres, this project would have filled volumes. Still, it was painful to leave out influential works such as William Cullen Bryant’s 1832 poem “The Prairies” and Carl Sandburg’s 1918 poem, “Prairie,” which was recently quoted in a speech by President Obama. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s fiction, which was based on the author’s real-life experiences, includes what I feel are important descriptions of tallgrass prairie wildlife, especially rare, positive, and truly beautiful portrayals of wolves, which are now extinct from these parts. Among contemporary fiction and poetry writers, the list is too long to include here, but I was especially sad to leave out the prairie poetry of Twyla Hansen, the current Nebraska State Poet, who is a real model of literary advocacy on behalf of the tallgrass.

HC: Your reader begins with works of nineteenth-century authors ranging from high adventure to romanticism. Then, after the destruction of the majority of the tallgrass, the writings become nostalgic, even epic and tragic. Next comes an emerging environmental consciousness, followed by a larger ecological perspective informed by hard science. What’s next on the tallgrass literary horizon?

JTP: This is a great question. A lot depends on the success of the ongoing efforts to protect and restore the tallgrass prairies. They are still terribly underprotected and very much in danger of vanishing from the planet—which is unconscionable. When I think about the future of the tallgrass and its literature, I often think of a 1964 quote by farmer and environmentalist Eugene Poirot: “The once great prairies with their fruits and wildlife nourished our nation through its weak infancy. They nourished it again through its reckless and wasteful adolescence. The nation has now reached a maturity which should make it capable of recognizing that the prairie can no longer give that which it does not have and that as man destroys it he destroys himself.”

As Poirot implied, a deeper sense of personal identification with the prairies is essential. The prairie, even in its currently diminished state, still has a lot of inspiration and beauty to offer those who seek to understand and appreciate it, including writers. My hope is that more people will give back to the prairies by dedicating their talents, whatever they are, to helping ensure its survival. But this begins with seeing the tallgrass prairie, no matter where you live, as “home.” As home, it becomes a place worthy not only of our attention but also our love and protection. As home, it becomes a place to return to and find our rightful place in the world, no matter how far we’ve strayed, no matter what mistakes we’ve made in the past.

If that happens, if we begin to see the prairies as our collective home again—“America’s Representative Landscape,” as Walt Whitman put it— we may see a resurgence of tallgrass ecosystems and a tallgrass literature that is once again full of the awe, wonder, respect, and reverence that define our most meaningful experiences of wilderness.

Interview with John T. Price, pt. 3

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 in a few days for the end of the interview.

Holly Carver: Your introductory essay to each piece provides biographical information and context. Taken together with the introduction to the anthology and the placement of the various chapters, you create a conversation among your writers, not just about each writer, which is a fairly notable achievement. How did you make these connections?

John T. Price: From the very beginning, I tried to think of this anthology as a kind of ecosystem, and ecosystems are all about connections and interrelationships. As I read and researched the various authors and works of literature, I kept track of recurring themes and questions, as well as certain places and natural features, and tried to select a diversity of responses to them. For instance, I became fascinated with the effect that the tallgrass had on those who spent their childhoods near it—an experience that is relatively rare nowadays. So I included such accounts by Mark Twain, Francis La Flesche, William Quayle, John Muir, and Hamlin Garland. I also included Dakota tribal author Zitkala-Ša, who, though not writing directly of her childhood in the essay included here, writes about a spiritual connection forged by her childhood spent on the prairie, “as free as the wind that blew my hair.”

It was fascinating to observe how literary representations of certain aspects of prairie ecology had evolved over time, as more scientific knowledge emerged. You can see this with fire, for example. It is portrayed by George Catlin and other nineteenth-century writers as a force that, though beautiful in its own way, was mostly terrifying and destructive. Later in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, fire is portrayed as an ecological force of health and healing. Certain prairie stories and observations of wildlife, such as the indigenous lore of prairie flowers as told by enthnobotanist Melvin R. Gilmore, seem to take on a life of their own, popping up in later works, shaping those perspectives in recognizable ways. Whether or not the “outside” world has been paying attention to the literature of the tallgrass prairie, the writers here have been reading and influencing each other for a long time.

HC: I won’t ask you to comment on contemporary writers, but which nineteenth-century writers are your favorites? Which deserves to be more widely read?

JTP: In the nineteenth century, I was fascinated by Eliza Woodson Farnham and Elizabeth B. Custer. Eliza Farnham, who lived in a farming community in Illinois during the 1830s, wrote some of the most stunningly beautiful descriptions of the prairie and its wildlife I’ve ever read. Elizabeth Custer’s work was interesting because one of her key motivations for writing her western memoirs was to glorify the memory of her famous husband, but her detailed descriptions of the grasslands environment itself—whether during a flood in Kansas or a blizzard in South Dakota or a romantic excursion riding horseback across the open prairie—kept stealing the spotlight. If I might be permitted to go a little ways into the twentieth century, William J. Haddock’s A Reminiscence: The Prairies of Iowa and Other Notes, self-published in 1901, provides a powerful before-and-after portrayal of the destruction of the tallgrass prairies and the profound impact that destruction had on those who witnessed it. This should be required reading for anyone studying environmental literature, not just those interested in the tallgrass prairies.

Interview with John T. Price, pt. 2

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. Stop by in a few days to read the rest of the interview.

Holly Carver: Your reader begins with a collection of commonplaces, impressions written by early tallgrass explorers. How did you decide to set the stage in this way?

John T. Price: I felt it was essential to offer readers a series of impressions by those who experienced the tallgrass prairie as a wilderness or frontier, so they could “see” what it was like before being largely settled by Euro-Americans. What they’ll find there is not only a startling diversity of plant and animal life but also a diversity of emotional responses to an environment that was, for many of them, beyond anything they had ever seen or imagined. These responses include fear, awe, disgust, and reverence but also more practical responses focused on the tallgrass prairie as a potentially unlimited resource, whether for hunting or agriculture.

Also on display is a wide range of perspectives on indigenous human cultures living on the tallgrass prairies and savannas. Contrary to how prairie is often represented, this was definitely not a “boring” landscape to those who experienced it back then. It provoked very strong responses, which were as extreme as the weather. I think readers will also find in these early quotes the seeds of the ongoing, sometimes heated discussion over the meaning and “value” of tallgrass prairie. This discussion is picked up by later writers in the anthology and remains at the center of contemporary debates over preserving and restoring these ecosystems.

HC: Were there any surprises for you while researching these and the other pieces in The Tallgrass Prairie Reader?

JTP: There were many, many surprises. As I say in the introduction, the story of the tallgrass prairie that emerged from my research complicated many of my preconceptions about that ecosystem and also about nature writing itself. Some of this had to do with the history of the land. I expected, for instance, to find a lot more nineteenth-century encounters with bison on the tallgrass, but although there were large herds in the region as late as 1820, they weren’t as numerous as they were farther west on the short and mixed-grass prairies. Also, the tall grass and the often wet ground didn’t lend itself well to hunting bison at full gallop on horseback, one of the staples of popular western literature at the time.

More prominent in the literature of the tallgrass prairie, at least during the nineteenth century, were elk and deer. Also prominent are encounters with prairie-chickens and other bird species as well as flowers and insects, which often led to writing that is less about adventure and high drama and more about close observation and quiet reflection. The exceptions are the dramatic and sometimes frightening encounters with weather, including blizzards, droughts, tornadoes, and thunderstorms, but those, too, added a surprising aspect to the literature of the tallgrass, where the sky itself is as much part of the prairie experience as what exists on the ground.

I also expected to find more examples of encounters with “pure” tallgrass prairie, but so much of the writing about prairie, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, occurred in the midst of writing about other ecosystems, such as wetlands, oak savannas, and other woodlands. In retrospect that makes complete sense. Not only were the tallgrass prairies intimately entwined with these ecosystems, but early travelers and settlers in the region were forced to stay close to water and trees for sustenance, fuel, building materials, and a sense of protection. Add to that the way trees, thanks to fire repression and other factors, have encroached on land previously dominated by prairie species. Consequently, there are selections in this anthology where the prairies—or individual prairie species—make only a brief but nevertheless important cameo appearance.

Likewise, perhaps because no other ecosystem has been as profoundly altered by humans or is now more dependent on human intervention for its long-term existence, there are a lot of people featured in tallgrass literature. This also works against traditional notions of nature writing as an escape from human interaction and toward uninterrupted encounters with the wild. Here the human and natural communities are inalterably entwined, whether on farms or in cities or on prairie restorations and preserves. The tallgrass prairies do not allow us the luxury of escaping the history of our past on this land or our direct responsibility for its present and future.