"And now I feel all these events from a week in the Prospect mountains, and the narrative pattern they cast like a shadow, or like ripples in sand, have been filed somewhere in the regions of the brain near to where the neurons and synapses first lit and flexed their tiny, metaphoric muscles from that childhood reading. In recent years scientists have emphasized how changing and dynamic is the human brain, shaped and structured by both thoughts and experience. The quest for understanding, the peripheral vision we gain from gazing where we do, becomes a kind of topography in our own head’s contours, gray matter under bone and skin and hair."

In Prospect, her wise collection of essays, Elizabeth Dodd widens her gaze to peer at the world through a myriad of lenses—natural history, local history, science, anthropology, philosophy, and literature. Offering cultural commentary and personal revelation, she invites the reader on a journey into the heart of life—the life of places, the life of the individual, the life of a culture. It is a journey whose map is continuously being formed out of the matter of the moment.

For Dodd, the pins on the map outlining the way are made up of elm trees and mosquitoes, burial and ceremonial mounds, a lunatic asylum, an inner-city neighborhood, the dissolution of a marriage, a mother’s death. In the venerable tradition of Gary Snyder, Terry Tempest Williams, and John Haines, Dodd uses the elements of the natural world and historical fact as compass points to locate the sense of self.

Elizabeth Dodd is professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program at Kansas State University. Her most recent work is a collection of poetry.