Emily Brisse

Good morning, It it raining here, lightly, and the view out my window is an ecstatic shaking green. I am three floors up, and yet I do not see the sky, I do not see the ground: just trunks and branches and leaves, close and middling and deep. What a scene to wake to! As ridiculous as these last months have been, these trees are saving me. Have saved me. Are already old friends.  I see now I'm going to have to write about them. Later. Soon. Graduation for the seniors tonight. And then: summer. Spring was a new house. A new roof. New floors and carpets and paint and cabinet liner and drawer pulls and towels. It was so much more space, these large open rooms that echoed even with our whispers. It was windows, light streaming in through the then bare branches. It was one holy morning when the buds popped open, and everywhere was suddenly yellow green and green yellow and holy holy holy. It was worrying about an old house with holes and trusting a new world so very able to fill it...

 I'm going to put on my teacher hat here for a moment. It was during my third semester in grad school that much of what I thought about and everything I wrote began to revolve around the notion of place. My classmates and I crafted critical theses that term, and mine focused on Minnesota writers and how these men and women rendered my state so convincingly. That paper was a labor of love, time, and too many notecards, so I'm grateful that a revised (and much shorter!) version of it is being shared with other writers and teachers of writing in the most recent issue of Minnesota English Journal .  If you're into that kind of thing, then by all means give it a read. Here are the first few paragraphs: "Landing: Writing About Place in our Flyover State" When I went off to college, I knew about Toni Morrison and Ernest Hemingway and  Harper Lee. I loved literature, so much that I wanted to both teach it and write it for the rest of my  life. But it wasn’t until I t...

Today I have returned to my students. I'm always surprised, after the exhaustion of spring, to discover how much I've missed them, how excited I am to be back in the classroom, teaching. I've spent the past month preparing for the next nine, and somewhere between notes on A Farewell to Arms  and rethinking my lead-in lesson on perspective, I reread the critical thesis I wrote two summers ago. I called it "Landing: A Focus on Place in Flyover Fiction." In it, I examined first place--how it's created in writing, effective techniques, etc.--and second those writers from my flyover state who seem to have a handle on such things. I wrote it as a writer for other writers. But this time, because of the headspace I was in, I read it as a teacher, and my planning from that day on changed. Later, I read in the most recent issue of Orion  Erik Reece's essay "The Schools We Need." He talked about many things, but the paragraph that stood out to me was th...

  "In a world where change seems the only constant, where the past is increasingly suspect and the future ever more doubtful, it is exhilarating to be in touch with something that 'binds together all humanity--the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.'" -- Paul Gruchow quoting Joseph Conrad From Travels in Canoe Country

Hello, Paul. I've been wanting to sit down and talk with you for some time now. I opened up Worlds Within a World  last summer, and then Travels in Canoe Country,  and then Journal of a Prairie Year  and  Grass Roots. When I began The Necessity of Empty Places  I already knew I'd agree with you, even though I'd find myself continually surprised by what you had to say. So it goes with kindred souls. And I don't think you'd mind that I claim that. Other people and other places can tell your story better than me, so I'll let them. But I think it's important that I point a few other thinkers to your message. We are all so busy. It's good, before the leaves change this Autumn, to remind ourselves to slow down. "I accept, when I am in the woods, the idea that I do not completely command my life. To venture into a wilderness is to submit to the authority of nature. This may also seem a regression — adults command, children submit — but it is actually ...

When I was a sophomore in college, I took a course called Ethnic American Literature. Being that I was 1) an English major, 2) from an ethnically homogenous small town, and 3) desperate for "culture," I was incredulous when the reading list my professor passed out that first day had no Ralph Ellison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Maxine Hong Kingston, or Toni Morrison, but was instead full of all these, as he called them, "regional writers," a mix of poets and novelists and essayists from my home state that I'd never heard of and was sure had absolutely no relevance to my life. After all, I was going to teach, and how was I supposed to do that if I wasn't introduced to the writers who'd been anthologized? I went to another professor and complained (and, Minnesotan that I am, this practically killed me) until she loaded up my arms with every Toni Morrison book she owned. And walking back to my dorm room, clickity clack, holding these canonical texts close to my ...