Emily Brisse

 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...

 I The body is like a November birch facing the full moon And reaching into the cold heavens. In these trees there is no ambition, no sodden body, no leaves, Nothing but bare trunks climbing like cold fire!  II My last walk in the trees has come. At dawn I must return to the trapped fields, To the obedient earth. The trees shall be reaching all the winter. III It is a joy to walk in the bare woods. The moonlight is not broken by the heavy leaves. The leaves are down, and touching the soaked earth, Giving off the odor that partridges love. -- from Silence in the Snowy Fields by Robert Bly

. As evidenced by many of the poems collected in Silence in the Snowy Fields ( 1962), Robert Bly looked toward the landscapes of Minnesota and often saw: Cornfields, cornstalks Catholic churches Box-elder trees, box-elder bugs Prairie grasses Chickens' eyes Dust Barns Norwegian immigrants Alfalfa fields Crickets Turkey sheds Telephone poles Corn stubble Perhaps not the most romantic list. And yet, the verses he called "Love Poem" go like this:       "When we are in love, we love the grass,      And the barns, and the light poles,      And the small mainstreets abandoned all night."  And to me, this seems exactly, simply, accurate . When we love — whether a person or a place — there is possibility for beauty in everything.

"Beneath the waters, since I was a boy, I have dreamt of strange and dark treasures, Not of gold, or strange stories, but the true Gift, beneath the pale lakes of Minnesota." -- Robert Bly From "After Drinking All Night"