Liesl Marie Buskirk and Dr. John S. Bennion, English

The process of composing an essay collection is one that comprises far more mental energy than merely sitting in front of a computer screen and typing away until you reach the desired number of pages. It begins with a collection of ideas gleaned from personal experience and the writing and thought of other thinkers. As these ideas interact, they form linkages that slowly evolve into a complex network of interrelated themes—the threads from which the fabric of an essay is woven. One of the most difficult phases of the work is sorting and dividing the tangled threads to feed into the loom coherent language.

My initial goal in this project was to pull together the influences and genres which have shaped my consciousness during my undergraduate career. I wanted to meld creative writing with scholarly rigor to produce some comprehensive statement of the issues I am passionate about. What I found as I moved from the theoretical smorgasbord of ideas in the notebook that I kept beside me through my reading to their application within the sphere of my experiences was that language, though liberating, often seems confining. Writing a linear argument about issues that are circularly interwoven can be frustrating. The initial challenges in writing my essays were negotiating the confines of language and finding a harmonious order for the issues I am concerned with. I eventually chose to divide the work in chapters, each chapter being an autonomous piece, yet linked to the work as a whole.

Perhaps even more challenging, however, were not the technical, but the ethical questions I encountered in my writing. When you are dealing with environmental and cultural issues on a personal level, as I was in these essays, you have to make decisions about your own attitude toward multi-faceted issues. Sometimes you find yourself contradicting yourself because you can see seemingly disparate sides so convincingly. For example, my initial project title was Lessons From the Land: Seeking Individual and Interpersonal Wholeness. After I had written an entire draft nearly sixty pages long centered around this focus, I asked my advisors for input. They read what I’d written and questioned the contradiction between the land ethic I repeatedly defend in the essays the idea that mankind is intricately linked to all other creations with a divinely appointed stewardship and the title I’d chosen which implies some sort of superiority of nature over man, a hierarchy reversed from the common historical example of man subduing the wild elements in the natural world. I hadn’t seen that dissonance. I hadn’t questioned the ethical statements in either the title of the collection of essays or in the pieces themselves. I hadn’t allowed the tension between those views to be visible in the essays themselves or even faced difficulty I have always had in finding my own voice (undecided though it may be) to sound in the chorus of others who have written on this issue. So, I rewrote many sections of the collection, threw out some pieces entirely and drastically renovated others.

I learned by facing the questions my advisors raised to really ask myself what the most important issues were: I don’t believe that wholeness, in the sense we most often use it a completeness or end is a state we will ever achieve in this life. We must constantly be striving in all of our most essential relationships to be a little better and a little more aware than we are now. These relationships with God, our families, and all other life are central to any other questions we face; they enable us to grow and learn and progress and they are in constant flux and closely related. How can you be right with God, if you abuse the land or devalue human life? How can you value your own life if you disregard the health of the earth and fail to see the hand of God in the world and lives around you?

No collection of essays can answer questions of how we should approach these relationships to cultivate a sense of belonging in response to these questions, but simply working through them enough to write about them is a step toward developing a consciousness of the implications they have for our spiritual or physical well-being. Though my collection of essays is printed (a copy is lodged in the Harold B. Lee Library with the Honors Theses in the humanities section), the influence of these ideas and my negotiation of them is just beginning.