From Where We Stand: Recovering a Sense of Place

Why does a particular landscape move us? What is it that attaches us to a particular place? Deborah Tall's From Where We Stand is an eloquent exploration of the connections we have with places--and the loss to us if there are no such connections. A typically rootless child of several American suburbs, haunted as an adult by the need to belong to an authentic place, Deborah Tall set out to make a true home for herself in the landscape to which circumstance had brought her--the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. In a mosaic of personal anecdotes, historical sketches, and lyrical meditations, she interweaves her own story with the story of this place and its people--from the Seneca Nation of the Iroquois, to European settlers, to the many utopians who sensed a spiritual resonance here and were inspired.

Deborah Tall teaches writing and literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and edits the poetry journal Seneca Review. She is the author of three books of poems and a memoir, The Island of the White Cow, about the five years she lived in rural Ireland in the 1970s.