"The bulwark. The keystone. The genesis. Okay, the baby. We concede that title if only to generate that cooing response and gaga adoration. Cut your teeth on":

• Dream Travel and the Genetics of a Geographic Imagination, musings from Wilbur Zelinsky.
• Route 66: A Cultural Icon, a photo essay by Elaine Mariolle.
• The Matter with Kansas, an essay by Laura Wexler.
• Where the Wilderness Begins, an essay by Ofelia Zepeda.
• Where Distance Makes Past Perfect, reflections from Kathleen Veslany.
• And that is only the beginning….

 

The premiere issue was published in the spring of 1998 under the direction of Kimi Eisele, the founder.

Editor's Note from Premiere issue:

You are here. Welcome. This is where geography unfolds into story, art, observation, and experience. Where words and pictures pull places off the map and re-cast them into full relief. Where representations of space and place get personal and landscape blurs into memoir.

Popular conceptions of geography summon maps, globes, and placenames, and geographers, of all people, are expected to know things: the capital of Tajikistan, which islands rise into the Coral Sea, how the Appalachian folded into a mountain range. Ashamedly, we don’t all know all of these things. Nor should we know them simply as "things." Why people migrate, how they manipulate their environment, and why they live, by the millions, in today’s cities – these too are the stuff of geography.

As we become "disciplined" into the discipline of geography, it has occurred to us that geography means much more. Of course maps and placenames indicate important geographic things, but they don’t really get at the nature of places themselves. Nor do scholarly studies about geomorphology, social constructions of nature, climate variability, global restructuring or regional science, for that matter.

For place, as Peirce Lewis suggests here, "is ultimately a matter of the heart." An entirely subjective concept, place, we believe, may have more to do with the human experience than anything else. And in the postmodern tradition, what that experience is has everything to do with who you are, where you came from, and how you view the world.

If places are, as Lewis writes, "creations of our individual or collective imagination," then you are here puts forth these creations as artists, cartographers, humanists, photographers, scientists, social scientists, and anyone else with a knack for "place"-ment renders them.

Here we are, interested in what dots on maps look like in three dimensions. And what happens when someone, in real or imaginary ways, comes to know the dimensions of that dot, or that street corner, mountain range, or ocean? Beyond this, we are interested in places you don’t find on maps. Not necessarily exotic, faraway places, but ordinary, forgotten places like the corner of your closet, the cafe that fills your coffee cup, your backyard.

And we are interested in the mindful, creative representation of such places. We want to see what happens when those who study "place" to get creative in their renderings and those who study words and images think more about where they are or where they’ve been.

Representing place is no easy task. It’s simple to say you were in Kansas or on Route 66 and to attach a one-word descriptor: "wretched" or "beautiful" or "strange." We can hear the words "North Dakota" and see the shape made by that state’s political boundaries, but perhaps only poetry can evoke the flat coldness of where Jane Varley has walked across the landscape. And perhaps only photographs will bring us closer to what Ila Abernathy has seen and heard of the real-life horrors lived out in central Guatemala. Surely, words and images, however small, can remind us that such places and people exist in some form or another.

At the heart of it, this is what we want scholarly research to tell us, too. Not so much what it finds out at the end, but what it learns in the process of looking. In fieldnotes, we ask researchers, What is it like to be in the field? In this issue, Gary Paul Nabhan goes jogging with the boojum trees while he looks for the signs of non-native plant species in Sonora, Mexico. In artscape, we ask the same of artists. Janet Bardwell reveals the important of place in solitary, lost gloves she finds on the land. In home, we ask about where you live. In this issue, Jim Griffith has figured out which place, of the many he understands as his own, he chooses for himself. In away, we want to know where you’ve been. For Alison Deming, being away means learning to comfortable in a place, learning the smells and tastes, and feeling, only in leaving, the "arc of that experience of place complete itself."

We want to know about place. Perhaps, as wild--like the stories Ofelia Zepeda tells of life in the desert wilderness and how her people have learned to live there. As dreamed--like Wilbur Zelinsky’s nighttime travel when the brain is believed to be turned off. Or as scary, generic, ugly, tiny, magnificent, imagined.

As geographers, we rest firmly on the conviction that "place matters." In the pages that follow, and in future issues, we hope to unravel, with innovative, thoughtful and creative interpretations, the reasons why.

You are here. Where exactly? To begin with at least, in Kathleen Veslany’s words, where "geography introduces itself" and "place becomes narrative."