Welcome to the only official and authorized web site of essayist Lisa Knopp.
Knopp is the author of Field of Vision, Flight Dreams: A Life in the Midwestern Landscape, The Nature of Home, and Interior Places. Her award-winning creative nonfiction, which explores her home ground in Iowa, Illinois, and Nebraska, has been lauded as "reminiscent of Thoreau's introspective nature writing and Dillard's taut, personal prose."
Friday, September 3, 2010 at 4:09PM I will be reading from and talking about my current writing project, Three Rivers: Journeys and Junctures, at noon on Wednesday, October 6 at Bennett Martin Public Library in Lincoln. The program is sponsored by the Nebraska Literary Heritage Association.
Thursday, July 15, 2010 at 8:43AM “Meanderings,” an essay that reflects on the serpentine shape of meandering streams of water (both the Platte River and the sinuously-shaped street, a former creek bed, in front of a house where I used to live) from the perspectives of scientists and artists, will be published in the August 2010 issue of Nebraskaland. A slightly longer and more freewheelin' version of "Meanderings" will be part of the Platte River section of Three Rivers, the essay collection that I'm completing this summer.
Sunday, April 11, 2010 at 7:29AM “Nauvoo, the Beautiful Place” has been published in the current issue of Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley. This essay is about a town in western Illinois with a remarkable past: it was the site of two, mid-19th-century utopias, one Mormon, one Icarian, as well as the oldest vineyards and wineries in the state. In recent years, many of the locals who have long loved Nauvoo, myself included, have had to grieve the loss of buildings, landscape, and access resulting from the surge of development by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the related influx of Mormon tourists and the Mormon retirees who are buying or building homes there.
Friday, March 12, 2010 at 4:58PM A celebration in honor of the publication of the Loren Eiseley Reader by the Loren Eiseley Society will be held April 10, 2010, 7 to 9 PM at the Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 "Q" Street, Lincoln Nebraska. I am looking forward to reading an excerpt from Eiseley's work at this event.
Eiseley's influence as a writer and thinker is felt far beyond Nebraska. In her introduction to the Best American Essays of 1988, Annie Dillard writes, "In this [20th] century, it was Loren Eiseley -- a scientist -- who restored the essay's place in imaginative literature and who extended its symbolic capacity." Even though I never met Eiseley, I consider him to be one of my writing teachers.