Home

Such a splendid jacket blurb

2012-01-30T18:44:21Z

Katherine Fischer, author of Dreaming the Mississippi, has written this blurb for What the River Carries.

Lisa Knopp has the eyes of an archeologist and the soul of a great blue heron as she renders this intimate portrayal of three national treasures—the Mississippi, Platte, and Missouri rivers. Here we visit places as exotic as Little Egypt yet as familiar as streams connecting our own backyards to these great waterways. Knopp asks hard questions about human interaction—and interference—with these watery corridors which are largely responsible for American expansion. Journeying through these pages, we also find tales of the shell button industry, Indian burial mounds, Mormon settlement, catastrophic flooding, barge commerce, and every day lives of people who work and play along the shores. What this book carries? Majesty. Knowledge. Inspiration.

Page proofs

2012-01-18T17:20:12Z

The page proofs arrived, and I'm about to begin my final reading of What the River Carries before it's published. What a beautiful job the University of Missouri Press has done!

I must say it's wonderful and a bit disorienting to see the stories of my river journeys all prettied up and ready to appear in public.

A new publication

2012-01-10T21:50:47Z

"Catfish Bend," the first essay in What the River Carries, has been published in the fall 2011 issue of Natural Bridge (the University of Missouri-St. Louis). It's an essay about catfish lore, fish stories, and the dangerous, frustrating, and magnificent Mississippi.

How to get your copy of my new book

2011-12-31T18:20:05Z

What the River Carries is coming out in April and will be available from online retailers (amazon.com), your local bookstore or library, or from the University of Missouri Press. If you'd like to go directly to the press, here's the information:

Please phone, e-mail, fax or snail mail your order to:

University of Missouri Press
c/o The Chicago Distribution Center
11030 South Langley Ave.
Chicago, IL 60628

PHONE ORDERS:
(800) 621-2736 (USA/Canada)
(773) 702-7000 (International)

FAX ORDERS
(800) 621-8476 (USA/Canada)
(773) 702-7212 (International)

Email (orders only) to: orders@press.uchicago.edu
(Credit card orders by phone, fax, or mail only)

If you're faxing or snail mailing, order forms are available at the press website. http://press.umsystem.edu/catalog/CategoryInfo.aspx?cid=152

Many thanks!

Winter break

2011-12-28T14:02:35Z

Waiting for the page proofs for What the River Carries. Reading Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk and Yi-fu Tuan's Segmented Worlds and Self: Group Life and Individual Consciousness (both are amazing!). Getting started on the next book. Listening to good stories from my mom, son, and daughter.

The cover and the catalog copy

2011-12-02T13:05:18Z

What the River Carries
Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte

Lisa Knopp

256 pages
6.125 x 9.25

2012

ISBN:

978-0-8262-1974-9

Paper $19.95 ^TR

ABOUT THE BOOK

In this informed and lyrical collection of interwoven essays, Lisa Knopp explores the physical and cultural geography of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte, rivers she has come to understand and cherish. At the same time, she contemplates how people experience landscape, identifying three primary roles of environmental perception: the insider, the outsider, and the outsider seeking to become an insider. Viewing the waterways through these approaches, she searches for knowledge and meaning.

Because Knopp was born and raised just a few blocks away, she considers the Mississippi from the perspective of a native resident, a “dweller in the land.” She revisits places she has long known: Nauvoo, Illinois, the site of two nineteenth-century utopias, one Mormon, one Icarian; Muscatine, Iowa, once the world’s largest manufacturer of pearl (mussel shell) buttons; and the mysterious prehistoric bird- and bear-shaped effigy mounds of northeastern Iowa. On a downriver trip between the Twin Cities and St. Louis, she meditates on what can be found in Mississippi river water—state lines, dissolved oxygen, smallmouth bass, corpses, family history, wrecked steamboats, mayfly nymphs, toxic perfluorinated chemicals, philosophies.

Knopp first encountered the Missouri as a tourist and became acquainted with it through literary and historical documents, as well as stories told by longtime residents. Her journey includes stops at Fort Bellefontaine, where Lewis and Clark first slept on their sojourn to the Pacific; Little Dixie, Missouri’s slaveholding, hemp-growing region, as revealed through the life of Jesse James’s mother; Fort Randall Dam and Lake Francis Case, the construction of which destroyed White Swan on the Yankton Sioux Reservation; and places that produced unique musical responses to the river, including Native American courting flutes, indie rock, Missouri River valley fiddling, Prohibition-era jazz jam sessions, and German folk music.

Knopp’s relationship with the Platte is marked by intentionality: she settled nearby and chose to develop deep and lasting connections over twenty years’ residence. On this adventure, she ponders the half-million sandhill cranes that pass through Nebraska each spring, the ancient varieties of Pawnee corn growing at the Great Platte River Road Archway Monument, a never-broken tract of tallgrass prairie, the sugar beet industry, and the changes in the river brought about by the demands of irrigation.

In the final essay, Knopp undertakes the science of river meanders, consecutive loops of water moving in opposite directions, which form around obstacles but also develop in the absence of them. What initiates the turning that results in a meander remains a mystery. Such is the subtle and interior process of knowing and loving a place. What the River Carries asks readers to consider their own relationships with landscape and how one can most meaningfully and responsibly dwell on the earth’s surface.

Praise from Scott Russell Sanders

2011-11-30T22:01:08Z

One of my favorite essayists, Scott Russell Sanders, has written a lovely jacket blurb for my new book, WHAT THE RIVER CARRIES, which is forthcoming from the University of Missouri Press in March of 2012. Here it is:

A river gathers the countryside, drawing the current of tributary

streams into a single flow, offering passage to travelers, nurturing

all manner of creatures, and eventually, perhaps by way of larger

rivers, delivering its waters to the sea. Just so, in the hands of a

skillful writer like Lisa Knopp, an essay draws material from a varied

terrain of memory, history, folklore, observation, and reflection,

gathering far-flung sources into a forceful narrative. Linked

together, these narratives trace the ways in which three great rivers

have been used, abused, and partly restored by humans over the past ten

thousand years—a panoramic history that should be of interest to any

reader who’s curious about the shaping of America’s interior.

Sanders is the author of EARTH WORKS, A CONSERVATIONIST MANIFESTO, The PARADISE OF BOMBS, STAYING PUT, WRITING FROM THE CENTER, and many other books.

Two new publications

2011-11-02T14:54:29Z

"Restorations,"which weaves together three stories (fishing with my son at Boyer Chute; the restoration of that side channel of the Missouri by several local and federal agencies; my son’s recovery from addiction through time spent in wild places), was published in the Fall 2009 issue of the North Dakota Quarterly. Despite the fall 2009 date, this issue just arrived in my mailbox last week.

"The Overlook," which surveys Missouri River history from the Pleistocene to the present as seen from the overlook at the Missouri River Basin Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center near Nebraska City, was published in the November 2011 issue of NEBRASKAland. It is accompanied by beautiful photographs. My student, Erica Hengelfelt, who was interning at NEBRASKAland last summer, did an excellent job editing the essay so that it fit the available space.

Different versions of both of these essays are included in What the River Carries (forthcoming, University of Missouri Press, 2012).

Publication Panel

2011-10-24T19:43:02Z

October 24, members of the English Department at the University of Nebraska-Omaha will speak about the process of publishing their work. Guest speakers are: Nora Bacon, Frank Bramlett, Tracy Bridgeford, Chuck Johanningsmeier, and Lisa Knopp. Bring your questions!

4:45 to 6:15 in the Writing Center (first floor of Arts & Sciences Hall).

A new title!

2011-10-02T17:22:59Z

My rivers book has a new title. It is: What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte. Let me know what you think of it.