Natural World Comes To Life In Colorado State Professor's New Book, 'bringing The Mountain Home'
Wednesday, February 12, 1997
The pages of SueEllen Campbell's new book, "Bringing the Mountain
Home," range from the
immensity of the Grand Canyon to the orange and platinum tint of lichen, from
the grind of a canoe
portage in damp northern Minnesota to the spectacle of thousands of flamingos
wading along a shore
in Africa.
Campbell, English professor at Colorado State, is a traveler of the
heart and a gifted
storyteller. She originally conceived the book as an academic work, but
during a hike on a familiar
trail four or five years ago, with the Mummy Range and Never Summer mountains
filling her vision,
she decided to write her own narratives of what landscape means to her.
"The desire for wildness is an elemental force, like gravity, like
magnetism," Campbell writes.
"A deeply loved landscape holds us fast to the planet. Drawn to one wild
place, to a small lily-
splashed lake in the Rockies, I'm drawn to all wild places.
"I realized I was taking two walks at once," she said. "One was
intensely personal and
immediate, my body, senses, memories moving through a specific and
extraordinary place and
moment. The other was shared, my own experience formed by my culture, by
other, earlier visitors to
wild places, by circumstances, attitudes, assumptions, words, even emotions I
had no part in creating
but had somehow absorbed into myself."
Campbell framed her creative essays with figures, a term Roland Barthes
borrowed from
choreography to name a momentary attitude of the body or a fragment of a
dance. After her walk in
the Mummy range, Campbell started seeing figures everywhere, during her
travels abroad and on hikes
in her own back yard. The figures she evoked in her book include a wide
spectrum of shared emotions
and experiences, from the fear of lightning strikes high on alpine tundra to
the delight of being
immersed shoulder-deep in larkspur, monkshood and Queen Anne's lace.
"'Bringing the Mountain Home' reads a little like Edward Abbey meets
Zen master Thich
Nhat Hanh, a delightful and insightful combination," said Eve Leonard in The
Salt Lake Tribune. "Her
struggle up steep terrain has the qualities of a walking meditation, and her
descriptions of the simple
elements of nature often have the simplicity of haiku."
Campbell, a fifth-generation Coloradan, received her doctorate in
English in 1980 at the
University of Virginia. Before joining the faculty at Colorado State in 1988,
she taught at Bowling
Green State University in Ohio, Xi'an Foreign Language Institute in China,
Rice University, the
University of Wyoming and the University of Virginia.
At Colorado State, Campbell teaches nature writing and literature of
the environment, 20th-
century fiction and nonfiction, literary theory and criticism and women's
literature.
"Working on the book was a great excuse to plan trips," Campbell said.
"The writing engaged
me, and I worked hard at it, but I enjoyed it because it was so different
than academic writing--I could
do so many more things. It felt like playing.
"My greatest satisfaction is knowing the book makes people think about
their own stories."
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