Issue 2

Autumn 2004

Carlson Biography

Essay:
"Map, Landscape, and Story"

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Douglas Carlson

Doug writes:

After thirty-five years of trying to balance a life of writing and teaching, most recently as writer-in-residence at Concordia College in Minnesota, I’ve retired to write full time. I think I can characterize the progress of my writing over those years as moving away from my self.

Between 1975 and 1985, I published five forgettable (and forgotten) collections of poems. I gradually realized that my poetry was self-indulgent, but, more important, that I wanted to examine the complexities of the exterior world rather than simplifying an interior one.

This turn toward my various landscapes led me to nonfiction and nature writing and to the publication of a collection of essays, At the Edge (White Pine Press, 1989). Nonfiction’s freedom had enabled the natural world in my writing, but the pieces remained rather personal.

A series of essays, published mostly in The Georgia Review, Ascent and various anthologies during the 1990s, reflected my interest in writing about place rather the myself in place. A sampling of this work can be found in When We Say We’re Home (University of Utah Press, 1999).

Recently, I’ve been able to remove the “I” from my work entirely. I’ve finished a biography of Roger Tory Peterson, a twentieth-century artist and naturalist who grew up in my homeplace, the rural country south of Buffalo, NY. It was a three-year project and, in many ways, the most satisfying work I’ve done so far.