Of Landscape and Longing: Finding a Home at the Water's Edge (World As Home, The)

Carolyn Servid, the child of American parents, grew up in a village in tropical India. America seemed to her, she writes in Of Landscape and Longing, "a world apart," a foreign country in which she could never quite fit. Small wonder, then, that she chose to settle in a once-remote and distant pocket of America, in the little Alaskan town of Sitka, to work as a writer and teacher. Her slender book gathers essays inspired by her time in India, Alaska, and places in between, essays that return to questions of how one finds and makes a home, a place of rootedness and belonging, a place in which to battle homesickness for all the other places we've known. A keen, spiritually inclined observer of the natural world, and a committed defender of the untamed forests that surround her, she writes easily of salmon and eagles, of clouds and spruce trees. And while Servid sometimes lapses into sentimentality--you might not guess, reading her, that humpback whales sing for their own purposes, and not strictly to awaken noble and loving thoughts in the humans who happen to overhear them--her exaltation at living at the water's edge, close to wild animals and the wild ocean, rings true. --Gregory McNamee