A Rooted Companionship with Kim Stafford

      Few things have made me as plainly, outright happy on first hearing about them as the word from Pharos publisher Harry Kirchner that he would be bringing Kim Stafford’s book Having Everything Right back into print.

      Some books just don’t belong out of print. Not that there aren’t many, many titles languishing in out-of-print land that, in a smart and just world, would remain available as bright new books as well as library titles and twice-read finds in secondhand bookstores. But this book—it is simply the best volume of Northwest essays I know, and its out-of-print status was awfully hard to take. So, bravo, Harry and Pharos. And as for you readers? Celebrate!

      “Sometimes,” Kim writes, in his essay “A Few Miles Short of Wisdom,” “stories from thoughtful travelers you trust, or some old book you believe, or the mind’s own credulous pilgrim named Imagination will make a place dazzle in anticipation.” Well, that’s true. And Having Everything Right is one old book that I believe. When I reread it, or even think about it, the Northwest writ large fairly dazzles in my anticipation.

      And an old book it is, by some measures. While still just a lad compared to the great Northwest essayists that went before—say, Murray Morgan or Stewart Holbrook—Kim saw this book first published by Confluence Press in 1986: the same year my own book Wintergreen came out, just four years before Tim Egan’s The Good Rain, and five prior to Sallie Tisdale’s Stepping Westward. It is no mystery that these four titles have stridden together across the years since, sharing space in many a review, reading list, and syllabus together, as complementary windows on a region defined as much by its writers as its rain.

      But even in its natural company, Kim’s book stands apart. He goes out on adventure a dozen times plus, and from each outing fetches back a field report, a ship’s log, a dispatch from the frontier, a libretto from the human heart in all its muddling variety, through all of which he builds his own cosmology—and his highly personal approach to life, land, and language—right before our eyes. And, through that, we grow. We can’t help it, any more than we can help peeking ahead to see what the next adventure will be. But we hold back after all, and take them in turn, as they come. This book cannot be skimmed. Almost every sentence glimmers and glows with the shiny details of What Kim Finds Out There, and with lapidary words to match.

      Neither of these traits is really surprising. In “The Separate Hearth,” one of the truly great kids-in-nature works (pre-Geography of Childhood, pre-The Thunder Tree, way-pre-Last Child in the Woods), Kim testifies for the kind of freedom, encouragement, and self-organizing wanderment and wonderment that rendered his childhood the perfect springboard for seeking the way toward having things right forever after. Plus, he sprang from a house of poetry, and later lodged in an academic program of Medieval Literature, studying the very origins of our storytelling tools and traditions. None of this can have impeded his wish or ability to meet the very World Itself with words that might possibly do it justice.

      Time after time I have taught with this book. I’ve brought several of the essays to my students, and the whole book, when there was time.