. . . I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Alas for Aldo Leopold, but mostly alas for us, that there haven’t been any really blank spots on the map for a long time, though we may still wish for them. But despite this being so, at least here in the Golden State, there’s still plenty of spots worth our attention if we just look for them. They’re inscribed in our literature and history and they can come alive in our own first person encounters with them, even some spots that seem almost wholly overwritten by human enterprise.

Rewriting California explores this idea, offering occasional brief essays that focus on how works of literature and history (some under-appreciated) inscribe the many memorable, and often achingly beautiful, settings that lend these California sites their unique sense of place. Featuring contemporary perspectives, including (when appropriate) first-hand reporting, essays key on writing featuring particularly evocative settings in order to draw out distinctions and congruities between how California places were once inscribed against how these same places are newly encountered, helping us to understand how they, and the writers who have memorialized them, can be more fully appreciated today. 

A note on the literary and historical works included in Rewriting California: the main criterion for selection is not that the writing is necessarily a classic or seminal work, but that the writing is powerfully evocative of California’s landscapes and their cultural and natural histories.