Life Knots

This collection of creative nonfiction essays is framed by M.M. Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, the concrete juncture of time and space. Chronotopes include technical relationships between those elements, as well as worldviews. Each essay examines a different thing or place as a chronotope, including maps, a well house, boxes, a dining room, periodical cicadas, and a sand dollar. All of the essays, however, share themes, including the search for unity (and for what actually constitutes unity), relationships between ways of knowing, and relationships between the personal, spiritual, environmental, and cultural. The essays span genres, from the personal and academically personal, to memoir and place memoir, to meditation.