Berkes+MH

"A Sense of Where McPhee Is" By Howard Berkes

By Mackenzie Heckbert I read part of A Sense of Where You Are by John McPhee, so when I discovered something written as a response to it I was particularly interested in reading it. Although this was not part of the main McPhee reading list, I thought I would take a chance and post a response to it.

==== This article was so breath taking to me because it describes John McPhee, not his writing just his habits as a person. It opens up my mind and makes me understand where the angels of his writing come from. The writer of this piece, Howard Berkes describes McPhee's office to be more ordinary, then the extraordinary he had been expecting. Berke seems to use McPhee's educated writing content as a kind of reflection of the person he thinks McPhee should be. It seems Berke was almost expecting this scholarly writer to work in some pristine, posh surroundings. However McPhee's office is in fact in almost a comforting state. Everything within is well used and reflects his writing as well as his creativity, but in a different way, drawing on the small things he's picked up along his travels and things that touch his heart and comfort him like canoeing and his family members. ====

==== I was particularly drawn to a couple sentences hidden and briefly discussed within the article; "He doesn't appear in photographs on the covers of his books. McPhee wants his readers to focus on his words, he says". I was really drawn to this because I feel like letting the reader absorb your work for what it is in it's entirety is better then allowing them to get caught up on your appearance, because often times when you see the way someone looks you automatically have perceptions on how you think they should write before you've even begun to read anything they have worked on. ====

====Seeing McPhee as being shy is a hard thing for me to grasp because his writing shows so much passion and confidence about topics of the natural world. McPhee goes on to say to Berke that he is writing something new, at the time of course, but he had so many ambiguous ideas about it that he was not sure what exactly it would end up being about. This lack of confidence in his thoughts is intriguing because it shows him as being not only shy and reserved but also modest about his intellectual abilities.====