FROM BARRIE JEAN BORICH: I can't post this photograph directly—as I don't have copyright—so for now click the underlined link above to see a gorgeous version of one of my broken places (as I define this idea. Please feel free to create your own definition.) And here are a few lines from an essay I published recently in ECOTONE—to give you just one idea of a way to approach the violence and beauty we will discuss in this course. I'm interested here in ways to acknowledge the brokenness and restoration that comes of remembering the ways we are made by that which we've left behind :
One of Terry Evans' photographs frames a limestone quarry in the near-south suburbs, close to the house where I lived when I was that girl, still in high school. While sitting in our kitchen, my family occasionally heard the excavation blasts, almost loud enough to rattle the plates in our cabinets. This was some of the limestone out of which the downtown skyline was made. The Thornton Quarry I remember is a grind of trucks and shovels, steel against stone, but from the air, in Evans’s photographs, the scarred stone walls become also sculpted sand, the truck road descending to the canyon bottom remade as a delicate spiral.
from "GEOGRAPHICAL SOLUTIONS [A Map of the Middle West with Insets Past and Current]" by Barrie Jean Borich, published in Ecotone #8/ The Brutality Issue, Fall 2009
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