Rick Van Noy
Critical Description of Work:
In the spirit of Rachel Carson’s The Sense of Wonder, Rick Van Noy journeys out of his suburban home with his children and describes the pleasures of walking in a creek, digging for salamanders, and learning to appreciate vultures. Through these and other “walks to school,” the Van Noys discover what lives nearby, what nature has to teach, and why this matters. From the backyard to the hiking trail, in a tide pool and a tree house, in the wild and in town, these narrative essays explore the terrain of childhood threatened by the lure of computers and television, by fear and the loss of play habitat, showing how kids thrive in their special places. In chronicling one parent’s determination (and at times frustration) to get his kids outside, A Natural Sense of Wonder suggests ways kids both young and old can experience the wonder found only in the natural world.
Contact Me:
Phone:
Email: rvannoy@radford.edu
Website:
http://rvannoy.asp.radford.edu/rvn/wonder/
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Biography:
I grew up in Titusville, New Jersey, just up river from where Washington crossed on Christmas Eve. I went to college in Colorado (The Colorado College) and graduate schools in Bellingham, Washington, and Cleveland, Ohio. I worked for a time as a technical writer where I met the proprietor and sole-owner of A/E Marketeers, Catherine Copich. We moved to Radford, Virginia, for a position in the English Department at Radford University and have stayed for the clean waterways and lovely mountains, though I often wish they were the kind that held more snow. Telemark skiing is among my more feverish pursuits, but I also enjoy biking, canoeing and growing tomatoes. We live in an old bungalow of revived lath and plaster and odd angles with two children, Sam and Elliot, and a menagerie of animal dependents.
Books & Essays
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A Natural Sense of Wonder: Connecting Kids with Nature Through the Seasons
Published: University of Georgia Press 2008
The technology boom of recent years has given kids numerous reasons to stay inside and play, while parents' increasing safety concerns make it tempting to keep children close to home. But what is being lost as fewer kids spend their free time outdoors? Deprived of meaningful contact with nature, children often fail to develop a significant relationship with the natural world, much less a sense of reverence and respect for the world outside their doors.
A Natural Sense of Wonder is one father's attempt to seek alternatives to the "flickering waves of TV and the electrifying boing of video games" and get kids outside and into nature. In the spirit of Rachel Carson's The Sense of Wonder, Rick Van Noy journeys out of his suburban home with his children and describes the pleasures of walking in a creek, digging for salamanders, and learning to appreciate vultures. Through these and other "walks to school," the Van Noys discover what lives nearby, what nature has to teach, and why this matters.
From the backyard to the hiking trail, in a tide pool and a tree house, in the wild and in town, these narrative essays explore the terrain of childhood threatened by the lure of computers and television, by fear and the loss of play habitat, showing how kids thrive in their special places. In chronicling one parent's determination (and at times frustration) to get his kids outside, A Natural Sense of Wonder suggests ways kids both young and old can experience the wonder found only in the natural world.
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Beautiful Scavengers
Published: Double Take Magazine
Download: Beautiful Scavengers
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Surveying the Interior: Literary Cartographers and the Sense of Place
Published: University of Nevada Press 2003
From a cartographer who wrote to a writer who mapped, the literary significance of surveying is revealed in this study of human relationships to the landscape.
From the very beginning, American literature was closely intertwined with surveying. In Surveying the Interior, Rick Van Noy explores the ways that four American literary cartographers—Henry David Thoreau, Clarence King, John Wesley Powell, and Wallace Stegner—concerned themselves with what it means to map or survey a place and what it means to write about it. In the process, he helps define the ways by which space enters the human psyche as definable place, as well as the ways by which physical landscape is transmuted into a sense of place as an intimate, personal manifestation of both physical and existential realities.
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