Summary

In "Knowing Our Place," Kingsolver describes her cabin in Walker Mountain in southern Appalachia, where she absconds to write and renew her perspective of the natural world. She describes the nature that surrounds her cabin: the tulip poplars, the bosque, and the creatures that live in the forest, mainly deer, jackrabbits, roadrunners, and doves. She notes that they are "oblivious to my labors, preoccupied with their own" (35). One day as she is writing in the cabin, she notices a bobcat peering in through a window and they make prolonged eye contact. Eventually, she becomes restless and averts her eyes, although she recognizes a predator must often pass hours without blinking, and that they are not equal (36). She thinks that she has imported a "hominid agenda" into the forest (36). Part of the hominid agenda is to create...