Frank McGill marvels at the way that literature diverges from reality and brings it vividly into awareness. While some consider it an escape, it is for him an immersion into the very circumstances that delight and confound and inspire us. McGill relishes the intimacy of immersion into lives and situations in texts, and the intimacy of exploring these in community. His focus on Ecocriticism—on the myriad, complex ways that human beings influence and are influenced by environments of all kinds—informs his interrogation of literary texts as well as his approach to the community of a classroom. Writers as varied as Henry David Thoreau and Leslie Marmon Silko call our attention to the real conditions of our being in the world and our responsibilities to all who inhabit it. McGill's current study of works of the US Southwest interrogates the objectives at which various communities have aimed in their relations to landscapes that for some represent home, for others proving grounds, or territories in which to find or reinvent themselves. Investigating works by a diverse group of authors illustrates that what we find in the world, or in a text, often reveals the nature of our vision.
