The There There

Part of the rough draft of my M/MLA paper:

One problem I have when discussing place and writing is what passes for place, how we think about the word, and the concepts behind the word, in the first place. At one extreme, I think we mean a lifelong experience of a particular geography, landscape and bioregion coupled with a deep map—including histories of race, class and gender—of a bounded part of the world. And let’s be clear that we mean place and not space. Indeed, space itself is the boundary in the most rigorous understanding.

In that formulation, I will never live in a place and therefore never write from one. My family moved too much when I was a kid—though only in this one part of this continent. But you can imagine how Iowa differed from Texas, from Ohio, from California. San Bernardino from Chicago. All of these places from Hendersonville, NC. And then Hendersonville from Atlanta. And now I’m in Lincoln comma Nebraska, having moved there from West, by god, Virginia.

In all the talk about place-based writing, at least a few people—we might call them dirt elites—insist on a knowledge of place over time. There’s a part of me that longs to be a part of them. I admit this. When writers like Wendell Berry talk about knowing a particular parcel of land over a lifetime. . . well. And I’m drawn to the southern Appalachian mountains I’ve lived in time and again, and where my mother’s family is from.

Have I mentioned I’m living in Nebraska?

In a very real and intellectual way, I live mostly in concepts. In culture. But living solely in culture, I’ve found, leads me more deeply into my head and, by extension, the heads of other humans. It removes my engagement from my physical world around me—where I eat, get caught in rainstorms, feel thirsty, sunburn. I am in my world. I am in place.

Comments

[Tanya]

Love the new photo...T.