Since I'm not posting often, I thought I'd post a huge block of text. To wit, the paper I'm working on for the MMLA conference. After I give the paper, I'll be going to hang out with my parents for the rest of the day. So. Anyway, the paper:
Rooted and Rootless: Writing from Place in a Mobile Society
This paper comes at the question of ecocriticism in the Great Plains a bit differently. For a culture and profession that’s increasingly (and notoriously) peripatetic, what does it mean to write from place? Is a writer who has moved from bioregion to bioregion—as the academic profession demands—required to take on the concerns of his/her current locale? Should they continue to address the concerns of the regions of their past?
It’s important to me to take on these questions because I was born to an Appalachian mother and Midwestern father and my life has been marked by those poles. I’ve lived in my father’s Iowa and my mother’s West Virginia. I had a poem in Appalachian Review, published by Appalachian State, last year. This year I became managing editor of Prairie Schooner, published by the University of Nebraska. I don’t know how to approach my “roots.” But this is not to say that I feel rootless. Quite the opposite. ASLE was held at my alma mater this year, and I was very happy to go back. After the conference, I went to spend time with old friends in the small towns in Western North Carolina where I grew up: Hendersonville and Asheville. I visited places I loved and, because we were camping, I was able to smell the forests and breathe in the night as it fell, an experience I’d sorely missed.
But I don’t live there now. We don’t get a lot of night mist on the plains. I’ve learned more about kinds of prairie (we live in mixed grass—you can also have short and tall grass—as I’m sure you all know) and my concept of “valley” has changed quite a bit. I have an entirely new and different relationship to wind.
Scott Slovic, during a talk at Nebraska, commented that there are two responses to place: to stay and learn deeply and to travel with the intent of jarring. But I fear that our lifestyles as academics might force a third way upon us, in which we stay for some number of years in a place then move to another for a decade, and then move on again. It’s this third way of punctuated migration that I want to explore today. I have three main points I want to discuss. First, that we cannot ignore place, in the same way that we cannot ignore race, class, gender, colonialism. Second, that we take our places with us wherever we go. Third, that a position of inquiry is required for us to engage with the unfamiliar and new places in which we find ourselves. I’m going to explore these ideas in a variety of ways, including poems and excerpts from other writing.
First, it’s clear that we cannot ignore place. The contexts in which we live, teach, and write shape our choices. The topics, writers and texts we study happened--or are happening--in places. We feel place when we move from Miami to Minneapolis, when our students assume things about what might be true and unalterable about the world. One problem we have when discussing place and writing is what passes for place, how we think about the word, and the concepts behind the word. At one extreme, what I like to think of as the dirt elite position, 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. At the other extreme, place is a purely linguistic and/or cultural construction that is never fully available.
In the dirt elite formulation, I will never live in a place and therefore never write from one because my family moved too much when I was a kid. 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.
There’s a part of me that longs to be a part of a community--both human and nonhuman--for a long time, to be a dirt elite. When writers like Wendell Berry talk about knowing a particular parcel of land over a lifetime and several generations. . . well, it’s at least compelling if not seductive. I’m drawn to the southern Appalachian mountains I’ve lived in time and again, and where my mother’s family is from. And I’m a bit jealous of Simon Ortiz’s sense of place as lived in for generations. And not only lived in but narrated.
As a middle ground, I want to consider Cheryl Glotfelty’s short but complicated definition of place: “A place is a relationship of land and stories about land. A place is a dynamic concept. Places are always being made.” What happened to Ortiz’s family, to Berry’s family, happened in particular places, and those places are being changed. Wendell Berry has certainly added to the stories--or the availability of stories to a wider audience--on his farm. Those of us who read his essays, poems, prayers and sermons have a kind of relationship to that place that changes the way the place exists in the world. Similarly, the history of Acoma pueblo now takes account of Simon Ortiz even as he takes account of Acoma pueblo.
In the 21st century, we are too connected, and too mobile, to ignore place.
But as I have begun to engage ideas of place in poems and essays, I find myself coming up short. Which place? Where do—or should—my allegiances lie? More important for me is what does all this mean for me as a writer, as a poet, particularly as an ecopoet? This brings me to my second point, that we take our places with us. I want to start this section with part of an essay I’ve been working on.
Kim was in my homeroom my first year at the new school, making her the person I’ve known longest—outside of family—in my life. As we sit in this clean, well lit pub on a Monday afternoon, the daylight swims for a moment when I realize this. I can’t bring myself to tell Kim this realization. After lunch and some conversation, we’re joined by a young man whose family Kim has known all her life. She’s connected here. She remains. She weaves me back into this town of tourists, retirees, tight-lipped locals.
Over Kim’s right shoulder, off near the street, there’s a bandstand. It’s not a shell so much as a series of low decks that allow a four piece to set up. We’ve been dancing in the streets of Hendersonville since just after World War I. By the time my parents dragged my brother and I down to Main Street, the dancing was every Wednesday during the summer. At the time, I enjoyed being able to walk around on the closed off street as much as the bands; my parents did not come from aesthetically charged backgrounds and offered no help in judging music. I loved the smell of popcorn, cotton candy and hotdogs mixed with tobacco and the occasional whiff of illicit liquor. I was a sponge for music and experience.
Have I mentioned I’m living in Nebraska?
In a very real way, we 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. A bioregional focus, Cheryl Glotfelty suggests, allows teaching to pay attention to distinct qualities in the place where teacher and students are working. My wife, a compositionist, was discussing a website about a place labeled as a farm with her students, but these Nebraskans objected that the place was too small. Not enough equipment. Too few cattle. As an Appalachian as well, her sense of farming was constrained by landscape in a way her students had never considered.
I have two poems that represent my own twinned experience.
What Connects You to the Fly-over States?
Beneath your comfortable traveling shoes,
a rumble, and literal tons of emptiness
above grassland that doesn’t care if you eat from it
or plunge to meet it. So fly over, move through.
You’ll never step on the same prairie twice.
Fly over the metal insect miracle of the combine,
harvest guided by a satellite staring down
to the edge of the oceanic fields.
Pumped circles scale the land with green,
a bread-basket dragon drinking from deep wells.
Shapes you see from the plane are invisible
at the level of fences, road signs, dead towns buried
by the curled and lifted turf of the dust bowl.
Nomads migrate through, stop, eat,
make their way West or, like you, back East.
They cross you going north, going south
make their connection, depart. Movie stars,
prostitutes, milk, all come from somewhere,
Flyover because untouristed, because empty.
Flyover because full
of black flies and soy and sky.
Visiting the Woodworker
Octavio’s house was barely more
than a floor of pebbles and cordwood cut
by his well conditioned chainsaw.
He kept his family in a single-wide trailer
until he had a roof over part of his land.
In summer they slept up in the framing
to catch the forest’s slow breath,
to rise with their rooster and the dawn.
Those Appalachian foothills felt green enough
for him—even under light snows.
He understood wood: grain, root and fire.
Now I find myself in a flat land wondering
where wheels would take me if I, too, measured
the sides of the continent looking to build
a home from the world around me,
and asked for my hands to be loved.
I have wanted his house—or his dream
for his house—since I spent an hour
talking about wood and his city of vines
in Venezuela. He had a way
with abandoned deadfall that stripped
the breath from the most narrow-eyed farmer
in our poor county. We all ran our hands
over his split, smoothed oak and locust.
So I am angered by water policy in the west, but I remain outraged about mountain top removal. None of my ancestors worked the plains or contributed to the Dust Bowl, but almost all of my mother’s uncles died of black lung. As a teacher, a scholar, a writer, I can invest in the mixed grass plains and the Southern Appalachians. Place, in other words, can be both/and not either/or. I understand the reactions of my Iowa cousins who complain about twisty roads and tall trees erasing the horizon. And I understand the mountain folk who come to the plains and wish for a place to stand to really see the vista. And I understand that one is missing the experience of what it means to be in a forest and that the other is missing the experience of the earth curving under an open sky. I may not ever be able to burrow into a place like the dirt elites, but I can bring my experience and understanding of one place to another and help the people I find there understand the places I’ve been.
However, what I can’t do is assume that one afternoon walking on a prairie is every afternoon on every prairie for every person. And this brings me to my last point. Inquiry. Writing can be a way to discover what one really thinks, says and feels, as Scott Russell Sanders and others claim, but I want to argue that it’s a way to discover place as well. The compositionists in my department are happy to have students be engaged in “inquiry”--an open-ended, open-minded engagement with their environment. Be curious. Be aware.
Rick Bass, in an interview in Sidney Dobrin and Christopher Keller’s Writing Environments, argues that while writing in a single place, a place we don’t move from, can be a good thing, it can be stultifying. Writers (as well as others) must remain curious and continue to explore. One of the possible challenges in writing from a place you know all too well is complacency. This doesn’t follow inevitably, of course, but it’s an important caution. But ecology in its broadest understanding leads us to explore, to follow the connections we sense around us. Good science--I would argue for including scholarship and community membership as well--requires this curiosity and dedication to pushing the limits of knowledge further, even when we feel that we’ve seen it all already.
Relatedly, the new and novel can overwhelm so that we’re left admiring surfaces while gaining the limited understanding and knowledge of the tourist. The long-term resident will know what issues have been important to the community over time, who is connected to what positions, actions, and so on. But these kinds of knowledge can be available to outsiders as well. Historical, political, economic research will reveal much. Fieldwork still more, but different, information.
Ann Zwinger offers an excellent example of someone who does close observations of places not always her "own" and who learns from it. She looks especially at the flora and fauna of a place, but she’s devoted to the notion that human history is always important and a part of natural history. Writers need to see place in their own terms as well as through research. While this point seems obviously applicable to peripatetic scholars like ourselves, it applies as well to students who may assume that their experience of the place they grew up is unitary and normative. Our research, and the research we ask of our students, the kinds of inquiry we practice, should have some mix of outside information, and some that can only be gained from experience.
Zwinger’s model of learning about the human history of a place even while she’s closely observing the natural history allows us to respond to a critique that shows up in all this thinking about place, ecocriticism and ecopoetics. The critique suggests that the critic, or the writer the critic is responding to, tells only a small part of the story of a place, thereby missing the history of horrors and exploitation that stain the landscape. Essentially, ecologically informed critical methods are ahistorical. This might have been true very early on, and it might be true of some writers—though of whom, I’m not quite sure—, but for the scholars and writers working now—and this is an almost identical set to the ones being critiqued—the land has never been without history. Science, archeology, paleobiology, history and other methods are available to and widely used by writers about and scholars of place.
In fact, it is place that gives us history.
And it is inquiry that sends us back, again and again, to place. For writers, scholars and artists in the academy, our engagement with place should be a constant state of inquiry. We’ll never know what a native to the place will know, but we can learn. And wherever we go, there is always more to learn. If grad school teaches us nothing else, it’s that narrow bodies of knowledge can be harvested again and again for information.
In the 21st century, we must consider place in our writing, pedagogy and scholarship. Any consideration of race, class, gender, colonial status, and so on, happens in a place, is a consideration of what happened in a place, and solutions and progress will happen in real places.
As those of us in the academy move from place to place--as scholars, teachers, and artists--we take the places we’ve been with us. West Virginia follows me to Nebraska. It’s my responsibility, then, to fold the complicated issues together. How are these places alike and different? What can I teach my Nebraska students about West Virginia? If I can get people to stop thinking of hillbillies, then I’ve done some good. I can certainly extend the discussion of farms that my wife’s classes had. I’ll make connections (about power plants, perhaps, exploitative wages, brain drains), remain open, flexible, inquisitive, and I’ll take Nebraska with me out into the world. I can’t give up either Appalachia or the Plains.
Wood drops into coals and I add more. A little more fuel, more air and the fire flares out along the side of the small log. Wind rustles leaves. I can hear the fires and low murmurs of other campsites. There are other night sounds, less distinct, less identifiable. If you sat beside me, you could hear the infrequent rumble of long-haul trucks roaring along the not-too-distant highway. Yes, even here, even this deep in the woods. And tomorrow my wife and I will pack up our tent, leave the woods I grew up in, and head out on that highway with those trucks to our home in Nebraska.